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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Damned, by Algernon Blackwood
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Damned
+
+Author: Algernon Blackwood
+
+Release Date: February 13, 2004 [EBook #11074]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAMNED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, David Cortesi and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+THE DAMNED
+
+Algernon Blackwood
+
+1914
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+"I'm over forty, Frances, and rather set in my ways," I said
+good-naturedly, ready to yield if she insisted that our going together
+on the visit involved her happiness. "My work is rather heavy just now
+too, as you know. The question is, could I work there--with a lot of
+unassorted people in the house?"
+
+"Mabel doesn't mention any other people, Bill," was my sister's
+rejoinder. "I gather she's alone--as well as lonely."
+
+By the way she looked sideways out of the window at nothing, it was
+obvious she was disappointed, but to my surprise she did not urge the
+point; and as I glanced at Mrs. Franklyn's invitation lying upon her
+sloping lap, the neat, childish handwriting conjured up a mental picture
+of the banker's widow, with her timid, insignificant personality, her
+pale grey eyes and her expression as of a backward child. I thought,
+too, of the roomy country mansion her late husband had altered to suit
+his particular needs, and of my visit to it a few years ago when its
+barren spaciousness suggested a wing of Kensington Museum fitted up
+temporarily as a place to eat and sleep in. Comparing it mentally with
+the poky Chelsea flat where I and my sister kept impecunious house, I
+realized other points as well. Unworthy details flashed across me to
+entice: the fine library, the organ, the quiet work-room I should have,
+perfect service, the delicious cup of early tea, and hot baths at any
+moment of the day--without a geyser!
+
+"It's a longish visit, a month--isn't it?" I hedged, smiling at the
+details that seduced me, and ashamed of my man's selfishness, yet
+knowing that Frances expected it of me. "There are points about it, I
+admit. If you're set on my going with you, I could manage it all right."
+
+I spoke at length in this way because my sister made no answer. I saw
+her tired eyes gazing into the dreariness of Oakley Street and felt a
+pang strike through me. After a pause, in which again she said no word,
+I added: "So, when you write the letter, you might hint, perhaps, that I
+usually work all the morning, and--er--am not a very lively visitor!
+Then she'll understand, you see." And I half-rose to return to my
+diminutive study, where I was slaving, just then, at an absorbing
+article on Comparative Aesthetic Values in the Blind and Deaf.
+
+But Frances did not move. She kept her grey eyes upon Oakley Street
+where the evening mist from the river drew mournful perspectives into
+view. It was late October. We heard the omnibuses thundering across the
+bridge. The monotony of that broad, characterless street seemed more
+than usually depressing. Even in June sunshine it was dead, but with
+autumn its melancholy soaked into every house between King's Road and
+the Embankment. It washed thought into the past, instead of inviting it
+hopefully towards the future. For me, its easy width was an avenue
+through which nameless slums across the river sent creeping messages of
+depression, and I always regarded it as Winter's main entrance into
+London--fog, slush, gloom trooped down it every November, waving their
+forbidding banners till March came to rout them.
+
+Its one claim upon my love was that the south wind swept sometimes
+unobstructed up it, soft with suggestions of the sea. These lugubrious
+thoughts I naturally kept to myself, though I never ceased to regret the
+little flat whose cheapness had seduced us. Now, as I watched my
+sister's impassive face, I realized that perhaps she, too, felt as I
+felt, yet, brave woman, without betraying it.
+
+"And, look here, Fanny," I said, putting a hand upon her shoulder as I
+crossed the room, "it would be the very thing for you. You're worn out
+with catering and housekeeping. Mabel is your oldest friend, besides,
+and you've hardly seen her since he died--"
+
+"She's been abroad for a year, Bill, and only just came back," my sister
+interposed. "She came back rather unexpectedly, though I never thought
+she would go there to live--" She stopped abruptly. Clearly, she was
+only speaking half her mind. "Probably," she went on, "Mabel wants to
+pick up old links again."
+
+"Naturally," I put in, "yourself chief among them." The veiled reference
+to the house I let pass.
+
+It involved discussing the dead man for one thing.
+
+"I feel I ought to go anyhow," she resumed, "and of course it would be
+jollier if you came too. You'd get in such a muddle here by yourself,
+and eat wrong things, and forget to air the rooms, and--oh, everything!"
+She looked up laughing. "Only," she added, "there's the British
+Museum--?"
+
+"But there's a big library there," I answered, "and all the books of
+reference I could possibly want. It was of you I was thinking. You could
+take up your painting again; you always sell half of what you paint. It
+would be a splendid rest too, and Sussex is a jolly country to walk in.
+By all means, Fanny, I advise--"
+
+Our eyes met, as I stammered in my attempts to avoid expressing the
+thought that hid in both our minds. My sister had a weakness for
+dabbling in the various "new" theories of the day, and Mabel, who before
+her marriage had belonged to foolish societies for investigating the
+future life to the neglect of the present one, had fostered this
+undesirable tendency. Her amiable, impressionable temperament was open
+to every psychic wind that blew. I deplored, detested the whole
+business. But even more than this I abhorred the later influence that
+Mr. Franklyn had steeped his wife in, capturing her body and soul in his
+somber doctrines. I had dreaded lest my sister also might be caught.
+
+"Now that she is alone again--"
+
+I stopped short. Our eyes now made pretence impossible, for the truth
+had slipped out inevitably, stupidly, although unexpressed in definite
+language. We laughed, turning our faces a moment to look at other things
+in the room. Frances picked up a book and examined its cover as though
+she had made an important discovery, while I took my case out and lit a
+cigarette I did not want to smoke. We left the matter there. I went out
+of the room before further explanation could cause tension.
+Disagreements grow into discord from such tiny things--wrong adjectives,
+or a chance inflection of the voice. Frances had a right to her views of
+life as much as I had. At least, I reflected comfortably, we had
+separated upon an agreement this time, recognized mutually, though not
+actually stated.
+
+And this point of meeting was, oddly enough, our way of regarding some
+one who was dead.
+
+For we had both disliked the husband with a great dislike, and during
+his three years' married life had only been to the house once--for a
+weekend visit; arriving late on Saturday, we had left after an early
+breakfast on Monday morning. Ascribing my sister's dislike to a natural
+jealousy at losing her old friend, I said merely that he displeased me.
+Yet we both knew that the real emotion lay much deeper. Frances, loyal,
+honorable creature, had kept silence; and beyond saying that house and
+grounds--he altered one and laid out the other--distressed her as an
+expression of his personality somehow ('distressed' was the word she
+used), no further explanation had passed her lips.
+
+Our dislike of his personality was easily accounted for--up to a point,
+since both of us shared the artist's point of view that a creed, cut to
+measure and carefully dried, was an ugly thing, and that a dogma to
+which believers must subscribe or perish everlastingly was a barbarism
+resting upon cruelty. But while my own dislike was purely due to an
+abstract worship of Beauty, my sister's had another twist in it, for
+with her "new" tendencies, she believed that all religions were an
+aspect of truth and that no one, even the lowest wretch, could escape
+"heaven" in the long run.
+
+Samuel Franklyn, the rich banker, was a man universally respected and
+admired, and the marriage, though Mabel was fifteen years his junior,
+won general applause; his bride was an heiress in her own right--
+breweries--and the story of her conversion at a revivalist meeting where
+Samuel Franklyn had spoken fervidly of heaven, and terrifyingly of sin,
+hell and damnation, even contained a touch of genuine romance. She was a
+brand snatched from the burning; his detailed eloquence had frightened
+her into heaven; salvation came in the nick of time; his words had
+plucked her from the edge of that lake of fire and brimstone where their
+worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. She regarded him as a hero,
+sighed her relief upon his saintly shoulder, and accepted the peace he
+offered her with a grateful resignation.
+
+For her husband was a "religious man" who successfully combined great
+riches with the glamour of winning souls. He was a portly figure, though
+tall, with masterful, big hands, his fingers rather thick and red; and
+his dignity, that just escaped being pompous, held in it something that
+was implacable. A convinced assurance, almost remorseless, gleamed in
+his eyes when he preached especially, and his threats of hell fire must
+have scared souls stronger than the timid, receptive Mabel whom he
+married. He clad himself in long frock-coats hat buttoned unevenly, big
+square boots, and trousers that invariably bagged at the knee and were a
+little short; he wore low collars, spats occasionally, and a tall black
+hat that was not of silk. His voice was alternately hard and unctuous;
+and he regarded theaters, ballrooms, and racecourses as the vestibule of
+that brimstone lake of whose geography he was as positive as of his
+great banking offices in the City. A philanthropist up to the hilt,
+however, no one ever doubted his complete sincerity; his convictions
+were ingrained, his faith borne out by his life--as witness his name
+upon so many admirable Societies, as treasurer, patron, or heading the
+donation list. He bulked large in the world of doing good, a broad and
+stately stone in the rampart against evil. And his heart was genuinely
+kind and soft for others--who believed as he did.
+
+Yet, in spite of this true sympathy with suffering and his desire to
+help, he was narrow as a telegraph wire and unbending as a church
+pillar; he was intensely selfish; intolerant as an officer of the
+Inquisition, his bourgeois soul constructed a revolting scheme of heaven
+that was reproduced in miniature in all he did and planned. Faith was
+the sine qua non of salvation, and by "faith" he meant belief in his own
+particular view of things--"which faith, except every one do keep whole
+and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." All the
+world but his own small, exclusive sect must be damned eternally--a
+pity, but alas, inevitable. He was right.
+
+Yet he prayed without ceasing, and gave heavily to the poor--the only
+thing he could not give being big ideas to his provincial and suburban
+deity. Pettier than an insect, and more obstinate than a mule, he had
+also the superior, sleek humility of a "chosen one." He was churchwarden
+too. He read the lesson in a "place of worship," either chilly or
+overheated, where neither organ, vestments, nor lighted candles were
+permitted, but where the odor of hair-wash on the boys' heads in the
+back rows pervaded the entire building.
+
+This portrait of the banker, who accumulated riches both on earth and in
+heaven, may possibly be overdrawn, however, because Frances and I were
+"artistic temperaments" that viewed the type with a dislike and distrust
+amounting to contempt. The majority considered Samuel Franklyn a worthy
+man and a good citizen. The majority, doubtless, held the saner view. A
+few years more, and he certainly would have been made a baronet. He
+relieved much suffering in the world, as assuredly as he caused many
+souls the agonies of torturing fear by his emphasis upon damnation.
+
+Had there been one point of beauty in him, we might have been more
+lenient; only we found it not, and, I admit, took little pains to
+search. I shall never forget the look of dour forgiveness with which he
+heard our excuses for missing Morning Prayers that Sunday morning of our
+single visit to The Towers. My sister learned that a change was made
+soon afterwards, prayers being "conducted" after breakfast instead of
+before.
+
+The Towers stood solemnly upon a Sussex hill amid park-like modern
+grounds, but the house cannot better be described--it would be so
+wearisome for one thing--than by saying that it was a cross between an
+overgrown, pretentious Norwood villa and one of those saturnine
+Institutes for cripples the train passes as it slinks ashamed through
+South London into Surrey. It was "wealthily" furnished and at first
+sight imposing, but on closer acquaintance revealed a meager
+personality, barren and austere. One looked for Rules and Regulations on
+the walls, all signed By Order. The place was a prison that shut out
+"the world." There was, of course, no billiard-room, no smoking-room, no
+room for play of any kind, and the great hall at the back, once a
+chapel, which might have been used for dancing, theatricals, or other
+innocent amusements, was consecrated in his day to meetings of various
+kinds, chiefly brigades, temperance or missionary societies. There was a
+harmonium at one end--on the level floor--a raised dais or platform at
+the other, and a gallery above for the servants, gardeners, and
+coachmen. It was heated with hot-water pipes, and hung with Doré's
+pictures, though these latter were soon removed and stored out of sight
+in the attics as being too unspiritual. In polished, shiny wood, it was
+a representation in miniature of that poky exclusive Heaven he took
+about with him, externalizing it in all he did and planned, even in the
+grounds about the house.
+
+Changes in The Towers, Frances told me, had been made during Mabel's
+year of widowhood abroad--an organ put into the big hall, the library
+made livable and re-catalogued--when it was permissible to suppose she
+had found her soul again and returned to her normal, healthy views of
+life, which included enjoyment and play, literature, music and the arts,
+without, however, a touch of that trivial thoughtlessness usually termed
+worldliness. Mrs. Franklyn, as I remembered her, was a quiet little
+woman, shallow, perhaps, and easily influenced, but sincere as a dog and
+thorough in her faithful Friendship. Her tastes at heart were catholic,
+and that heart was simple and unimaginative. That she took up with the
+various movements of the day was sign merely that she was searching in
+her limited way for a belief that should bring her peace. She was, in
+fact, a very ordinary woman, her caliber a little less than that of
+Frances. I knew they used to discuss all kinds of theories together, but
+as these discussions never resulted in action, I had come to regard her
+as harmless. Still, I was not sorry when she married, and I did not
+welcome now a renewal of the former intimacy. The philanthropist she had
+given no children, or she would have made a good and sensible mother. No
+doubt she would marry again.
+
+"Mabel mentions that she's been alone at The Towers since the end of
+August," Frances told me at teatime; "and I'm sure she feels out of it
+and lonely. It would be a kindness to go. Besides, I always liked her."
+
+I agreed. I had recovered from my attack of selfishness. I expressed my
+pleasure.
+
+"You've written to accept," I said, half statement and half question.
+
+Frances nodded. "I thanked for you," she added quietly, "explaining that
+you were not free at the moment, but that later, if not inconvenient,
+you might come down for a bit and join me."
+
+I stared. Frances sometimes had this independent way of deciding things.
+I was convicted, and punished into the bargain.
+
+Of course there followed argument and explanation, as between brother
+and sister who were affectionate, but the recording of our talk could be
+of little interest. It was arranged thus, Frances and I both satisfied.
+Two days later she departed for The Towers, leaving me alone in the flat
+with everything planned for my comfort and good behavior--she was rather
+a tyrant in her quiet way--and her last words as I saw her off from
+Charing Cross rang in my head for a long time after she was gone:
+
+"I'll write and let you know, Bill. Eat properly, mind, and let me know
+if anything goes wrong."
+
+She waved her small gloved hand, nodded her head till the feather
+brushed the window, and was gone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+After the note announcing her safe arrival a week of silence passed, and
+then a letter came; there were various suggestions for my welfare, and
+the rest was the usual rambling information and description Frances
+loved, generously italicized.
+
+" ...and we are quite alone," she went on in her enormous handwriting
+that seemed such a waste of space and labor, "though some others are
+coming presently, I believe. You could work here to your heart's
+content. Mabel quite understands, and says she would love to have you
+when you feel free to come. She has changed a bit--back to her old
+natural self: she never mentions him. The place has changed too in
+certain ways: it has more cheerfulness, I think. She has put it in, this
+cheerfulness, spaded it in, if you know what I mean; but it lies about
+uneasily and is not natural--quite. The organ is a beauty. She must be
+very rich now, but she's as gentle and sweet as ever. Do you know, Bill,
+I think he must have frightened her into marrying him. I get the
+impression she was afraid of him." This last sentence was inked out, I
+but I read it through the scratching; the letters being too big to hide.
+"He had an inflexible will beneath all that oily kindness which passed
+for spiritual. He was a real personality, I mean. I'm sure he'd have
+sent you and me cheerfully to the stake in another century--for our own
+good. Isn't it odd she never speaks of him, even to me?" This, again,
+was stroked through, though without the intention to obliterate--merely
+because it was repetition, probably. "The only reminder of him in the
+house now is a big copy of the presentation portrait that stands on the
+stairs of the Multitechnic Institute at Peckham--you know--that
+life-size one with his fat hand sprinkled with rings resting on a thick
+Bible and the other slipped between the buttons of a tight frock-coat.
+It hangs in the dining room and rather dominates our meals. I wish Mabel
+would take it down. I think she'd like to, if she dared. There's not a
+single photograph of him anywhere, even in her own room. Mrs. Marsh is
+here--you remember her, his housekeeper, the wife of the man who got
+penal servitude for killing a baby or something--you said she robbed him
+and justified her stealing because the story of the unjust steward was
+in the Bible! How we laughed over that! She's just the same too, gliding
+about all over the house and turning up when least expected."
+
+Other reminiscences filled the next two sides of the letter, and ran,
+without a trace of punctuation, into instructions about a Salamander
+stove for heating my work-room in the flat; these were followed by
+things I was to tell the cook, and by requests for several articles she
+had forgotten and would like sent after her, two of them blouses, with
+descriptions so lengthy and contradictory that I sighed as I read them--
+"unless you come down soon, in which case perhaps you wouldn't mind
+bringing them; not the mauve one I wear in the evening sometimes, but
+the pale blue one with lace round the collar and the crinkly front.
+They're in the cupboard--or the drawer, I'm not sure which--of my
+bedroom. Ask Annie if you're in doubt. Thanks most awfully. Send a
+telegram, remember, and we'll meet you in the motor any time. I don't
+quite know if I shall stay the whole month--alone. It all depends...."
+And she closed the letter, the italicized words increasing recklessly
+towards the end, with a repetition that Mabel would love to have me "for
+myself," as also to have a "man in the house," and that I only had to
+telegraph the day and the train.... This letter, coming by the second
+post, interrupted me in a moment of absorbing work, and, having read it
+through to make sure there was nothing requiring instant attention, I
+threw it aside and went on with my notes and reading. Within five
+minutes, however, it was back at me again. That restless thing called
+"between the lines" fluttered about my mind. My interest in the Balkan
+States--political article that had been "ordered"--faded. Somewhere,
+somehow I felt disquieted, disturbed. At first I persisted in my work,
+forcing myself to concentrate, but soon found that a layer of new
+impressions floated between the article and my attention. It was like a
+shadow, though a shadow that dissolved upon inspection. Once or twice I
+glanced up, expecting to find some one in the room, that the door had
+opened unobserved and Annie was waiting for instructions. I heard the
+buses thundering across the bridge. I was aware of Oakley Street.
+
+Montenegro and the blue Adriatic melted into the October haze along that
+depressing Embankment that aped a riverbank, and sentences from the
+letter flashed before my eyes and stung me. Picking it up and reading it
+through more carefully, I rang the bell and told Annie to find the
+blouses and pack them for the post, showing her finally the written
+description, and resenting the superior smile with which she at once
+interrupted. "I know them, sir," and disappeared.
+
+But it was not the blouses: it was that exasperating thing "between the
+lines" that put an end to my work with its elusive teasing nuisance. The
+first sharp impression is alone of value in such a case, for once
+analysis begins the imagination constructs all kinds of false
+interpretation. The more I thought, the more I grew fuddled. The letter,
+it seemed to me, wanted to say another thing; instead the eight sheets
+conveyed it merely. It came to the edge of disclosure, then halted.
+
+There was something on the writer's mind, and I felt uneasy. Studying
+the sentences brought, however, no revelation, but increased confusion
+only; for while the uneasiness remained, the first clear hint had
+vanished. In the end I closed my books and went out to look up another
+matter at the British Museum library. Perhaps I should discover it that
+way--by turning the mind in a totally new direction. I lunched at the
+Express Dairy in Oxford Street close by, and telephoned to Annie that I
+would be home to tea at five.
+
+And at tea, tired physically and mentally after breathing the exhausted
+air of the Rotunda for five hours, my mind suddenly delivered up its
+original impression, vivid and clear-cut; no proof accompanied the
+revelation; it was mere presentiment, but convincing. Frances was
+disturbed in her mind, her orderly, sensible, housekeeping mind; she was
+uneasy, even perhaps afraid; something in the house distressed her, and
+she had need of me. Unless I went down, her time of rest and change, her
+quite necessary holiday, in fact, would be spoilt. She was too unselfish
+to say this, but it ran everywhere between the lines. I saw it clearly
+now. Mrs. Franklyn, moreover--and that meant Frances too--would like a
+"man in the house." It was a disagreeable phrase, a suggestive way of
+hinting something she dared not state definitely. The two women in that
+great, lonely barrack of a house were afraid.
+
+My sense of duty, affection, unselfishness, whatever the composite
+emotion may be termed, was stirred; also my vanity. I acted quickly,
+lest reflection should warp clear, decent judgment.
+
+"Annie," I said, when she answered the bell, "you need not send those
+blouses by the post. I'll take them down tomorrow when I go. I shall be
+away a week or two, possibly longer." And, having looked up a train, I
+hastened out to telegraph before I could change my fickle mind.
+
+But no desire came that night to change my mind. I was doing the right,
+the necessary thing. I was even in something of a hurry to get down to
+The Towers as soon as possible. I chose an early afternoon train.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+
+A telegram had told me to come to a town ten miles from the house, so I
+was saved the crawling train to the local station, and traveled down by
+an express. As soon as we left London the fog cleared off, and an autumn
+sun, though without heat in it, painted the landscape with golden browns
+and yellows. My spirits rose as I lay back in the luxurious motor and
+sped between the woods and hedges. Oddly enough, my anxiety of overnight
+had disappeared. It was due, no doubt, to that exaggeration of detail
+which reflection in loneliness brings. Frances and I had not been
+separated for over a year, and her letters from The Towers told so
+little. It had seemed unnatural to be deprived of those intimate
+particulars of mood and feeling I was accustomed to. We had such
+confidence in one another, and our affection was so deep. Though she was
+but five years younger than myself, I regarded her as a child. My
+attitude was fatherly.
+
+In return, she certainly mothered me with a solicitude that never
+cloyed. I felt no desire to marry while she was still alive. She painted
+in watercolors with a reasonable success, and kept house for me; I
+wrote, reviewed books and lectured on aesthetics; we were a humdrum
+couple of quasi-artists, well satisfied with life, and all I feared for
+her was that she might become a suffragette or be taken captive by one
+of these wild theories that caught her imagination sometimes, and that
+Mabel, for one, had fostered. As for myself, no doubt she deemed me a
+trifle solid or stolid--I forget which word she preferred--but on the
+whole there was just sufficient difference of opinion to make
+intercourse suggestive without monotony, and certainly without
+quarrelling.
+
+Drawing in deep draughts of the stinging autumn air, I felt happy and
+exhilarated. It was like going for a holiday, with comfort at the end of
+the journey instead of bargaining for centimes.
+
+But my heart sank noticeably the moment the house came into view. The
+long drive, lined with hostile monkey trees and formal wellingtonias
+that were solemn and sedate, was mere extension of the miniature
+approach to a thousand semidetached suburban "residences"; and the
+appearance of The Towers, as we turned the corner with a rush, suggested
+a commonplace climax to a story that had begun interestingly, almost
+thrillingly. A villa had escaped from the shadow of the Crystal Palace,
+thumped its way down by night, grown suddenly monstrous in a shower of
+rich rain, and settled itself insolently to stay. Ivy climbed about the
+opulent red-brick walls, but climbed neatly and with disfiguring effect,
+sham as on a prison or--the simile made me smile--an orphan asylum.
+There was no hint of the comely roughness of untidy ivy on a ruin.
+Clipped, trained, and precise it was, as on a brand-new protestant
+church. I swear there was not a bird's nest nor a single earwig in it
+anywhere. About the porch it was particularly thick, smothering a
+seventeenth-century lamp with a contrast that was quite horrible.
+Extensive glass-houses spread away on the farther side of the house; the
+numerous towers to which the building owed its name seemed made to hold
+school bells; and the windowsills, thick with potted flowers, made me
+think of the desolate suburbs of Brighton or Bexhill. In a commanding
+position upon the crest of a hill, it overlooked miles of undulating,
+wooded country southwards to the Downs, but behind it, to the north,
+thick banks of ilex, holly, and privet protected it from the cleaner and
+more stimulating winds. Hence, though highly placed, it was shut in.
+Three years had passed since I last set eyes upon, it, but the unsightly
+memory I had retained was justified by the reality. The place was
+deplorable.
+
+It is my habit to express my opinions audibly sometimes, when
+impressions are strong enough to warrant it; but now I only sighed "Oh,
+dear," as I extricated my legs from many rugs and went into the house. A
+tall parlor-maid, with the bearing of a grenadier, received me, and
+standing behind her was Mrs. Marsh, the housekeeper, whom I remembered
+because her untidy back hair had suggested to me that it had been burnt.
+I went at once to my room, my hostess already dressing for dinner, but
+Frances came in to see me just as I was struggling with my black tie
+that had got tangled like a bootlace. She fastened it for me in a neat,
+effective bow, and while I held my chin up for the operation, staring
+blankly at the ceiling, the impression came--I wondered, was it her
+touch that caused it?--that something in her trembled. Shrinking perhaps
+is the truer word. Nothing in her face or manner betrayed it, nor in her
+pleasant, easy talk while she tidied my things and scolded my slovenly
+packing, as her habit was, questioning me about the servants at the
+flat. The blouses, though right, were crumpled, and my scolding was
+deserved. There was no impatience even. Yet somehow or other the
+suggestion of a shrinking reserve and holding back reached my mind. She
+had been lonely, of course, but it was more than that; she was glad that
+I had come, yet for some reason unstated she could have wished that I
+had stayed away. We discussed the news that had accumulated during our
+brief separation, and in doing so the impression, at best exceedingly
+slight, was forgotten. My chamber was large and beautifully furnished;
+the hall and dining room of our flat would have gone into it with a good
+remainder; yet it was not a place I could settle down in for work. It
+conveyed the idea of impermanence, making me feel transient as in a
+hotel bedroom. This, of course, was the fact. But some rooms convey a
+settled, lasting hospitality even in a hotel; this one did not; and as I
+was accustomed to work in the room I slept in, at least when visiting, a
+slight frown must have crept between my eyes.
+
+"Mabel has fitted a work-room for you just out of the library," said the
+clairvoyant Frances.
+
+"No one will disturb you there, and you'll have fifteen thousand books
+all catalogued within easy reach. There's a private staircase too. You
+can breakfast in your room and slip down in your dressing gown if you
+want to." She laughed. My spirits took a turn upwards as absurdly as
+they had gone down.
+
+"And how are you?" I asked, giving her a belated kiss. "It's jolly to be
+together again. I did feel rather lost without you, I'll admit."
+
+"That's natural," she laughed. "I'm so glad."
+
+She looked well and had country color in her cheeks. She informed me
+that she was eating and sleeping well, going out for little walks with
+Mabel, painting bits of scenery again, and enjoying a complete change
+and rest; and yet, for all her brave description, the word somehow did
+not quite ring true. Those last words in particular did not ring true.
+There lay in her manner, just out of sight, I felt, this suggestion of
+the exact reverse--of unrest, shrinking, almost of anxiety. Certain
+small strings in her seemed over-tight. "Keyed-up" was the slang
+expression that crossed my mind. I looked rather searchingly into her
+face as she was telling me this.
+
+"Only--the evenings," she added, noticing my query, yet rather avoiding
+my eyes, "the evenings are--well, rather heavy sometimes, and I find it
+difficult to keep awake."
+
+"The strong air after London makes you drowsy," I suggested, "and you
+like to get early to bed."
+
+Frances turned and looked at me for a moment steadily. "On the contrary,
+Bill, I dislike going to bed--here. And Mabel goes so early." She said
+it lightly enough, fingering the disorder upon my dressing table in such
+a stupid way that I saw her mind was working in another direction
+altogether. She looked up suddenly with a kind of nervousness from the
+brush and scissors.
+
+"Billy," she said abruptly, lowering her voice, "isn't it odd, but I
+hate sleeping alone here? I can't make it out quite; I've never felt
+such a thing before in my life. Do you--think it's all nonsense?"
+
+And she laughed, with her lips but not with her eyes; there was a note
+of defiance in her I failed to understand.
+
+"Nothing a nature like yours feels strongly is nonsense, Frances," I
+replied soothingly.
+
+But I, too, answered with my lips only, for another part of my mind was
+working elsewhere, and among uncomfortable things. A touch of
+bewilderment passed over me. I was not certain how best to continue. If
+I laughed she would tell me no more, yet if I took her too seriously the
+strings would tighten further. Instinctively, then, this flashed rapidly
+across me: that something of what she felt, I had also felt, though
+interpreting it differently. Vague it was, as the coming of rain or
+storm that announce themselves hours in advance with their hint of
+faint, unsettling excitement in the air. I had been but a short hour in
+the house--big, comfortable, luxurious house--but had experienced this
+sense of being unsettled, unfixed, fluctuating--a kind of impermanence
+that transient lodgers in hotels must feel, but that a guest in a
+friend's home ought not to feel, be the visit short or long. To Frances,
+an impressionable woman, the feeling had come in the terms of alarm. She
+disliked sleeping alone, while yet she longed to sleep. The precise idea
+in my mind evaded capture, merely brushing through me, three-quarters
+out of sight; I realized only that we both felt the same thing, and that
+neither of us could get at it clearly.
+
+Degrees of unrest we felt, but the actual thing did not disclose itself.
+It did not happen.
+
+I felt strangely at sea for a moment. Frances would interpret hesitation
+as endorsement, and encouragement might be the last thing that could
+help her.
+
+"Sleeping in a strange house," I answered at length, "is often difficult
+at first, and one feels lonely. After fifteen months in our tiny flat
+one feels lost and uncared-for in a big house. It's an uncomfortable
+feeling--I know it well. And this is a barrack, isn't it? The masses of
+furniture only make it worse. One feels in storage somewhere
+underground--the furniture doesn't furnish. One must never yield to
+fancies, though--"
+
+Frances looked away towards the windows; she seemed disappointed a
+little.
+
+"After our thickly-populated Chelsea," I went on quickly, "it seems
+isolated here."
+
+But she did not turn back, and clearly I was saying the wrong thing. A
+wave of pity rushed suddenly over me. Was she really frightened,
+perhaps? She was imaginative, I knew, but never moody; common sense was
+strong in her, though she had her times of hypersensitiveness. I caught
+the echo of some unreasoning, big alarm in her. She stood there, gazing
+across my balcony towards the sea of wooded country that spread dim and
+vague in the obscurity of the dusk. The deepening shadows entered the
+room, I fancied, from the grounds below. Following her abstracted gaze a
+moment, I experienced a curious sharp desire to leave, to escape. Out
+yonder was wind and space and freedom. This enormous building was
+oppressive, silent, still.
+
+Great catacombs occurred to me, things beneath the ground, imprisonment
+and capture. I believe I even shuddered a little.
+
+I touched her shoulder. She turned round slowly, and we looked with a
+certain deliberation into each other's eyes.
+
+"Fanny," I asked, more gravely than I intended, "you are not frightened,
+are you? Nothing has happened, has it?"
+
+She replied with emphasis, "Of course not! How could it--I mean, why
+should I?" She stammered, as though the wrong sentence flustered her a
+second. "It's simply--that I have this ter--this dislike of sleeping
+alone."
+
+Naturally, my first thought was how easy it would be to cut our visit
+short. But I did not say this. Had it been a true solution, Frances
+would have said it for me long ago.
+
+"Wouldn't Mabel double-up with you?" I said instead, "or give you an
+adjoining room, so that you could leave the door between you open?
+There's space enough, heaven knows."
+
+And then, as the gong sounded in the hall below for dinner, she said, as
+with an effort, this thing:
+
+"Mabel did ask me--on the third night--after I had told her. But I
+declined."
+
+"You'd rather be alone than with her?" I asked, with a certain relief.
+
+Her reply was so gravely given, a child would have known there was more
+behind it: "Not that; but that she did not really want it."
+
+I had a moment's intuition and acted on it impulsively. "She feels it
+too, perhaps, but wishes to face it by herself--and get over it?"
+
+My sister bowed her head, and the gesture made me realize of a sudden
+how grave and solemn our talk had grown, as though some portentous thing
+were under discussion. It had come of itself--indefinite as a gradual
+change of temperature. Yet neither of us knew its nature, for apparently
+neither of us could state it plainly. Nothing happened, even in our
+words.
+
+"That was my impression," she said, "--that if she yields to it she
+encourages it. And a habit forms so easily. Just think," she added with
+a faint smile that was the first sign of lightness she had yet betrayed,
+"what a nuisance it would be--everywhere--if everybody was afraid of
+being alone--like that."
+
+I snatched readily at the chance. We laughed a little, though it was a
+quiet kind of laughter that seemed wrong. I took her arm and led her
+towards the door.
+
+"Disastrous, in fact," I agreed.
+
+She raised her voice to its normal pitch again, as I had done. "No doubt
+it will pass," she said, "now that you have come. Of course, it's
+chiefly my imagination." Her tone was lighter, though nothing could
+convince me that the matter itself was light--just then. "And in any
+case," tightening her grip on my arm as we passed into the bright
+enormous corridor and caught sight of Mrs. Franklyn waiting in the
+cheerless hall below, "I'm very glad you're here, Bill, and Mabel, I
+know, is too."
+
+"If it doesn't pass," I just had time to whisper with a feeble attempt
+at jollity, "I'll come at night and snore outside your door. After that
+you'll be so glad to get rid of me that you won't mind being alone."
+
+"That's a bargain," said Frances.
+
+I shook my hostess by the hand, made a banal remark about the long
+interval since last we met, and walked behind them into the great dining
+room, dimly lit by candles, wondering in my heart how long my sister and
+I should stay, and why in the world we had ever left our cozy little
+flat to enter this desolation of riches and false luxury at all. The
+unsightly picture of the late Samuel Franklyn, Esq., stared down upon me
+from the farther end of the room above the mighty mantelpiece.
+
+He looked, I thought, like some pompous Heavenly Butler who denied to
+all the world, and to us in particular, the right of entry without
+presentation cards signed by his hand as proof that we belonged to his
+own exclusive set. The majority, to his deep grief, and in spite of all
+his prayers on their behalf, must burn and "perish everlastingly."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+With the instinct of the healthy bachelor I always try to make myself a
+nest in the place I live in, be it for long or short. Whether visiting,
+in lodging-house, or in hotel, the first essential is this nest--one's
+own things built into the walls as a bird builds in its feathers. It may
+look desolate and uncomfortable enough to others, because the central
+detail is neither bed nor wardrobe, sofa nor armchair, but a good solid
+writing-table that does not wriggle, and that has wide elbowroom.
+
+And The Towers is vividly described for me by the single fact that I
+could not "nest" there.
+
+I took several days to discover this, but the first impression of
+impermanence was truer than I knew. The feathers of the mind refused
+here to lie one way. They ruffled, pointed, and grew wild.
+
+Luxurious furniture does not mean comfort; I might as well have tried to
+settle down in the sofa and armchair department of a big shop. My
+bedroom was easily managed; it was the private workroom, prepared
+especially for my reception, that made me feel alien and outcast.
+
+Externally, it was all one could desire: an antechamber to the great
+library, with not one, but two generous oak tables, to say nothing of
+smaller ones against the walls with capacious drawers.
+
+There were reading desks, mechanical devices for holding books, perfect
+light, quiet as in a church, and no approach but across the huge
+adjoining room. Yet it did not invite.
+
+"I hope you'll be able to work here," said my little hostess the next
+morning, as she took me in--her only visit to it while I stayed in the
+house--and showed me the ten-volume Catalogue.
+
+"It's absolutely quiet and no one will disturb you."
+
+"If you can't, Bill, you're not much good," laughed Frances, who was on
+her arm. "Even I could write in a study like this!"
+
+I glanced with pleasure at the ample tables, the sheets of thick
+blotting paper, the rulers, sealing wax, paper knives, and all the other
+immaculate paraphernalia. "It's perfect," I answered with a secret
+thrill, yet feeling a little foolish. This was for Gibbon or Carlyle,
+rather than for my potboiling insignificancies. "If I can't write
+masterpieces here, it's certainly not your fault," and I turned with
+gratitude to Mrs. Franklyn. She was looking straight at me, and there
+was a question in her small pale eyes I did not understand. Was she
+noting the effect upon me, I wondered?
+
+"You'll write here--perhaps a story about the house," she said,
+"Thompson will bring you anything you want; you only have to ring." She
+pointed to the electric bell on the central table, the wire running
+neatly down the leg. "No one has ever worked here before, and the
+library has been hardly used since it was put in. So there's no previous
+atmosphere to affect your imagination--er--adversely."
+
+We laughed. "Bill isn't that sort," said my sister; while I wished they
+would go out and leave me to arrange my little nest and set to work.
+
+I thought, of course, it was the huge listening library that made me
+feel so inconsiderable--the fifteen thousand silent, staring books, the
+solemn aisles, the deep, eloquent shelves. But when the women had gone
+and I was alone, the beginning of the truth crept over me, and I felt
+that first hint of disconsolateness which later became an imperative No.
+The mind shut down, images ceased to rise and flow. I read, made copious
+notes, but I wrote no single line at The Towers.
+
+Nothing completed itself there. Nothing happened.
+
+The morning sunshine poured into the library through ten long narrow
+windows; birds were singing; the autumn air, rich with a faint aroma of
+November melancholy that stung the imagination pleasantly, filled my
+antechamber. I looked out upon the undulating wooded landscape, hemmed
+in by the sweep of distant Downs, and I tasted a whiff of the sea. Rooks
+cawed as they floated above the elms, and there were lazy cows in the
+nearer meadows. A dozen times I tried to make my nest and settle down to
+work, and a dozen times, like a turning fastidious dog upon a hearth
+rug, I rearranged my chair and books and papers. The temptation of the
+Catalogue and shelves, of course, was accountable for much, yet not, I
+felt, for all. That was a manageable seduction. My work, moreover, was
+not of the creative kind that requires absolute absorption; it was the
+mere readable presentation of data I had accumulated. My notebooks were
+charged with facts ready to tabulate--facts, too, that interested me
+keenly. A mere effort of the will was necessary, and concentration of no
+difficult kind. Yet, somehow, it seemed beyond me: something forever
+pushed the facts into disorder ... and in the end I sat in the sunshine,
+dipping into a dozen books selected from the shelves outside, vexed with
+myself and only half-enjoying it. I felt restless. I wanted to be
+elsewhere.
+
+And even while I read, attention wandered. Frances, Mabel, her late
+husband, the house and grounds, each in turn and sometimes all together,
+rose uninvited into the stream of thought, hindering any consecutive
+flow of work. In disconnected fashion came these pictures that
+interrupted concentration, yet presenting themselves as broken fragments
+of a bigger thing my mind already groped for unconsciously. They
+fluttered round this hidden thing of which they were aspects, fugitive
+interpretations, no one of them bringing complete revelation. There was
+no adjective, such as pleasant or unpleasant, that I could attach to
+what I felt, beyond that the result was unsettling. Vague as the
+atmosphere of a dream, it yet persisted, and I could not dissipate it.
+
+Isolated words or phrases in the lines I read sent questions scouring
+across my mind, sure sign that the deeper part of me was restless and
+ill at ease.
+
+Rather trivial questions too--half-foolish interrogations, as of a
+puzzled or curious child: Why was my sister afraid to sleep alone, and
+why did her friend feel a similar repugnance, yet seek to conquer it?
+Why was the solid luxury of the house without comfort, its shelter
+without the sense of permanence? Why had Mrs. Franklyn asked us to come,
+artists, unbelieving vagabonds, types at the farthest possible remove
+from the saved sheep of her husband's household? Had a reaction set in
+against the hysteria of her conversion? I had seen no signs of religious
+fervor in her; her atmosphere was that of an ordinary, high-minded
+woman, yet a woman of the world. Lifeless, though, a little, perhaps,
+now that I came to think about it: she had made no definite impression
+upon me of any kind. And my thoughts ran vaguely after this fragile
+clue.
+
+Closing my book, I let them run. For, with this chance reflection came
+the discovery that I could not see her clearly--could not feel her soul,
+her personality. Her face, her small pale eyes, her dress and body and
+walk, all these stood before me like a photograph; but her Self evaded
+me. She seemed not there, lifeless, empty, a shadow--nothing. The
+picture was disagreeable, and I put it by. Instantly she melted out, as
+though light thought had conjured up a phantom that had no real
+existence. And at that very moment, singularly enough, my eye caught
+sight of her moving past the window, going silently along the gravel
+path. I watched her, a sudden new sensation gripping me. "There goes a
+prisoner," my thought instantly ran, "one who wishes to escape, but
+cannot."
+
+What brought the outlandish notion, heaven only knows. The house was of
+her own choice, she was twice an heiress, and the world lay open at her
+feet. Yet she stayed--unhappy, frightened, caught. All this flashed over
+me, and made a sharp impression even before I had time to dismiss it as
+absurd. But a moment later explanation offered itself, though it seemed
+as far-fetched as the original impression. My mind, being logical, was
+obliged to provide something, apparently. For Mrs. Franklyn, while
+dressed to go out, with thick walking-boots, a pointed stick, and a
+motor-cap tied on with a veil as for the windy lanes, was obviously
+content to go no farther than the little garden paths. The costume was a
+sham and a pretence. It was this, and her lithe, quick movements that
+suggested a caged creature--a creature tamed by fear and cruelty that
+cloaked themselves in kindness--pacing up and down, unable to realize
+why it got no farther, but always met the same bars in exactly the same
+place. The mind in her was barred.
+
+I watched her go along the paths and down the steps from one terrace to
+another, until the laurels hid her altogether; and into this mere
+imagining of a moment came a hint of something slightly disagreeable,
+for which my mind, search as it would, found no explanation at all. I
+remembered then certain other little things. They dropped into the
+picture of their own accord. In a mind not deliberately hunting for
+clues, pieces of a puzzle sometimes come together in this way, bringing
+revelation, so that for a second there flashed across me, vanishing
+instantly again before I could consider it, a large, distressing
+thought. I can only describe vaguely as a Shadow.
+
+Dark and ugly, oppressive certainly it might be described, with
+something torn and dreadful about the edges that suggested pain and
+strife and terror. The interior of a prison with two rows of occupied
+condemned cells, seen years ago in New York, sprang to memory after it--
+the connection between the two impossible to surmise even. But the
+"certain other little things" mentioned above were these: that Mrs.
+Franklyn, in last night's dinner talk, had always referred to "this
+house," but never called it "home"; and had emphasized unnecessarily,
+for a well-bred woman, our "great kindness" in coming down to stay so
+long with her. Another time, in answer to my futile compliment about the
+"stately rooms," she said quietly, "It is an enormous house for so small
+a party; but I stay here very little, and only till I get it straight
+again." The three of us were going up the great staircase to bed as this
+was said, and, not knowing quite her meaning, I dropped the subject. It
+edged delicate ground, I felt. Frances added no word of her own. It now
+occurred to me abruptly that "stay" was the word made use of, when
+"live" would have been more natural. How insignificant to recall! Yet
+why did they suggest themselves just at this moment ...?
+
+And, on going to Frances's room to make sure she was not nervous or
+lonely, I realized abruptly, that Mrs. Franklyn, of course, had talked
+with her in a confidential sense that I, as a mere visiting brother,
+could not share. Frances had told me nothing. I might easily have wormed
+it out of her, had I not felt that for us to discuss further our hostess
+and her house merely because we were under the roof together, was not
+quite nice or loyal.
+
+"I'll call you, Bill, if I'm scared," she had laughed as we parted, my
+room being just across the big corridor from her own. I had fallen
+asleep, thinking what in the world was meant by "getting it straight
+again."
+
+And now in my antechamber to the library, on the second morning, sitting
+among piles of foolscap and sheets of spotless blotting-paper, all
+useless to me, these slight hints came back and helped to frame the big,
+vague Shadow I have mentioned. Up to the neck in this Shadow, almost
+drowned, yet just treading water, stood the figure of my hostess in her
+walking costume. Frances and I seemed swimming to her aid. The Shadow
+was large enough to include both house and grounds, but farther than
+that I could not see.... Dismissing it, I fell to reading my purloined
+book again. Before I turned another page, however, another startling
+detail leaped out at me: the figure of Mrs. Franklyn in the Shadow was
+not living. It floated helplessly, like a doll or puppet that has no
+life in it. It was both pathetic and dreadful.
+
+Any one who sits in reverie thus, of course, may see similar ridiculous
+pictures when the will no longer guides construction. The incongruities
+of dreams are thus explained. I merely record the picture as it came.
+That it remained by me for several days, just as vivid dreams do, is
+neither here nor there. I did not allow myself to dwell upon it. The
+curious thing, perhaps, is that from this moment I date my inclination,
+though not yet my desire, to leave. I purposely say "to leave."
+
+I cannot quite remember when the word changed to that aggressive,
+frantic thing which is escape.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+
+We were left delightfully to ourselves in this pretentious country
+mansion with the soul of a villa. Frances took up her painting again,
+and, the weather being propitious, spent hours out of doors, sketching
+flowers, trees and nooks of woodland, garden, even the house itself
+where bits of it peered suggestively across the orchards. Mrs. Franklyn
+seemed always busy about something or other, and never interfered with
+us except to propose motoring, tea in another part of the lawn, and so
+forth. She flitted everywhere, preoccupied, yet apparently doing
+nothing. The house engulfed her rather. No visitor called. For one
+thing, she was not supposed to be back from abroad yet; and for another,
+I think, the neighborhood--her husband's neighborhood--was puzzled by
+her sudden cessation from good works. Brigades and temperance societies
+did not ask to hold their meetings in the big hall, and the vicar
+arranged the school-treats in another's field without explanation. The
+full-length portrait in the dining room, and the presence of the
+housekeeper with the "burnt" back hair, indeed, were the only reminders
+of the man who once had lived here. Mrs. Marsh retained her place in
+silence, well-paid sinecure as it doubtless was, yet with no hint of
+that suppressed disapproval one might have expected from her. Indeed
+there was nothing positive to disapprove, since nothing "worldly"
+entered grounds or building. In her master's lifetime she had been
+another "brand snatched from the burning," and it had then been her
+custom to give vociferous "testimony" at the revival meetings where he
+adorned the platform and led in streams of prayer. I saw her sometimes
+on the stairs, hovering, wandering, half-watching and half-listening,
+and the idea came to me once that this woman somehow formed a link with
+the departed influence of her bigoted employer. She, alone among us,
+belonged to the house, and looked at home there. When I saw her talking
+--oh, with such correct and respectful mien--to Mrs. Franklyn, I had the
+feeling that for all her unaggressive attitude, she yet exerted some
+influence that sought to make her mistress stay in the building forever
+--live there. She would prevent her escape, prevent "getting it straight
+again," thwart somehow her will to freedom, if she could. The idea in me
+was of the most fleeting kind. But another time, when I came down late
+at night to get a book from the library antechamber, and found her
+sitting in the hall--alone--the impression left upon me was the reverse
+of fleeting. I can never forget the vivid, disagreeable effect it
+produced upon me. What was she doing there at half-past eleven at night,
+all alone in the darkness? She was sitting upright, stiff, in a big
+chair below the clock. It gave me a turn. It was so incongruous and odd.
+She rose quietly as I turned the corner of the stairs, and asked me
+respectfully, her eyes cast down as usual, whether I had finished with
+the library, so that she might lock up. There was no more to it than
+that; but the picture stayed with me--unpleasantly.
+
+These various impressions came to me at odd moments, of course, and not
+in a single sequence as I now relate them. I was hard at work before
+three days were past, not writing, as explained, but reading, making
+notes, and gathering material from the library for future use. It was in
+chance moments that these curious flashes came, catching me unawares
+with a touch of surprise that sometimes made me start. For they proved
+that my under-mind was still conscious of the Shadow, and that far away
+out of sight lay the cause of it that left me with a vague unrest,
+unsettled, seeking to "nest" in a place that did not want me. Only when
+this deeper part knows harmony, perhaps, can good brainwork result, and
+my inability to write was thus explained.
+
+Certainly, I was always seeking for something here I could not find--an
+explanation that continually evaded me. Nothing but these trivial hints
+offered themselves. Lumped together, however, they had the effect of
+defining the Shadow a little. I became more and more aware of its very
+real existence. And, if I have made little mention of Frances and my
+hostess in this connection, it is because they contributed at first
+little or nothing towards the discovery of what this story tries to
+tell. Our life was wholly external, normal, quiet, and uneventful;
+conversation banal--Mrs. Franklyn's conversation in particular. They
+said nothing that suggested revelation.
+
+Both were in this Shadow, and both knew that they were in it, but
+neither betrayed by word or act a hint of interpretation. They talked
+privately, no doubt, but of that I can report no details.
+
+And so it was that, after ten days of a very commonplace visit, I found
+myself looking straight into the face of a Strangeness that defied
+capture at close quarters. "There's something here that never happens,"
+were the words that rose in my mind, "and that's why none of us can
+speak of it."
+
+And as I looked out of the window and watched the vulgar blackbirds,
+with toes turned in, boring out their worms, I realized sharply that
+even they, as indeed everything large and small in the house and
+grounds, shared this strangeness, and were twisted out of normal
+appearance because of it. Life, as expressed in the entire place, was
+crumpled, dwarfed, emasculated. God's meanings here were crippled, His
+love of joy was stunted. Nothing in the garden danced or sang.
+
+There was hate in it. "The Shadow," my thought hurried on to completion,
+"is a manifestation of hate; and hate is the Devil." And then I sat back
+frightened in my chair, for I knew that I had partly found the truth.
+
+Leaving my books I went out into the open. The sky was overcast, yet the
+day by no means gloomy, for a soft, diffused light oozed through the
+clouds and turned all things warm and almost summery. But I saw the
+grounds now in their nakedness because I understood. Hate means strife,
+and the two together weave the robe that terror wears. Having no
+so-called religious beliefs myself, nor belonging to any set of dogmas
+called a creed, I could stand outside these feelings and observe. Yet
+they soaked into me sufficiently for me to grasp sympathetically what
+others, with more cabined souls (I flattered myself), might feel. That
+picture in the dining room stalked everywhere, hid behind every tree,
+peered down upon me from the peaked ugliness of the bourgeois towers,
+and left the impress of its powerful hand upon every bed of flowers.
+"You must not do this, you must not do that," went past me through the
+air. "You must not leave these narrow paths," said the rigid iron
+railings of black. "You shall not walk here," was written on the lawns.
+"Keep to the steps," "Don't pick the flowers; make no noise of laughter,
+singing, dancing," was placarded all over the rose-garden, and
+"Trespassers will be--not prosecuted but--destroyed" hung from the crest
+of monkey tree and holly. Guarding the ends of each artificial terrace
+stood gaunt, implacable policemen, warders, jailers. "Come with us,"
+they chanted, "or be damned eternally."
+
+I remember feeling quite pleased with myself that I had discovered this
+obvious explanation of the prison feeling the place breathed out. That
+the posthumous influence of heavy old Samuel Franklyn might be an
+inadequate solution did not occur to me. By "getting the place straight
+again," his widow, of course, meant forgetting the glamour of fear and
+foreboding his depressing creed had temporarily forced upon her; and
+Frances, delicately minded being, did not speak of it because it was the
+influence of the man her friend had loved. I felt lighter; a load was
+lifted from me. "To trace the unfamiliar to the familiar," came back a
+sentence I had read somewhere, "is to understand." It was a real relief.
+I could talk with Frances now, even with my hostess, no danger of
+treading clumsily. For the key was in my hands. I might even help to
+dissipate the Shadow, "to get it straight again." It seemed, perhaps,
+our long invitation was explained!
+
+I went into the house laughing--at myself a little. "Perhaps after all
+the artist's outlook, with no hard and fast dogmas, is as narrow as the
+others! How small humanity is! And why is there no possible and true
+combination of all outlooks?"
+
+The feeling of "unsettling" was very strong in me just then, in spite of
+my big discovery which was to clear everything up. And at the moment I
+ran into Frances on the stairs, with a portfolio of sketches under her
+arm.
+
+It came across me then abruptly that, although she had worked a great
+deal since we came, she had shown me nothing. It struck me suddenly as
+odd, unnatural. The way she tried to pass me now confirmed my newborn
+suspicion that--well, that her results were hardly what they ought to
+be.
+
+"Stand and deliver!" I laughed, stepping in front of her. "I've seen
+nothing you've done since you've been here, and as a rule you show me
+all your things. I believe they are atrocious and degrading!" Then my
+laughter froze.
+
+She made a sly gesture to slip past me, and I almost decided to let her
+go, for the expression that flashed across her face shocked me. She
+looked uncomfortable and ashamed; the color came and went a moment in he
+cheeks, making me think of a child detected in some secret naughtiness.
+It was almost fear.
+
+"It's because they're not finished then?" I said, dropping the tone of
+banter, "or because they're too good for me to understand?" For my
+criticism of painting, she told me, was crude and ignorant sometimes.
+"But you'll let me see them later, won't you?"
+
+Frances, however, did not take the way of escape I offered. She changed
+her mind. She drew the portfolio from beneath her arm instead. "You can
+see them if you really want to, Bill," she said quietly, and her tone
+reminded me of a nurse who says to a boy just grown out of childhood,
+"you are old enough now to look upon horror and ugliness--only I don't
+advise it."
+
+"I do want to," I said, and made to go downstairs with her. But,
+instead, she said in the same low voice as before, "Come up to my room,
+we shall be undisturbed there." So I guessed that she had been on her
+way to show the paintings to our hostess, but did not care for us all
+three to see them together. My mind worked furiously.
+
+"Mabel asked me to do them," she explained in a tone of submissive
+horror, once the door was shut, "in fact, she begged it of me. You know
+how persistent she is in her quiet way. I--er--had to."
+
+She flushed and opened the portfolio on the little table by the window,
+standing behind me as I turned the sketches over--sketches of the
+grounds and trees and garden. In the first moment of inspection,
+however, I did not take in clearly why my sister's sense of modesty had
+been offended. For my attention flashed a second elsewhere. Another bit
+of the puzzle had dropped into place, defining still further the nature
+of what I called "the Shadow." Mrs. Franklyn, I now remembered, had
+suggested to me in the library that I might perhaps write something
+about the place, and I had taken it for one of her banal sentences and
+paid no further attention. I realized now that it was said in earnest.
+She wanted our interpretations, as expressed in our respective
+"talents," painting and writing. Her invitation was explained. She left
+us to ourselves on purpose.
+
+"I should like to tear them up," Frances was whispering behind me with a
+shudder, "only I promised--" She hesitated a moment.
+
+"Promised not to?" I asked with a queer feeling of distress, my eyes
+glued to the papers.
+
+"Promised always to show them to her first," she finished so low I
+barely caught it.
+
+I have no intuitive, immediate grasp of the value of paintings; results
+come to me slowly, and though every one believes his own judgment to be
+good, I dare not claim that mine is worth more than that of any other
+layman, Frances had too often convicted me of gross ignorance and error.
+I can only say that I examined these sketches with a feeling of
+amazement that contained revulsion, if not actually horror and disgust.
+They were outrageous. I felt hot for my sister, and it was a relief to
+know she had moved across the room on some pretence or other, and did
+not examine them with me. Her talent, of course, is mediocre, yet she
+has her moments of inspiration--moments, that is to say, when a view of
+Beauty not normally her own flames divinely through her. And these
+interpretations struck me forcibly as being thus "inspired"--not her
+own. They were uncommonly well done; they were also atrocious. The
+meaning in them, however, was never more than hinted. There the unholy
+skill and power came in: they suggested so abominably, leaving most to
+the imagination. To find such significance in a bourgeois villa garden,
+and to interpret it with such delicate yet legible certainty, was a kind
+of symbolism that was sinister, even diabolical. The delicacy was her
+own, but the point of view was another's.
+
+And the word that rose in my mind was not the gross description of
+"impure," but the more fundamental qualification--"un-pure."
+
+In silence I turned the sketches over one by one, as a boy hurries
+through the pages of an evil book lest he be caught.
+
+"What does Mabel do with them?" I asked presently in a low tone, as I
+neared the end. "Does she keep them?"
+
+"She makes notes about them in a book and then destroys them," was the
+reply from the end of the room. I heard a sigh of relief. "I'm glad
+you've seen them, Bill. I wanted you to--but was afraid to show them.
+You understand?"
+
+"I understand," was my reply, though it was not a question intended to
+be answered. All I understood really was that Mabel's mind was as sweet
+and pure as my sister's, and that she had some good reason for what she
+did. She destroyed the sketches, but first made notes! It was an
+interpretation of the place she sought. Brother-like, I felt resentment,
+though, that Frances should waste her time and talent, when she might be
+doing work that she could sell. Naturally, I felt other things as
+well....
+
+"Mabel pays me five guineas for each one," I heard. "Absolutely
+insists."
+
+I stared at her stupidly a moment, bereft of speech or wit. "I must
+either accept, or go away," she went on calmly, but a little white.
+"I've tried everything. There was a scene the third day I was here--when
+I showed her my first result. I wanted to write to you, but hesitated--"
+
+"It's unintentional, then, on your part--forgive my asking it, Frances,
+dear?" I blundered, hardly knowing what to think or say. "Between the
+lines" of her letter came back to me. "I mean, you make the sketches in
+your ordinary way and--the result comes out of itself, so to speak?"
+
+She nodded, throwing her hands out like a Frenchman. "We needn't keep
+the money for ourselves, Bill. We can give it away, but--I must either
+accept or leave," and she repeated the shrugging gesture. She sat down
+on the chair facing me, staring helplessly at the carpet.
+
+"You say there was a scene?" I went on presently, "She insisted?"
+
+"She begged me to continue," my sister replied very quietly. "She
+thinks--that is, she has an idea or theory that there's something about
+the place--something she can't get at quite." Frances stammered badly.
+She knew I did not encourage her wild theories.
+
+"Something she feels--yes," I helped her, more than curious.
+
+"Oh, you know what I mean, Bill," she said desperately. "That the place
+is saturated with some influence that she is herself too positive or too
+stupid to interpret. She's trying to make herself negative and
+receptive, as she calls it, but can't, of course, succeed. Haven't you
+noticed how dull and impersonal and insipid she seems, as though she had
+no personality? She thinks impressions will come to her that way. But
+they don't--"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"So she's trying me--us--what she calls the sensitive and impressionable
+artistic temperament. She says that until she is sure exactly what this
+influence is, she can't fight it, turn it out, 'get the house straight',
+as she phrases it."
+
+Remembering my own singular impressions, I felt more lenient than I
+might otherwise have done. I tried to keep impatience out of my voice.
+
+"And this influence, what--whose is it?"
+
+We used the pronoun that followed in the same breath, for I answered my
+own question at the same moment as she did:
+
+"His." Our heads nodded involuntarily towards the floor, the dining room
+being directly underneath.
+
+And my heart sank, my curiosity died away on the instant; I felt bored.
+A commonplace haunted house was the last thing in the world to amuse or
+interest me. The mere thought exasperated, with its suggestions of
+imagination, overwrought nerves, hysteria, and the rest.
+
+Mingled with my other feelings was certainly disappointment. To see a
+figure or feel a "presence," and report from day to day strange
+incidents to each other would be a form of weariness I could never
+tolerate.
+
+"But really, Frances," I said firmly, after a moment's pause, "it's too
+far-fetched, this explanation. A curse, you know, belongs to the ghost
+stories of early Victorian days." And only my positive conviction that
+there was something after all worth discovering, and that it most
+certainly was not this, prevented my suggesting that we terminate our
+visit forthwith, or as soon as we decently could. "This is not a haunted
+house, whatever it is," I concluded somewhat vehemently, bringing my
+hand down upon her odious portfolio.
+
+My sister's reply revived my curiosity sharply.
+
+"I was waiting for you to say that. Mabel says exactly the same. He is
+in it--but it's something more than that alone, something far bigger and
+more complicated." Her sentence seemed to indicate the sketches, and
+though I caught the inference I did not take it up, having no desire to
+discuss them with her just them indeed, if ever.
+
+I merely stared at her and listened. Questions, I felt sure, would be of
+little use. It was better she should say her thought in her own way.
+
+"He is one influence, the most recent," she went on slowly, and always
+very calmly, "but there are others--deeper layers, as it were--
+underneath. If his were the only one, something would happen. But
+nothing ever does happen. The others hinder and prevent--as though each
+were struggling to predominate."
+
+I had felt it already myself. The idea was rather horrible. I shivered.
+
+"That's what is so ugly about it--that nothing ever happens," she said.
+"There is this endless anticipation--always on the dry edge of a result
+that never materializes. It is torture. Mabel is at her wits' end, you
+see. And when she begged me--what I felt about my sketches--I mean--"
+
+She stammered badly as before.
+
+I stopped her. I had judged too hastily. That queer symbolism in her
+paintings, pagan and yet not innocent, was, I understood, the result of
+mixture. I did not pretend to understand, but at least I could be
+patient. I consequently held my peace. We did talk on a little longer,
+but it was more general talk that avoided successfully our hostess, the
+paintings, wild theories, and him--until at length the emotion Frances
+had hitherto so successfully kept under burst vehemently forth again.
+
+It had hidden between her calm sentences, as it had hidden between the
+lines of her letter. It swept her now from head to foot, packed tight in
+the thing she then said.
+
+"Then, Bill, if it is not an ordinary haunted house," she asked, "what
+is it?"
+
+The words were commonplace enough. The emotion was in the tone of her
+voice that trembled; in the gesture she made, leaning forward and
+clasping both hands upon her knees, and in the slight blanching of her
+cheeks as her brave eyes asked the question and searched my own with
+anxiety that bordered upon panic. In that moment she put herself under
+my protection. I winced.
+
+"And why," she added, lowering her voice to a still and furtive whisper,
+"does nothing ever happen? If only,"--this with great emphasis--
+"something would happen--break this awful tension--bring relief. It's
+the waiting I cannot stand." And she shivered all over as she said it, a
+touch of wildness in her eyes.
+
+I would have given much to have made a true and satisfactory answer. My
+mind searched frantically for a moment, but in vain. There lay no
+sufficient answer in me. I felt what she felt, though with differences.
+No conclusive explanation lay within reach. Nothing happened. Eager as I
+was to shoot the entire business into the rubbish heap where ignorance
+and superstition discharge their poisonous weeds, I could not honestly
+accomplish this. To treat Frances as a child, and merely "explain away"
+would be to strain her confidence in my protection, so affectionately
+claimed. It would further be dishonest to myself--weak, besides--to deny
+that I had also felt the strain and tension even as she did. While my
+mind continued searching, I returned her stare in silence; and Frances
+then, with more honesty and insight than my own, gave suddenly the
+answer herself--an answer whose truth and adequacy, so far as they went,
+I could not readily gainsay:
+
+"I think, Bill, because it is too big to happen here--to happen
+anywhere, indeed, all at once--and too awful!"
+
+To have tossed the sentence aside as nonsense, argued it away, proved
+that it was really meaningless, would have been easy--at any other time
+or in any other place; and, had the past week brought me none of the
+vivid impressions it had brought me, this is doubtless what I should
+have done. My narrowness again was proved. We understand in others only
+what we have in ourselves. But her explanation, in a measure, I knew was
+true. It hinted at the strife and struggle that my notion of a Shadow
+had seemed to cover thinly.
+
+"Perhaps," I murmured lamely, waiting in vain for her to say more. "But
+you said just now that you felt the thing was 'in layers', as it were.
+Do you mean each one--each influence--fighting for the upper hand?"
+
+I used her phraseology to conceal my own poverty. Terminology, after
+all, was nothing, provided we could reach the idea itself.
+
+Her eyes said yes. She had her clear conception, arrived at
+independently, as was her way.
+
+And, unlike her sex, she kept it clear, unsmothered by too many words.
+
+"One set of influences gets at me, another gets at you. It's according
+to our temperaments, I think." She glanced significantly at the vile
+portfolio. "Sometimes they are mixed--and therefore false. There has
+always been in me, more than in you, the pagan thing, perhaps, though
+never, thank God, like that."
+
+The frank confession of course invited my own, as it was meant to do.
+Yet it was difficult to find the words.
+
+"What I have felt in this place, Frances, I honestly can hardly tell
+you, because--er--my impressions have not arranged themselves in any
+definite form I can describe. The strife, the agony of vainly-sought
+escape, and the unrest--a sort of prison atmosphere--this I have felt at
+different times and with varying degrees of strength. But I find, as
+yet, no final label to attach. I couldn't say pagan, Christian, or
+anything like that, I mean, as you do. As with the blind and deaf, you
+may have an intensification of certain senses denied to me, or even
+another sense altogether in embryo--"
+
+"Perhaps," she stopped me, anxious to keep to the point, "you feel it as
+Mabel does. She feels the whole thing complete."
+
+"That also is possible," I said very slowly. I was thinking behind my
+words. Her odd remark that it was "big and awful" came back upon me as
+true. A vast sensation of distress and discomfort swept me suddenly.
+Pity was in it, and a fierce contempt, a savage, bitter anger as well.
+Fury against some sham authority was part of it.
+
+"Frances," I said, caught unawares, and dropping all pretence, "what in
+the world can it be?" I looked hard at her. For some minutes neither of
+us spoke.
+
+"Have you felt no desire to interpret it?" she asked presently, "Mabel
+did suggest my writing something about the house," was my reply, "but
+I've felt nothing imperative. That sort of writing is not my line, you
+know. My only feeling," I added, noticing that she waited for more, "is
+the impulse to explain, discover, get it out of me somehow, and so get
+rid of it. Not by writing, though--as yet." And again I repeated my
+former question:
+
+"What in the world do you think it is?" My voice had become
+involuntarily hushed. There was awe in it. Her answer, given with slow
+emphasis, brought back all my reserve: the phraseology provoked me
+rather:--"Whatever it is, Bill, it is not of God."
+
+I got up to go downstairs. I believe I shrugged my shoulders. "Would you
+like to leave, Frances? Shall we go back to town?" I suggested this at
+the door, and hearing no immediate reply, I turned back to look. Frances
+was sitting with her head bowed over and buried in her hands. The
+attitude horribly suggested tears. No woman, I realized, can keep back
+the pressure of strong emotion as long as Frances had done, without
+ending in a fluid collapse. I waited a moment uneasily, longing to
+comfort, yet afraid to act--and in this way discovered the existence of
+the appalling emotion in myself, hitherto but half guessed. At all costs
+a scene must be prevented: it would involve such exaggeration and
+overstatement. Brutally, such is the weakness of the ordinary man, I
+turned the handle to go out, but my sister then raised her head. The
+sunlight caught her face, framed untidily in its auburn hair, and I saw
+her wonderful expression with a start. Pity, tenderness, and sympathy
+shone in it like a flame. It was undeniable. There shone through all her
+features the imperishable love and yearning to sacrifice self for others
+which I have seen in only one type of human being. It was the great
+mother look.
+
+"We must stay by Mabel and help her get it straight," she whispered,
+making the decision for us both.
+
+I murmured agreement. Abashed and half ashamed, I stole softly from the
+room and went out into the grounds. And the first thing clearly realized
+when alone was this: that the long scene between us was without definite
+result. The exchange of confidence was really nothing but hints and
+vague suggestion. We had decided to stay, but it was a negative decision
+not to leave rather than a positive action. All our words and questions,
+our guesses, inferences, explanations, our most subtle allusions and
+insinuations, even the odious paintings themselves, were without
+definite result. Nothing had happened.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+
+And instinctively, once alone, I made for the places where she had
+painted her extraordinary pictures; I tried to see what she had seen.
+Perhaps, now that she had opened my mind to another view, I should be
+sensitive to some similar interpretation--and possibly by way of
+literary expression. If I were to write about the place, I asked myself,
+how should I treat it? I deliberately invited an interpretation in the
+way that came easiest to me--writing.
+
+But in this case there came no such revelation. Looking closely at the
+trees and flowers, the bits of lawn and terrace, the rose-garden and
+corner of the house where the flaming creeper hung so thickly, I
+discovered nothing of the odious, unpure thing her color and grouping
+had unconsciously revealed. At first, that is, I discovered nothing. The
+reality stood there, commonplace and ugly, side by side with her
+distorted version of it that lay in my mind. It seemed incredible. I
+tried to force it, but in vain. My imagination, ploughed less deeply
+than hers, or to another pattern, grew different seed. Where I saw the
+gross soul of an overgrown suburban garden, inspired by the spirit of a
+vulgar, rich revivalist who loved to preach damnation, she saw this rush
+of pagan liberty and joy, this strange license of primitive flesh which,
+tainted by the other, produced the adulterated, vile result.
+
+Certain things, however, gradually then became apparent, forcing
+themselves upon me, willy-nilly. They came slowly, but overwhelmingly.
+Not that facts had changed, or natural details altered in the grounds--
+this was impossible--but that I noticed for the first time various
+aspects I had not noticed before--trivial enough, yet for me, just then,
+significant. Some I remembered from previous days; others I saw now as I
+wandered to and fro, uneasy, uncomfortable,--almost, it seemed, watched
+by some one who took note of my impressions. The details were so
+foolish, the total result so formidable. I was half aware that others
+tried hard to make me see. It was deliberate.
+
+My sister's phrase, "one layer got at me, another gets at you," flashed,
+undesired, upon me.
+
+For I saw, as with the eyes of a child, what I can only call a goblin
+garden--house, grounds, trees, and flowers belonged to a goblin world
+that children enter through the pages of their fairy tales. And what
+made me first aware of it was the whisper of the wind behind me, so that
+I turned with a sudden start, feeling that something had moved closer.
+An old ash tree, ugly and ungainly, had been artificially trained to
+form an arbor at one end of the terrace that was a tennis lawn, and the
+leaves of it now went rustling together, swishing as they rose and fell.
+I looked at the ash tree, and felt as though I had passed that moment
+between doors into this goblin garden that crouched behind the real one.
+Below, at a deeper layer perhaps, lay hidden the one my sister had
+entered.
+
+To deal with my own, however, I call it goblin, because an odd aspect of
+the quaint in it yet never quite achieved the picturesque. Grotesque,
+probably, is the truer word, for everywhere I noticed, and for the first
+time, this slight alteration of the natural due either to the
+exaggeration of some detail, or to its suppression, generally, I think,
+to the latter. Life everywhere appeared to me as blocked from the full
+delivery of its sweet and lovely message. Some counter influence stopped
+it--suppression; or sent it awry--exaggeration. The house itself, mere
+expression, of course, of a narrow, limited mind, was sheer ugliness; it
+required no further explanation. With the grounds and garden, so far as
+shape and general plan were concerned, this was also true; but that
+trees and flowers and other natural details should share the same
+deficiency perplexed my logical soul, and even dismayed it. I stood and
+stared, then moved about, and stood and stared again. Everywhere was
+this mockery of a sinister, unfinished aspect. I sought in vain to
+recover my normal point of view. My mind had found this goblin garden
+and wandered to and fro in it, unable to escape.
+
+The change was in myself, of course, and so trivial were the details
+which illustrated it, that they sound absurd, thus mentioned one by one.
+For me, they proved it, is all I can affirm. The goblin touch lay
+plainly everywhere: in the forms of the trees, planted at neat intervals
+along the lawns; in this twisted ash that rustled just behind me; in the
+shadow of the gloomy wellingtonias, whose sweeping skirts obscured the
+grass; but especially, I noticed, in the tops and crests of them. For
+here, the delicate, graceful curves of last year's growth seemed to
+shrink back into themselves. None of them pointed upwards. Their life
+had failed and turned aside just when it should have become triumphant.
+The character of a tree reveals itself chiefly at the extremities, and
+it was precisely here that they all drooped and achieved this hint of
+goblin distortion--in the growth, that is, of the last few years. What
+ought to have been fairy, joyful, natural, was instead uncomely to the
+verge of the grotesque. Spontaneous expression was arrested. My mind
+perceived a goblin garden, and was caught in it. The place grimaced at
+me.
+
+With the flowers it was similar, though far more difficult to detect in
+detail for description. I saw the smaller vegetable growth as impish,
+half-malicious. Even the terraces sloped ill, as though their ends had
+sagged since they had been so lavishly constructed; their varying angles
+gave a queerly bewildering aspect to their sequence that was unpleasant
+to the eye. One might wander among their deceptive lengths and get lost
+--lost among open terraces!--with the house quite close at hand. Unhomely
+seemed the entire garden, unable to give repose, restlessness in it
+everywhere, almost strife, and discord certainly.
+
+Moreover, the garden grew into the house, the house into the garden, and
+in both was this idea of resistance to the natural--the spirit that says
+No to joy. All over it I was aware of the effort to achieve another end,
+the struggle to burst forth and escape into free, spontaneous expression
+that should be happy and natural, yet the effort forever frustrated by
+the weight of this dark shadow that rendered it abortive. Life crawled
+aside into a channel that was a cul-de-sac, then turned horribly upon
+itself. Instead of blossom and fruit, there were weeds. This approach of
+life I was conscious of--then dismal failure. There was no fulfillment.
+Nothing happened.
+
+And so, through this singular mood, I came a little nearer to understand
+the unpure thing that had stammered out into expression through my
+sister's talent. For the unpure is merely negative; it has no existence;
+it is but the cramped expression of what is true, stammering its way
+brokenly over false boundaries that seek to limit and confine. Great,
+full expression of anything is pure, whereas here was only the
+incomplete, unfinished, and therefore ugly. There was a strife and pain
+and desire to escape. I found myself shrinking from house and grounds as
+one shrinks from the touch of the mentally arrested, those in whom life
+has turned awry. There was almost mutilation in it.
+
+Past items, too, now flocked to confirm this feeling that I walked,
+liberty captured and half-maimed, in a monstrous garden. I remembered
+days of rain that refreshed the countryside, but left these grounds,
+cracked with the summer heat, unsatisfied and thirsty; and how the big
+winds, that cleaned the woods and fields elsewhere, crawled here with
+difficulty through the dense foliage that protected The Towers from the
+North and West and East. They were ineffective, sluggish currents. There
+was no real wind. Nothing happened. I began to realize--far more clearly
+than in my sister's fanciful explanation about "layers"--that here were
+many contrary influences at work, mutually destructive of one another.
+House and grounds were not haunted merely; they were the arena of past
+thinking and feeling, perhaps of terrible, impure beliefs, each striving
+to suppress the others, yet no one of them achieving supremacy because
+no one of them was strong enough, no one of them was true. Each,
+moreover, tried to win me over, though only one was able to reach my
+mind at all. For some obscure reason--possibly because my temperament
+had a natural bias towards the grotesque--it was the goblin layer. With
+me, it was the line of least resistance....
+
+In my own thoughts this "goblin garden" revealed, of course, merely my
+personal interpretation. I felt now objectively what long ago my mind
+had felt subjectively. My work, essential sign of spontaneous life with
+me, had stopped dead; production had become impossible.
+
+I stood now considerably closer to the cause of this sterility. The
+Cause, rather, turned bolder, had stepped insolently nearer. Nothing
+happened anywhere; house, garden, mind alike were barren, abortive, torn
+by the strife of frustrate impulse, ugly, hateful, sinful. Yet behind it
+all was still the desire of life--desire to escape--accomplish. Hope--an
+intolerable hope--I became startlingly aware--crowned torture.
+
+And, realizing this, though in some part of me where Reason lost her
+hold, there rose upon me then another and a darker thing that caught me
+by the throat and made me shrink with a sense of revulsion that touched
+actual loathing. I knew instantly whence it came, this wave of
+abhorrence and disgust, for even while I saw red and felt revolt rise in
+me, it seemed that I grew partially aware of the layer next below the
+goblin. I perceived the existence of this deeper stratum. One opened the
+way for the other, as it were. There were so many, yet all
+inter-related; to admit one was to clear the way for all. If I lingered
+I should be caught--horribly. They struggled with such violence for
+supremacy among themselves, however, that this latest uprising was
+instantly smothered and crushed back, though not before a glimpse had
+been revealed to me, and the redness in my thoughts transferred itself
+to color my surroundings thickly and appallingly--with blood. This lurid
+aspect drenched the garden, smeared the terraces, lent to the very soil
+a tinge as of sacrificial rites, that choked the breath in me, while it
+seemed to fix me to the earth my feet so longed to leave. It was so
+revolting that at the same time I felt a dreadful curiosity as of
+fascination--I wished to stay. Between these contrary impulses I think I
+actually reeled a moment, transfixed by a fascination of the Awful.
+Through the lighter goblin veil I felt myself sinking down, down, down
+into this turgid layer that was so much more violent and so much more
+ancient. The upper layer, indeed, seemed fairy by comparison with this
+terror born of the lust for blood, thick with the anguish of human
+sacrificial victims.
+
+Upper! Then I was already sinking; my feet were caught; I was actually
+in it! What atavistic strain, hidden deep within me, had been touched
+into vile response, giving this flash of intuitive comprehension, I
+cannot say. The coatings laid on by civilization are probably thin
+enough in all of us. I made a supreme effort. The sun and wind came
+back. I could almost swear I opened my eyes. Something very atrocious
+surged back into the depths, carrying with it a thought of tangled
+woods, of big stones standing in a circle, motionless, white figures,
+the one form bound with ropes, and the ghastly gleam of the knife. Like
+smoke upon a battlefield, it rolled away....
+
+I was standing on the gravel path below the second terrace when the
+familiar goblin garden danced back again, doubly grotesque now, doubly
+mocking, yet, by way of contrast, almost welcome. My glimpse into the
+depths was momentary, it seems, and had passed utterly away.
+
+The common world rushed back with a sense of glad relief, yet ominous
+now forever, I felt, for the knowledge of what its past had built upon.
+In street, in theater, in the festivities of friends, in music-room or
+playing field, even indeed in church--how could the memory of what I had
+seen and felt leave its hideous trace? The very structure of my Thought,
+it seemed to me, was stained.
+
+What has been thought by others can never be obliterated until....
+
+With a start my reverie broke and fled, scattered by a violent sound
+that I recognized for the first time in my life as wholly desirable. The
+returning motor meant that my hostess was back.
+
+Yet, so urgent had been my temporary obsession, that my first
+presentation of her was--well, not as I knew her now. Floating along
+with a face of anguished torture I saw Mabel, a mere effigy captured by
+others' thinking, pass down into those depths of fire and blood that
+only just had closed beneath my feet. She dipped away. She vanished, her
+fading eyes turned to the last towards some savior who had failed her.
+And that strange intolerable hope was in her face.
+
+The mystery of the place was pretty thick about me just then. It was the
+fall of dusk, and the ghost of slanting sunshine was as unreal as though
+badly painted. The garden stood at attention all about me. I cannot
+explain it, but I can tell it, I think, exactly as it happened, for it
+remains vivid in me forever--that, for the first time, something almost
+happened, myself apparently the combining link through which it pressed
+towards delivery:
+
+I had already turned towards the house. In my mind were pictures--not
+actual thoughts--of the motor, tea on the verandah, my sister, Mabel--
+when there came behind me this tumultuous, awful rush--as I left the
+garden. The ugliness, the pain, the striving to escape, the whole
+negative and suppressed agony that was the Place, focused that second
+into a concentrated effort to produce a result. It was a blinding
+tempest of long-frustrate desire that heaved at me, surging appallingly
+behind me like an anguished mob. I was in the act of crossing the
+frontier into my normal self again, when it came, catching fearfully at
+my skirts. I might use an entire dictionary of descriptive adjectives
+yet come no nearer to it than this--the conception of a huge assemblage
+determined to escape with me, or to snatch me back among themselves. My
+legs trembled for an instant, and I caught my breath--then turned and
+ran as fast as possible up the ugly terraces.
+
+At the same instant, as though the clanging of an iron gate cut short
+the unfinished phrase, I thought the beginning of an awful thing:
+
+"The Damned ..."
+
+Like this it rushed after me from that goblin garden that had sought to
+keep me:
+
+"The Damned!"
+
+For there was sound in it. I know full well it was subjective, not
+actually heard at all; yet somehow sound was in it--a great volume,
+roaring and booming thunderously, far away, and below me. The sentence
+dipped back into the depths that gave it birth, unfinished. Its
+completion was prevented. As usual, nothing happened. But it drove
+behind me like a hurricane as I ran towards the house, and the sound of
+it I can only liken to those terrible undertones you may hear standing
+beside Niagara. They lie behind the mere crash of the falling flood,
+within it somehow, not audible to all--felt rather than definitely
+heard.
+
+It seemed to echo back from the surface of those sagging terraces as I
+flew across their sloping ends, for it was somehow underneath them. It
+was in the rustle of the wind that stirred the skirts of the drooping
+wellingtonias. The beds of formal flowers passed it on to the creepers,
+red as blood, that crept over the unsightly building. Into the structure
+of the vulgar and forbidding house it sank away; The Towers took it
+home. The uncomely doors and windows seemed almost like mouths that had
+uttered the words themselves, and on the upper floors at that very
+moment I saw two maids in the act of closing them again.
+
+And on the verandah, as I arrived breathless, and shaken in my soul,
+Frances and Mabel, standing by the tea table, looked up to greet me. In
+the faces of both were clearly legible the signs of shock. They watched
+me coming, yet so full of their own distress that they hardly noticed
+the state in which I came. In the face of my hostess, however, I read
+another and a bigger thing than in the face of Frances. Mabel knew. She
+had experienced what I had experienced. She had heard that awful
+sentence I had heard but heard it not for the first time; heard it,
+moreover, I verily believe, complete and to its dreadful end.
+
+"Bill, did you hear that curious noise just now?" Frances asked it
+sharply before I could say a word. Her manner was confused; she looked
+straight at me; and there was a tremor in her voice she could not hide.
+
+"There's wind about," I said, "wind in the trees and sweeping round the
+walls. It's risen rather suddenly." My voice faltered rather.
+
+"No. It wasn't wind," she insisted, with a significance meant for me
+alone, but badly hidden. "It was more like distant thunder, we thought.
+How you ran too!" she added. "What a pace you came across the terraces!"
+
+I knew instantly from the way she said it that they both had already
+heard the sound before and were anxious to know if I had heard it, and
+how. My interpretation was what they sought.
+
+"It was a curiously deep sound, I admit. It may have been big guns at
+sea," I suggested, "forts or cruisers practicing. The coast isn't so
+very far, and with the wind in the right direction--"
+
+The expression on Mabel's face stopped me dead.
+
+"Like huge doors closing," she said softly in her colorless voice,
+"enormous metal doors shutting against a mass of people clamoring to get
+out." The gravity, the note of hopelessness in her tones, was shocking.
+
+Frances had gone into the house the instant Mabel began to speak. "I'm
+cold," she had said; "I think I'll get a shawl." Mabel and I were alone.
+I believe it was the first time we had been really alone since I
+arrived. She looked up from the teacups, fixing her pallid eyes on mine.
+She had made a question of the sentence.
+
+"You hear it like that?" I asked innocently. I purposely used the
+present tense.
+
+She changed her stare from one eye to the other; it was absolutely
+expressionless. My sister's step sounded on the floor of the room behind
+us.
+
+"If only--" Mabel began, then stopped, and my own feelings leaping out
+instinctively completed the sentence I felt was in her mind:
+
+"--something would happen."
+
+She instantly corrected me. I had caught her thought, yet somehow
+phrased it wrongly.
+
+"We could escape!" She lowered her tone a little, saying it hurriedly.
+The "we" amazed and horrified me; but something in her voice and manner
+struck me utterly dumb. There was ice and terror in it. It was a dying
+woman speaking--a lost and hopeless soul.
+
+In that atrocious moment I hardly noticed what was said exactly, but I
+remember that my sister returned with a grey shawl about her shoulders,
+and that Mabel said, in her ordinary voice again, "It is chilly, yes;
+let's have tea inside," and that two maids, one of them the grenadier,
+speedily carried the loaded trays into the morning-room and put a match
+to the logs in the great open fireplace. It was, after all, foolish to
+risk the sharp evening air, for dusk was falling steadily, and even the
+sunshine of the day just fading could not turn autumn into summer. I was
+the last to come in. Just as I left the verandah a large black bird
+swooped down in front of me past the pillars; it dropped from overhead,
+swerved abruptly to one side as it caught sight of me, and flapped
+heavily towards the shrubberies on the left of the terraces, where it
+disappeared into the gloom. It flew very low, very close. And it
+startled me, I think because in some way it seemed like my Shadow
+materialized--as though the dark horror that was rising everywhere from
+house and garden, then settling back so thickly yet so imperceptibly
+upon us all, were incarnated in that whirring creature that passed
+between the daylight and the coming night.
+
+I stood a moment, wondering if it would appear again, before I followed
+the others indoors, and as I was in the act of closing the windows after
+me, I caught a glimpse of a figure on the lawn. It was some distance
+away, on the other side of the shrubberies, in fact where the bird had
+vanished. But in spite of the twilight that half magnified, half
+obscured it, the identity was unmistakable. I knew the housekeeper's
+stiff walk too well to be deceived. "Mrs. Marsh taking the air," I said
+to myself. I felt the necessity of saying it, and I wondered why she was
+doing so at this particular hour. If I had other thoughts they were so
+vague, and so quickly and utterly suppressed, that I cannot recall them
+sufficiently to relate them here.
+
+And, once indoors, it was to be expected that there would come
+explanation, discussion, conversation, at any rate, regarding the
+singular noise and its cause, some uttered evidence of the mood that had
+been strong enough to drive us all inside. Yet there was none. Each of
+us purposely, and with various skill, ignored it. We talked little, and
+when we did it was of anything in the world but that. Personally, I
+experienced a touch of that same bewilderment which had come over me
+during my first talk with Frances on the evening of my arrival, for I
+recall now the acute tension, and the hope, yet dread, that one or other
+of us must sooner or later introduce the subject. It did not happen,
+however; no reference was made to it even remotely. It was the presence
+of Mabel, I felt positive, that prohibited. As soon might we have
+discussed Death in the bedroom of a dying woman.
+
+The only scrap of conversation I remember, where all was ordinary and
+commonplace, was when Mabel spoke casually to the grenadier asking why
+Mrs. Marsh had omitted to do something or other--what it was I forget--
+and that the maid replied respectfully that "Mrs. Marsh was very sorry,
+but her 'and still pained her." I enquired, though so casually that I
+scarcely know what prompted the words, whether she had injured herself
+severely, and the reply, "She upset a lamp and burnt herself," was said
+in a tone that made me feel my curiosity was indiscreet, "but she always
+has an excuse for not doing things she ought to do." The little bit of
+conversation remained with me, and I remember particularly the quick way
+Frances interrupted and turned the talk upon the delinquencies of
+servants in general, telling incidents of her own at our flat with a
+volubility that perhaps seemed forced, and that certainly did not
+encourage general talk as it may have been intended to do. We lapsed
+into silence immediately she finished.
+
+But for all our care and all our calculated silence, each knew that
+something had, in these last moments, come very close; it had brushed us
+in passing; it had retired; and I am inclined to think now that the
+large dark thing I saw, riding the dusk, probably bird of prey, was in
+some sense a symbol of it in my mind--that actually there had been no
+bird at all, I mean, but that my mood of apprehension and dismay had
+formed the vivid picture in my thoughts. It had swept past us, it had
+retreated, but it was now, at this moment, in hiding very close. And it
+was watching us.
+
+Perhaps, too, it was mere coincidence that I encountered Mrs. Marsh, his
+housekeeper, several times that evening in the short interval between
+tea and dinner, and that on each occasion the sight of this gaunt,
+half-saturnine woman fed my prejudice against her. Once, on my way to the
+telephone, I ran into her just where the passage is somewhat jammed by a
+square table carrying the Chinese gong, a grandfather's clock and a box
+of croquet mallets. We both gave way, then both advanced, then again
+gave way--simultaneously. It seemed, impossible to pass. We stepped with
+decision to the same side, finally colliding in the middle, while saying
+those futile little things, half apology, half excuse, that are
+inevitable at such times. In the end she stood upright against the wall
+for me to pass, taking her place against the very door I wished to open.
+It was ludicrous.
+
+"Excuse me--I was just going in--to telephone," I explained. And she
+sidled off, murmuring apologies, but opening the door for me while she
+did so. Our hands met a moment on the handle.
+
+There was a second's awkwardness--it was too stupid. I remembered her
+injury, and by way of something to say, I enquired after it. She thanked
+me; it was entirely healed now, but it might have been much worse; and
+there was something about the "mercy of the Lord" that I didn't quite
+catch. While telephoning, however--London call, and my attention focused
+on it--realized sharply that this was the first time I had spoken with
+her; also, that I had--touched her.
+
+It happened to be a Sunday, and the lines were clear. I got my
+connection quickly, and the incident was forgotten while my thoughts
+went up to London. On my way upstairs, then, the woman came back into my
+mind, so that I recalled other things about her--how she seemed all over
+the house, in unlikely places often; how I had caught her sitting in the
+hall alone that night; how she was forever coming and going with her
+lugubrious visage and that untidy hair at the back that had made me
+laugh three years ago with the idea that it looked singed or burnt; and
+how the impression on my first arrival at The Towers was that this woman
+somehow kept alive, though its evidence was outwardly suppressed, the
+influence of her late employer and of his somber teachings. Somewhere
+with her was associated the idea of punishment, vindictiveness, revenge.
+I remembered again suddenly my odd notion that she sought to keep her
+present mistress here, a prisoner in this bleak and comfortless house,
+and that really, in spite of her obsequious silence, she was intensely
+opposed to the change of thought that had reclaimed Mabel to a happier
+view of life.
+
+All this in a passing second flashed in review before me, and I
+discovered, or at any rate reconstructed, the real Mrs. Marsh. She was
+decidedly in the Shadow. More, she stood in the forefront of it,
+stealthily leading an assault, as it were, against The Towers and its
+occupants, as though, consciously or unconsciously, she labored
+incessantly to this hateful end.
+
+I can only judge that some state of nervousness in me permitted the
+series of insignificant thoughts to assume this dramatic shape, and that
+what had gone before prepared the way and led her up at the head of so
+formidable a procession. I relate it exactly as it came to me. My nerves
+were doubtless somewhat on edge by now. Otherwise I should hardly have
+been a prey to the exaggeration at all. I seemed open to so many
+strange, impressions.
+
+Nothing else, perhaps, can explain my ridiculous conversation with her,
+when, for the third time that evening, I came suddenly upon the woman
+half-way down the stairs, standing by an open window as if in the act of
+listening. She was dressed in black, a black shawl over her square
+shoulders and black gloves on her big, broad hands. Two black objects,
+prayer books apparently, she clasped, and on her head she wore a bonnet
+with shaking beads of jet. At first I did not know her, as I came
+running down upon her from the landing; it was only when she stood aside
+to let me pass that I saw her profile against the tapestry and
+recognized Mrs. Marsh. And to catch her on the front stairs, dressed
+like this, struck me as incongruous--impertinent. I paused in my
+dangerous descent. Through the opened window came the sound of bells--
+church bells--a sound more depressing to me than superstition, and as
+nauseating. Though the action was ill judged, I obeyed the sudden
+prompting--was it a secret desire to attack, perhaps?--and spoke to her.
+
+"Been to church, I suppose, Mrs. Marsh?" I said. "Or just going,
+perhaps?"
+
+Her face, as she looked up a second to reply, was like an iron doll that
+moved its lips and turned its eyes, but made no other imitation of life
+at all.
+
+"Some of us still goes, sir," she said unctuously.
+
+It was respectful enough, yet the implied judgment of the rest of the
+world made me almost angry. A deferential insolence lay behind the
+affected meekness.
+
+"For those who believe no doubt it is helpful," I smiled. "True religion
+brings peace and happiness, I'm sure--joy, Mrs. Marsh, joy!" I found
+keen satisfaction in the emphasis.
+
+She looked at me like a knife. I cannot describe the implacable thing
+that shone in her fixed, stern eyes, nor the shadow of felt darkness
+that stole across her face. She glittered. I felt hate in her. I knew--
+she knew too--who was in the thoughts of us both at that moment.
+
+She replied softly, never forgetting her place for an instant:
+
+"There is joy, sir--in 'eaven--over one sinner that repenteth, and in
+church there goes up prayer to Gawd for those 'oo--well, for the others,
+sir, 'oo--"
+
+She cut short her sentence thus. The gloom about her as she said it was
+like the gloom about a hearse, a tomb, a darkness of great hopeless
+dungeons. My tongue ran on of itself with a kind of bitter satisfaction:
+
+"We must believe there are no others, Mrs. Marsh. Salvation, you know,
+would be such a failure if there were. No merciful, all-foreseeing God
+could ever have devised such a fearful plan--"
+
+Her voice, interrupting me, seemed to rise out of the bowels of the
+earth:
+
+"They rejected the salvation when it was offered to them, sir, on
+earth."
+
+"But you wouldn't have them tortured forever because of one mistake in
+ignorance," I said, fixing her with my eye. "Come now, would you, Mrs.
+Marsh? No God worth worshipping could permit such cruelty. Think a
+moment what it means."
+
+She stared at me, a curious expression in her stupid eyes. It seemed to
+me as though the "woman" in her revolted, while yet she dared not suffer
+her grim belief to trip. That is, she would willingly have had it
+otherwise but for a terror that prevented.
+
+"We may pray for them, sir, and we do--we may 'ope." She dropped her
+eyes to the carpet.
+
+"Good, good!" I put in cheerfully, sorry now that I had spoken at all.
+"That's more hopeful, at any rate isn't it?"
+
+She murmured something about Abraham's bosom, and the "time of salvation
+not being forever," as I tried to pass her. Then a half gesture that she
+made stopped me. There was something more she wished to say--to ask. She
+looked up furtively. In her eyes I saw the "woman" peering out through
+fear.
+
+"Per'aps, sir." she faltered, as though lightning must strike her dead,
+"per'aps, would you think, a drop of cold water, given in His name,
+might moisten--?"
+
+But I stopped her, for the foolish talk had lasted long enough. "Of
+course," I exclaimed, "of course. For God is love, remember, and love
+means charity, tolerance, sympathy, and sparing others pain," and I
+hurried past her, determined to end the outrageous conversation for
+which yet I knew myself entirely to blame. Behind me, she stood
+stock-still for several minutes, half bewildered, half alarmed, as I
+suspected. I caught the fragment of another sentence, one word of it,
+rather--"punishment"--but the rest escaped me. Her arrogance and
+condescending tolerance exasperated me, while I was at the same time
+secretly pleased that I might have touched some string of remorse or
+sympathy in her after all. Her belief was iron; she dared not let it go;
+yet somewhere underneath there lurked the germ of a wholesome revulsion.
+She would help "them"--if she dared. Her question proved it.
+
+Half ashamed of myself, I turned and crossed the hall quickly lest I
+should be tempted to say more, and in me was a disagreeable sensation as
+though I had just left the Incurable Ward of some great hospital. A
+reaction caught me as of nausea. Ugh! I wanted such people cleansed by
+fire. They seemed to me as centers of contamination whose vicious
+thoughts flowed out to stain God's glorious world. I saw myself,
+Frances, Mabel too especially, on the rack, while that odious figure of
+cruelty and darkness stood over us and ordered the awful handles turned
+in order that we might be "saved"--forced, that is, to think and believe
+exactly as she thought and believed.
+
+I found relief for my somewhat childish indignation by letting myself
+loose upon the organ then. The flood of Bach and Beethoven brought back
+the sense of proportion. It proved, however, at the same time that there
+had been this growth of distortion in me, and that it had been provided
+apparently by my closer contact--for the first time--with that funereal
+personality, the woman who, like her master, believed that all holding
+views of God that differed from her own, must be damned eternally. It
+gave me, moreover, some faint clue perhaps, though a clue I was unequal
+of following up, to the nature of the strife and terror and frustrate
+influence in the house. That housekeeper had to do with it. She kept it
+alive. Her thought was like a spell she waved above her mistress's head.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+
+That night I was wakened by a hurried tapping at my door, and before I
+could answer, Frances stood beside my bed. She had switched on the light
+as she came in. Her hair fell straggling over her dressing gown. Her
+face was deathly pale, its expression so distraught it was almost
+haggard.
+
+The eyes were very wide. She looked almost like another woman.
+
+She was whispering at a great pace: "Bill, Bill, wake up, quick!"
+
+"I am awake. What is it?" I whispered too. I was startled.
+
+"Listen!" was all she said. Her eyes stared into vacancy.
+
+There was not a sound in the great house. The wind had dropped, and all
+was still. Only the tapping seemed to continue endlessly in my brain.
+The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past two.
+
+"I heard nothing, Frances. What is it?" I rubbed my eyes; I had been
+very deeply asleep.
+
+"Listen!" she repeated very softly, holding up one finger and turning
+her eyes towards the door she had left ajar. Her usual calmness had
+deserted her. She was in the grip of some distressing terror.
+
+For a full minute we held our breath and listened. Then her eyes rolled
+round again and met my own, and her skin went even whiter than before.
+
+"It woke me," she said beneath her breath, and moving a step nearer to
+my bed. "It was the Noise." Even her whisper trembled.
+
+"The Noise!" The word repeated itself dully of its own accord. I would
+rather it had been anything in the world but that--earthquake, foreign
+cannon, collapse of the house above our heads! "The Noise, Frances! Are
+you sure?" I was playing really for a little time.
+
+"It was like thunder. At first I thought it was thunder. But a minute
+later it came again--from underground. It's appalling." She muttered the
+words, her voice not properly under control.
+
+There was a pause of perhaps a minute, and then we both spoke at once.
+We said foolish, obvious things that neither of us believed in for a
+second. The roof had fallen in, there were burglars downstairs, the
+safes had been blown open. It was to comfort each other as children do
+that we said these things; also it was to gain further time.
+
+"There's some one in the house, of course," I heard my voice say
+finally, as I sprang out of bed and hurried into dressing gown and
+slippers. "Don't be alarmed. I'll go down and see," and from the drawer
+I took a pistol it was my habit to carry everywhere with me. I loaded it
+carefully while Frances stood stock-still beside the bed and watched. I
+moved towards the open door.
+
+"You stay here, Frances," I whispered, the beating of my heart making
+the words uneven, "while I go down and make a search. Lock yourself in,
+girl. Nothing can happen to you. It was downstairs, you said?"
+
+"Underneath," she answered faintly, pointing through the floor.
+
+She moved suddenly between me and the door.
+
+"Listen! Hark!" she said, the eyes in her face quite fixed; "it's coming
+again," and she turned her head to catch the slightest sound. I stood
+there watching her, and while I watched her, shook.
+
+But nothing stirred. From the halls below rose only the whirr and quiet
+ticking of the numerous clocks. The blind by the open window behind us
+flapped out a little into the room as the draught caught it.
+
+"I'll come with you, Bill--to the next floor," she broke the silence.
+"Then I'll stay with Mabel--till you come up again." The blind sank down
+with a long sigh as she said it.
+
+The question jumped to my lips before I could repress it:
+
+"Mabel is awake. She heard it too?"
+
+I hardly know why horror caught me at her answer. All was so vague and
+terrible as we stood there playing the great game of this sinister house
+where nothing ever happened.
+
+"We met in the passage. She was on her way to me."
+
+What shook in me, shook inwardly. Frances, I mean, did not see it. I had
+the feeling just that the Noise was upon us, that any second it would
+boom and roar about our ears. But the deep silence held. I only heard my
+sister's little whisper coming across the room in answer to my question:
+
+"Then what is Mabel doing now?"
+
+And her reply proved that she was yielding at last beneath the dreadful
+tension, for she spoke at once, unable longer to keep up the pretence.
+With a kind of relief, as it were, she said it out, looking helplessly
+at me like a child:
+
+"She is weeping and gna--"
+
+My expression must have stopped her. I believe I clapped both hands upon
+her mouth, though when I realized things clearly again, I found they
+were covering my own ears instead. It was a moment of unutterable
+horror. The revulsion I felt was actually physical. It would have given
+me pleasure to fire off all the five chambers of my pistol into the air
+above my head; the sound--a definite, wholesome sound that explained
+itself--would have been a positive relief. Other feelings, though, were
+in me too, all over me, rushing to and fro. It was vain to seek their
+disentanglement; it was impossible. I confess that I experienced, among
+them, a touch of paralyzing fear--though for a moment only; it passed as
+sharply as it came, leaving me with a violent flush of blood to the face
+such as bursts of anger bring, followed abruptly by an icy perspiration
+over the entire body. Yet I may honestly avow that it was not ordinary
+personal fear I felt, nor any common dread of physical injury. It was,
+rather, a vast, impersonal shrinking--a sympathetic shrinking--from the
+agony and terror that countless others, somewhere, somehow, felt for
+themselves. The first sensation of a prison overwhelmed me in that
+instant, of bitter strife and frenzied suffering, and the fiery torture
+of the yearning to escape that was yet hopelessly uttered.... It was of
+incredible power. It was real. The vain, intolerable hope swept over me.
+
+I mastered myself, though hardly knowing how, and took my sister's hand.
+It was as cold as ice, as I led her firmly to the door and out into the
+passage. Apparently she noticed nothing of my so near collapse, for I
+caught her whisper as we went. "You are brave, Bill; splendidly brave."
+
+The upper corridors of the great sleeping house were brightly lit; on
+her way to me she had turned on every electric switch her hand could
+reach; and as we passed the final flight of stairs to the floor below, I
+heard a door shut softly and knew that Mabel had been listening--waiting
+for us. I led my sister up to it. She knocked, and the door was opened
+cautiously an inch or so. The room was pitch black. I caught no glimpse
+of Mabel standing there. Frances turned to me with a hurried whisper,
+"Billy, you will be careful, won't you?" and went in. I just had time to
+answer that I would not be long, and Frances to reply, "You'll find us
+here" when the door closed and cut her sentence short before its end.
+
+But it was not alone the closing door that took the final words.
+Frances--by the way she disappeared I knew it--had made a swift and
+violent movement into the darkness that was as though she sprang. She
+leaped upon that other woman who stood back among the shadows, for,
+simultaneously with the clipping of the sentence, another sound was also
+stopped--stifled, smothered, choked back lest I should also hear it. Yet
+not in time. I heard it--a hard and horrible sound that explained both
+the leap and the abrupt cessation of the whispered words.
+
+I stood irresolute a moment. It was as though all the bones had been
+withdrawn from my body, so that I must sink and fall. That sound plucked
+them out, and plucked out my self-possession with them. I am not sure
+that it was a sound I had ever heard before, though children, I half
+remembered, made it sometimes in blind rages when they knew not what
+they did. In a grown-up person certainly I had never known it. I
+associated it with animals rather--horribly. In the history of the
+world, no doubt, it has been common enough, alas, but fortunately today
+there can be but few who know it, or would recognize it even when heard.
+The bones shot back into my body the same instant, but red-hot and
+burning; the brief instant of irresolution passed; I was torn between
+the desire to break down the door and enter, and to run--run for my life
+from a thing I dared not face.
+
+Out of the horrid tumult, then, I adopted neither course. Without
+reflection, certainly without analysis of what was best to do for my
+sister, myself or Mabel, I took up my action where it had been
+interrupted. I turned from the awful door and moved slowly towards the
+head of the stairs.
+
+But that dreadful little sound came with me. I believe my own teeth
+chattered. It seemed all over the house--in the empty halls that opened
+into the long passages towards the music-room, and even in the grounds
+outside the building. From the lawns and barren garden, from the ugly
+terraces themselves, it rose into the night, and behind it came a
+curious driving sound, incomplete, unfinished, as of wailing for
+deliverance, the wailing of desperate souls in anguish, the dull and dry
+beseeching of hopeless spirits in prison.
+
+That I could have taken the little sound from the bedroom where I
+actually heard it, and spread it thus over the entire house and grounds,
+is evidence, perhaps, of the state my nerves were in.
+
+The wailing assuredly was in my mind alone. But the longer I hesitated,
+the more difficult became my task, and, gathering up my dressing gown,
+lest I should trip in the darkness, I passed slowly down the staircase
+into the hail below. I carried neither candle nor matches; every switch
+in room and corridor was known to me. The covering of darkness was
+indeed rather comforting than otherwise, for if it prevented seeing, it
+also prevented being seen. The heavy pistol, knocking against my thigh
+as I moved, made me feel I was carrying a child's toy, foolishly. I
+experienced in every nerve that primitive vast dread which is the Thrill
+of darkness. Merely the child in me was comforted by that pistol.
+
+The night was not entirely black; the iron bars across the glass front
+door were visible, and, equally, I discerned the big, stiff wooden
+chairs in the hall, the gaping fireplace, the upright pillars supporting
+the staircase, the round table in the center with its books and
+flower-vases, and the basket that held visitors' cards. There, too, was
+the stick and umbrella stand and the shelf with railway guides,
+directory, and telegraph forms. Clocks ticked everywhere with sounds
+like quiet footfalls. Light fell here and there in patches from the
+floor above. I stood a moment in the hall, letting my eyes grow more
+accustomed to the gloom, while deciding on a plan of search. I made out
+the ivy trailing outside over one of the big windows ... and then the
+tall clock by the front door made a grating noise deep down inside its
+body--it was the Presentation clock, large and hideous, given by the
+congregation of his church--and, dreading the booming strike it seemed
+to threaten, I made a quick decision. If others beside myself were about
+in the night, the sound of that striking might cover their approach.
+
+So I tiptoed to the right, where the passage led towards the dining
+room. In the other direction were the morning- and drawing rooms, both
+little used, and various other rooms beyond that had been his, generally
+now kept locked. I thought of my sister, waiting upstairs with that
+frightened woman for my return. I went quickly, yet stealthily.
+
+And, to my surprise, the door of the dining room was open. It had been
+opened. I paused on the threshold, staring about me. I think I fully
+expected to see a figure blocked in the shadows against the heavy
+sideboard, or looming on the other side beneath his portrait. But the
+room was empty; I felt it empty. Through the wide bow-windows that gave
+on to the verandah came an uncertain glimmer that even shone reflected
+in the polished surface of the dinner-table, and again I perceived the
+stiff outline of chairs, waiting tenantless all round it, two larger
+ones with high carved backs at either end. The monkey trees on the upper
+terrace, too, were visible outside against the sky, and the solemn
+crests of the wellingtonias on the terraces below. The enormous clock on
+the mantelpiece ticked very slowly, as though its machinery were running
+down, and I made out the pale round patch that was its face. Resisting
+my first inclination to turn the lights up--my hand had gone so far as
+to finger the friendly knob--I crossed the room so carefully that no
+single board creaked, nor a single chair, as I rested a hand upon its
+back, moved on the parquet flooring. I turned neither to the right nor
+left, nor did I once look back.
+
+I went towards the long corridor filled with priceless _objets d'art_,
+that led through various antechambers into the spacious music-room, and
+only at the mouth of this corridor did I next halt a moment in
+uncertainty. For this long corridor, lit faintly by high windows on the
+left from the verandah, was very narrow, owing to the mass of shelves
+and fancy tables it contained. It was not that I feared to knock over
+precious things as I went, but, that, because of its ungenerous width,
+there would be no room to pass another person--if I met one. And the
+certainty had suddenly come upon me that somewhere in this corridor
+another person at this actual moment stood. Here, somehow, amid all this
+dead atmosphere of furniture and impersonal emptiness, lay the hint of a
+living human presence; and with such conviction did it come upon me,
+that my hand instinctively gripped the pistol in my pocket before I
+could even think. Either some one had passed along this corridor just
+before me, or some one lay waiting at its farther end--withdrawn or
+flattened into one of the little recesses, to let me pass. It was the
+person who had opened the door. And the blood ran from my heart as I
+realized it.
+
+It was not courage that sent me on, but rather a strong impulsion from
+behind that made it impossible to retreat: the feeling that a throng
+pressed at my back, drawing nearer and nearer; that I was already half
+surrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there
+was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their
+fire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm of
+irrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring down
+the length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end,
+I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that the
+negative emotion of fear was swamped in this vast sea of pity and
+commiseration for others that surged upon me.
+
+My senses, at least, were no whit confused; if anything, my brain
+registered impressions with keener accuracy than usual. I noticed, for
+instance, that the two swinging doors of baize that cut the corridor
+into definite lengths, making little rooms of the spaces between them,
+were both wide-open--in the dim light no mean achievement. Also that the
+fronds of a palm plant, some ten feet in front of me, still stirred
+gently from the air of someone who had recently gone past them. The long
+green leaves waved to and fro like hands. Then I went stealthily forward
+down the narrow space, proud even that I had this command of myself, and
+so carefully that my feet made no sound upon the Japanese matting on the
+floor.
+
+It was a journey that seemed timeless. I have no idea how fast or slow I
+went, but I remember that I deliberately examined articles on each side
+of me, peering with particular closeness into the recesses of wall and
+window. I passed the first baize doors, and the passage beyond them
+widened out to hold shelves of books; there were sofas and small
+reading-tables against the wall.
+
+It narrowed again presently, as I entered the second stretch. The
+windows here were higher and smaller, and marble statuettes of classical
+subject lined the walls, watching me like figures of the dead. Their
+white and shining faces saw me, yet made no sign. I passed next between
+the second baize doors. They, too, had been fastened back with hooks
+against the wall. Thus all doors were open--had been recently opened.
+
+And so, at length, I found myself in the final widening of the corridor
+which formed an antechamber to the music-room itself. It had been used
+formerly to hold the overflow of meetings. No door separated it from the
+great hall beyond, but heavy curtains hung usually to close it off, and
+these curtains were invariably drawn. They now stood wide. And here--I
+can merely state the impression that came upon me--I knew myself at last
+surrounded. The throng that pressed behind me, also surged in front:
+facing me in the big room, and waiting for my entry, stood a multitude;
+on either side of me, in the very air above my head, the vast assemblage
+paused upon my coming. The pause, however, was momentary, for instantly
+the deep, tumultuous movement was resumed that yet was silent as a
+cavern underground. I felt the agony that was in it, the passionate
+striving, the awful struggle to escape. The semi-darkness held
+beseeching faces that fought to press themselves upon my vision,
+yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened to
+implore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury of
+misery and hate that made the life in me stop dead, frozen by the horror
+of vain pity. That intolerable, vain Hope was everywhere.
+
+And the multitude, it came to me, was not a single multitude, but many;
+for, as soon as one huge division pressed too close upon the edge of
+escape, it was dragged back by another and prevented. The wild host was
+divided against itself. Here dwelt the Shadow I had "imagined" weeks
+ago, and in it struggled armies of lost souls as in the depths of some
+bottomless pit whence there is no escape. The layers mingled, fighting
+against themselves in endless torture. It was in this great Shadow I had
+clairvoyantly seen Mabel, but about its fearful mouth, I now was
+certain, hovered another figure of darkness, a figure who sought to keep
+it in existence, since to her thought were due those lampless depths of
+woe without escape.... Towards me the multitudes now surged.
+
+It was a sound and a movement that brought me back into myself. The
+great dock at the farther end of the room just then struck the hour of
+three. That was the sound. And the movement--? I was aware that a figure
+was passing across the distant center of the floor. Instantly I dropped
+back into the arena of my little human terror. My hand again clutched
+stupidly at the pistol butt. I drew back into the folds of the heavy
+curtain. And the figure advanced.
+
+I remember every detail. At first it seemed to me enormous--this
+advancing shadow--far beyond human scale; but as it came nearer, I
+measured it, though not consciously, by the organ pipes that gleamed in
+faint colors, just above its gradual soft approach. It passed them,
+already halfway across the great room. I saw then that its stature was
+that of ordinary men. The prolonged booming of the clock died away. I
+heard the footfall, shuffling upon the polished boards. I heard another
+sound--a voice, low and monotonous, droning as in prayer. The figure was
+speaking. It was a woman. And she carried in both hands before her a
+small object that faintly shimmered--a glass of water. And then I
+recognized her.
+
+There was still an instant's time before she reached me, and I made use
+of it. I shrank back, flattening myself against the wall. Her voice
+ceased a moment, as she turned and carefully drew the curtains together
+behind her, dosing them with one hand. Oblivious of my presence, though
+she actually touched my dressing gown with the hand that pulled the
+cords, she resumed her dreadful, solemn march, disappearing at length
+down the long vista of the corridor like a shadow.
+
+But as she passed me, her voice began again, so that I heard each word
+distinctly as she uttered it, her head aloft, her figure upright, as
+though she moved at the head of a procession:
+
+"A drop of cold water, given in His name, shall moisten their burning
+tongues."
+
+It was repeated monotonously over and over again, droning down into the
+distance as she went, until at length both voice and figure faded into
+the shadows at the farther end.
+
+For a time, I have no means of measuring precisely, I stood in that dark
+corner, pressing my back against the wall, and would have drawn the
+curtains down to hide me had I dared to stretch an arm out. The dread
+that presently the woman would return passed gradually away. I realized
+that the air had emptied, the crowd her presence had stirred into
+activity had retreated; I was alone in the gloomy under-space of the
+odious building.... Then I remembered suddenly again the terrified women
+waiting for me on that upper landing; and realized that my skin was wet
+and freezing cold after a profuse perspiration. I prepared to retrace my
+steps. I remember the effort it cost me to leave the support of the wall
+and covering darkness of my corner, and step out into the grey light of
+the corridor. At first I sidled, then, finding this mode of walking
+impossible, turned my face boldly and walked quickly, regardless that my
+dressing gown set the precious objects shaking as I passed. A wind that
+sighed mournfully against the high, small windows seemed to have got
+inside the corridor as well; it felt so cold; and every moment I dreaded
+to see the outline of the woman's figure as she waited in recess or
+angle against the wall for me to pass.
+
+Was there another thing I dreaded even more? I cannot say. I only know
+that the first baize doors had swung to behind me, and the second ones
+were close at hand, when the great dim thunder caught me, pouring up
+with prodigious volume so that it, seemed to roll out from another
+world. It shook the very bowels of the building. I was closer to it than
+that other time, when it had followed me from the goblin garden. There
+was strength and hardness in it, as of metal reverberation. Some touch
+of numbness, almost of paralysis, must surely have been upon me that I
+felt no actual terror, for I remember even turning and standing still to
+hear it better. "That is the Noise," my thought ran stupidly, and I
+think I whispered it aloud; "the Doors are closing." The wind outside
+against the windows was audible, so it cannot have been really loud, yet
+to me it was the biggest, deepest sound I have ever heard, but so far
+away, with such awful remoteness in it, that I had to doubt my own ears
+at the same time. It seemed underground--the rumbling of earthquake
+gates that shut remorselessly within the rocky Earth--stupendous
+ultimate thunder. They were shut off from help again. The doors had
+closed.
+
+I felt a storm of pity, an agony of bitter, futile hate sweep through
+me. My memory of the figure changed then. The Woman with the glass of
+cooling water had stepped down from Heaven; but the Man--or was it Men?
+--who smeared this terrible layer of belief and Thought upon the
+world!...
+
+I crossed the dining room--it was fancy, of course, that held my eyes
+from glancing at the portrait for fear I should see it smiling approval
+--and so finally reached the hall, where the light from the floor above
+seemed now quite bright in comparison. All the doors I closed carefully
+behind me; but first I had to open them. The woman had closed every one.
+Up the stairs, then, I actually ran, two steps at a time. My sister was
+standing outside Mabel's door. By her face I knew that she had also
+heard. There was no need to ask. I quickly made my mind up.
+
+"There's nothing," I said, and detailed briefly my tour of search. "All
+is quiet and undisturbed downstairs." May God forgive me!
+
+She beckoned to me, closing the door softly behind her. My heart beat
+violently a moment, then stood still.
+
+"Mabel," she said aloud.
+
+It was like the sentence of a judge, that one short word.
+
+I tried to push past her and go in, but she stopped me with her arm. She
+was wholly mistress of herself, I saw.
+
+"Hush!" she said in a lower voice. "I've got her round again with
+brandy. She's sleeping quietly now. We won't disturb her."
+
+She drew me farther out into the landing, and as she did so, the clock
+in the hall below struck half-past three. I had stood, then, thirty
+minutes in the corridor below. "You've been such a long time." she said
+simply. "I feared for you," and she took my hand in her own that was
+cold and clammy.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+
+And then, while that dreadful house stood listening about us in the
+early hours of this chill morning upon the edge of winter, she told me,
+with laconic brevity, things about Mabel that I heard as from a
+distance. There was nothing so unusual or tremendous in the short
+recital, nothing indeed I might not have already guessed for myself. It
+was the time and scene, the inference, too, that made it so afflicting:
+the idea that Mabel believed herself so utterly and hopelessly lost--
+beyond recovery damned.
+
+That she had loved him with so passionate a devotion that she had given
+her soul into his keeping, this certainly I had not divined--probably
+because I had never thought about it one way or the other. He had
+"converted" her, I knew, but that she had subscribed whole-heartedly to
+that most cruel and ugly of his dogmas--this was new to me, and came
+with a certain shock as I heard it. In love, of course, the weaker
+nature is receptive to all manner of suggestion. This man had
+"suggested" his pet brimstone lake so vividly that she had listened and
+believed. He had frightened her into heaven; and his heaven, a definite
+locality in the skies, had its foretaste here on earth in miniature--The
+Towers, house, and garden. Into his dolorous scheme of a handful saved
+and millions damned, his enclosure, as it were, of sheep and goats, he
+had swept her before she was aware of it. Her mind no longer was her
+own. And it was Mrs. Marsh who kept the thought-stream open, though
+tempered, as she deemed, with that touch of craven, superstitious mercy.
+
+But what I found it difficult to understand, and still more difficult to
+accept, was that, during her year abroad, she had been so haunted with a
+secret dread of that hideous after-death that she had finally revolted
+and tried to recover that clearer state of mind she had enjoyed before
+the religious bully had stunned her--yet had tried in vain. She had
+returned to The Towers to find her soul again, only to realize that it
+was lost eternally. The cleaner state of mind lay then beyond recovery.
+In the reaction that followed the removal of his terrible "suggestion,"
+she felt the crumbling of all that he had taught her, but searched in
+vain for the peace and beauty his teachings had destroyed. Nothing came
+to replace these. She was empty, desolate, hopeless; craving her former
+joy and carelessness, she found only hate and diabolical calculation.
+This man, whom she had loved to the point of losing her soul for him,
+had bequeathed to her one black and fiery thing--the terror of the
+damned. His thinking wrapped her in this iron garment that held her
+fast.
+
+All this Frances told me, far more briefly than I have here repeated it.
+In her eyes and gestures and laconic sentences lay the conviction of
+great beating issues and of menacing drama my own description fails to
+recapture. It was all so incongruous and remote from the world I lived
+in that more than once a smile, though a smile of pity, fluttered to my
+lips; but a glimpse of my face in the mirror showed rather the leer of a
+grimace. There was no real laughter anywhere that night.
+
+The entire adventure seemed so incredible, here, in this twentieth
+century--but yet delusion, that feeble word, did not occur once in the
+comments my mind suggested though did not utter. I remembered that
+forbidding Shadow too; my sister's watercolors; the vanished personality
+of our hostess; the inexplicable, thundering Noise, and the figure of
+Mrs. Marsh in her midnight ritual that was so childish yet so horrible.
+I shivered in spite of my own "emancipated" cast of mind.
+
+"There is no Mabel," were the words with which my sister sent another
+shower of ice down my spine. "He has killed her in his lake of fire and
+brimstone."
+
+I stared at her blankly, as in a nightmare where nothing true or
+possible ever happened.
+
+"He killed her in his lake of fire and brimstone," she repeated more
+faintly.
+
+A desperate effort was in me to say the strong, sensible thing which
+should destroy the oppressive horror that grew so stiflingly about us
+both, but again the mirror drew the attempted smile into the merest
+grin, betraying the distortion that was everywhere in the place.
+
+"You mean," I stammered beneath my breath, "that her faith has gone, but
+that the terror has remained?" I asked it, dully groping. I moved out of
+the line of the reflection in the glass.
+
+She bowed her head as though beneath a weight; her skin was the pallor
+of grey ashes.
+
+"You mean," I said louder, "that she has lost her--mind?"
+
+"She is terror incarnate," was the whispered answer. "Mabel has lost her
+soul. Her soul is--there!" She pointed horribly below. "She is seeking
+it ...?"
+
+The word "soul" stung me into something of my normal self again.
+
+"But her terror, poor thing, is not--cannot be--transferable to us!" I
+exclaimed more vehemently. "It certainly is not convertible into
+feelings, sights and--even sounds!"
+
+She interrupted me quickly, almost impatiently, speaking with that
+conviction by which she conquered me so easily that night.
+
+"It is her terror that revived 'the Others.' It has brought her into
+touch with them. They are loose and driving after her. Her efforts at
+resistance have given them also hope--that escape, after all, is
+possible. Day and night they strive.
+
+"Escape! Others!" The anger fast rising in me dropped of its own accord
+at the moment of birth. It shrank into a shuddering beyond my control.
+In that moment, I think, I would have believed in the possibility of
+anything and everything she might tell me. To argue or contradict seemed
+equally futile.
+
+"His strong belief, as also the beliefs of others who have preceded
+him," she replied, so sure of herself that I actually turned to look
+over my shoulder, "have left their shadow like a thick deposit over the
+house and grounds. To them, poor souls imprisoned by thought, it was
+hopeless as granite walls--until her resistance, her effort to dissipate
+it--let in light. Now, in their thousands, they are flocking to this
+little light, seeking escape. Her own escape, don't you see, may release
+them all!"
+
+It took my breath away. Had his predecessors, former occupants of this
+house, also preached damnation of all the world but their own exclusive
+sect? Was this the explanation of her obscure talk of "layers," each
+striving against the other for domination? And if men are spirits, and
+these spirits survive, could strong Thought thus determine their
+condition even afterwards?
+
+So many questions flooded into me that I selected no one of them, but
+stared in uncomfortable silence, bewildered, out of my depth, and
+acutely, painfully distressed. There was so odd a mixture of possible
+truth and incredible, unacceptable explanation in it all; so much
+confirmed, yet so much left darker than before. What she said did,
+indeed, offer a quasi-interpretation of my own series of abominable
+sensations--strife, agony, pity, hate, escape--but so far-fetched that
+only the deep conviction in her voice and attitude made it tolerable for
+a second even. I found myself in a curious state of mind. I could
+neither think clearly nor say a word to refute her amazing statements,
+whispered there beside me in the shivering hours of the early morning
+with only a wall between ourselves and--Mabel. Close behind her words I
+remember this singular thing, however--that an atmosphere as of the
+Inquisition seemed to rise and stir about the room, beating awful wings
+of black above my head.
+
+Abruptly, then, a moment's common sense returned to me. I faced her.
+
+"And the Noise?" I said aloud, more firmly, "the roar of the closing
+doors? We have all heard that! Is that subjective too?"
+
+Frances looked sideways about her in a queer fashion that made my flesh
+creep again. I spoke brusquely, almost angrily. I repeated the question,
+and waited with anxiety for her reply.
+
+"What noise?" she asked, with the frank expression of an innocent child.
+"What closing doors?"
+
+But her face turned from grey to white, and I saw that drops of
+perspiration glistened on her forehead. She caught at the back of a
+chair to steady herself, then glanced about her again with that sidelong
+look that made my blood run cold. I understood suddenly then. She did
+not take in what I said. I knew now. She was listening--for something
+else.
+
+And the discovery revived in me a far stronger emotion than any mere
+desire for immediate explanation. Not only did I not insist upon an
+answer, but I was actually terrified lest she would answer. More, I felt
+in me a terror lest I should be moved to describe my own experiences
+below-stairs, thus increasing their reality and so the reality of all.
+She might even explain them too!
+
+Still listening intently, she raised her head and looked me in the eyes.
+Her lips opened to speak. The words came to me from a great distance, it
+seemed, and her voice had a sound like a stone that drops into a deep
+well, its fate though hidden, known.
+
+"We are in it with her, too, Bill. We are in it with her. Our
+interpretations vary--because we are--in parts of it only. Mabel is in
+it--all."
+
+The desire for violence came over me. If only she would say a definite
+thing in plain King's English! If only I could find it in me to give
+utterance to what shouted so loud within me! If only--the same old cry--
+something would happen! For all this elliptic talk that dazed my mind
+left obscurity everywhere. Her atrocious meaning, nonetheless, flashed
+through me, though vanishing before it wholly divulged itself.
+
+It brought a certain reaction with it. I found my tongue. Whether I
+actually believed what I said is more than I can swear to; that it
+seemed to me wise at the moment is all I remember. My mind was in a
+state of obscure perception less than that of normal consciousness.
+
+"Yes, Frances, I believe that what you say is the truth, and that we are
+in it with her"--I meant to say I with loud, hostile emphasis, but
+instead I whispered it lest she should hear the trembling of my voice--
+"and for that reason, my dear sister, we leave tomorrow, you and I--
+today, rather, since it is long past midnight--we leave this house of
+the damned. We go back to London."
+
+Frances looked up, her face distraught almost beyond recognition. But it
+was not my words that caused the tumult in her heart. It was a sound--
+the sound she had been listening for--so faint I barely caught it
+myself, and had she not pointed I could never have known the direction
+whence it came. Small and terrible it rose again in the stillness of the
+night, the sound of gnashing teeth. And behind it came another--the
+tread of stealthy footsteps. Both were just outside the door.
+
+The room swung round me for a second. My first instinct to prevent my
+sister going out--she had dashed past me frantically to the door--gave
+place to another when I saw the expression in her eyes. I followed her
+lead instead; it was surer than my own. The pistol in my pocket swung
+uselessly against my thigh. I was flustered beyond belief and ashamed
+that I was so.
+
+"Keep close to me, Frances," I said huskily, as the door swung wide and
+a shaft of light fell upon a figure moving rapidly. Mabel was going down
+the corridor. Beyond her, in the shadows on the staircase, a second
+figure stood beckoning, scarcely visible.
+
+"Before they get her! Quick!" was screamed into my ears, and our arms
+were about her in the same moment. It was a horrible scene. Not that
+Mabel struggled in the least, but that she collapsed as we caught her
+and fell with her dead weight, as of a corpse, limp, against us. And her
+teeth began again. They continued, even beneath the hand that Frances
+clapped upon her lips....
+
+We carried her back into her own bedroom, where she lay down peacefully
+enough. It was so soon over.... The rapidity of the whole thing robbed
+it of reality almost. It had the swiftness of something remembered
+rather than of something witnessed. She slept again so quickly that it
+was almost as if we had caught her sleepwalking. I cannot say. I asked
+no questions at the time; I have asked none since; and my help was
+needed as little as the protection of my pistol. Frances was strangely
+competent and collected.... I lingered for some time uselessly by the
+door, till at length, looking up with a sigh, she made a sign for me to
+go.
+
+"I shall wait in your room next door," I whispered, "till you come."
+But, though going out, I waited in the corridor instead, so as to hear
+the faintest call for help. In that dark corridor upstairs I waited, but
+not long. It may have been fifteen minutes when Frances reappeared,
+locking the door softly behind her. Leaning over the banisters, I saw
+her.
+
+"I'll go in again about six o'clock," she whispered, "as soon as it gets
+light. She is sound asleep now. Please don't wait. If anything happens
+I'll call--you might leave your door ajar, perhaps."
+
+And she came up, looking like a ghost.
+
+But I saw her first safely into bed, and the rest of the night I spent
+in an armchair close to my opened door, listening for the slightest
+sound. Soon after five o'clock I heard Frances fumbling with the key,
+and, peering over the railing again, I waited till she reappeared and
+went back into her own room. She closed her door. Evidently she was
+satisfied that all was well.
+
+Then, and then only, did I go to bed myself, but not to sleep. I could
+not get the scene out of my mind, especially that odious detail of it
+which I hoped and believed my sister had not seen--the still, dark
+figure of the housekeeper waiting on the stairs below--waiting, of
+course, for Mabel.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+
+It seems I became a mere spectator after that; my sister's lead was so
+assured for one thing, and, for another, the responsibility of leaving
+Mabel alone--Frances laid it bodily upon my shoulders--was a little more
+than I cared about. Moreover, when we all three met later in the day,
+things went on so exactly as before, so absolutely without friction or
+distress, that to present a sudden, obvious excuse for cutting our visit
+short seemed ill-judged. And on the lowest grounds it would have been
+desertion. At any rate, it was beyond my powers, and Frances was quite
+firm that she must stay. We therefore did stay. Things that happen in
+the night always seem exaggerated and distorted when the sun shines
+brightly next morning; no one can reconstruct the terror of a nightmare
+afterwards, nor comprehend why it seemed so overwhelming at the time.
+
+I slept till ten o'clock, and when I rang for breakfast, a note from my
+sister lay upon the tray, its message of counsel couched in a calm and
+comforting strain. Mabel, she assured me, was herself again and
+remembered nothing of what had happened; there was no need of any
+violent measures; I was to treat her exactly as if I knew nothing. "And,
+if you don't mind, Bill, let us leave the matter unmentioned between
+ourselves as well. Discussion exaggerates; such things are best not
+talked about. I'm sorry I disturbed you so unnecessarily; I was stupidly
+excited. Please forget all the things I said at the moment." She had
+written "nonsense" first instead of "things," then scratched it out. She
+wished to convey that hysteria had been abroad in the night, and I
+readily gulped the explanation down, though it could not satisfy me in
+the smallest degree.
+
+There was another week of our visit still, and we stayed it out to the
+end without disaster. My desire to leave at times became that frantic
+thing, desire to escape; but I controlled it, kept silent, watched and
+wondered. Nothing happened. As before, and everywhere, there was no
+sequence of development, no connection between cause and effect; and
+climax, none whatever. The thing swayed up and down, backwards and
+forwards like a great loose curtain in the wind, and I could only
+vaguely surmise what caused the draught or why there was a curtain at
+all. A novelist might mold the queer material into coherent sequence
+that would be interesting but could not be true.
+
+It remains, therefore, not a story but a history. Nothing happened.
+
+Perhaps my intense dislike of the fall of darkness was due wholly to my
+stirred imagination, and perhaps my anger when I learned that Frances
+now occupied a bed in our hostess's room was unreasonable. Nerves were
+unquestionably on edge. I was forever on the lookout for some event that
+should make escape imperative, but yet that never presented itself. I
+slept lightly, left my door ajar to catch the slightest sound, even made
+stealthy tours of the house below-stairs while everybody dreamed in
+their beds. But I discovered nothing; the doors were always locked; I
+neither saw the housekeeper again in unreasonable times and places, nor
+heard a footstep in the passages and halls. The Noise was never once
+repeated. That horrible, ultimate thunder, my intensest dread of all,
+lay withdrawn into the abyss whence it had twice arisen. And though in
+my thoughts it was sternly denied existence, the great black reason for
+the fact afflicted me unbelievably. Since Mabel's fruitless effort to
+escape, the Doors kept closed remorselessly. She had failed; they gave
+up hope. For this was the explanation that haunted the region of my mind
+where feelings stir and hint before they clothe themselves in actual
+language. Only I firmly kept it there; it never knew expression.
+
+But, if my ears were open, my eyes were opened too, and it were idle to
+pretend that I did not notice a hundred details that were capable of
+sinister interpretation had I been weak enough to yield. Some protective
+barrier had fallen into ruins round me, so that Terror stalked behind
+the general collapse, feeling for me through all the gaping fissures.
+Much of this, I admit, must have been merely the elaboration of those
+sensations I had first vaguely felt, before subsequent events and my
+talks with Frances had dramatized them into living thoughts. I therefore
+leave them unmentioned in this history, just as my mind left them
+unmentioned in that interminable final week. Our life went on precisely
+as before--Mabel unreal and outwardly so still; Frances, secretive,
+anxious, tactful to the point of slyness, and keen to save to the point
+of self-forgetfulness.
+
+There were the same stupid meals, the same wearisome long evenings, the
+stifling ugliness of house and grounds, the Shadow settling in so
+thickly that it seemed almost a visible, tangible thing. I came to feel
+the only friendly things in all this hostile, cruel place were the
+robins that hopped boldly over the monstrous terraces and even up to the
+windows of the unsightly house itself. The robins alone knew joy; they
+danced, believing no evil thing was possible in all God's radiant world.
+They believed in everybody; their god's plan of life had no room in it
+for hell, damnation, and lakes of brimstone. I came to love the little
+birds. Had Samuel Franklyn known them, he might have preached a
+different sermon, bequeathing love in place of terror!
+
+Most of my time I spent writing; but it was a pretence at best, and
+rather a dangerous one besides. For it stirred the mind to production,
+with the result that other things came pouring in as well. With reading
+it was the same. In the end I found an aggressive, deliberate resistance
+to be the only way of feasible defense. To walk far afield was out of
+the question, for it meant leaving my sister too long alone, so that my
+exercise was confined to nearer home. My saunters in the grounds,
+however, never surprised the goblin garden again. It was close at hand,
+but I seemed unable to get wholly into it. Too many things assailed my
+mind for any one to hold exclusive possession, perhaps.
+
+Indeed, all the interpretations, all the "layers," to use my sister's
+phrase, slipped in by turns and lodged there for a time. They came day
+and night, and though my reason denied them entrance they held their own
+as by a kind of squatter's right. They stirred moods already in me, that
+is, and did not introduce entirely new ones; for every mind conceals
+ancestral deposits that have been cultivated in turn along the whole
+line of its descent. Any day a chance shower may cause this one or that
+to blossom. Thus it came to me, at any rate. After darkness the
+Inquisition paced the empty corridors and set up ghastly apparatus in
+the dismal halls; and once, in the library, there swept over me that
+easy and delicious conviction that by confessing my wickedness I could
+resume it later, since Confession is expression, and expression brings
+relief and leaves one ready to accumulate again. And in such mood I felt
+bitter and unforgiving towards all others who thought differently.
+Another time it was a Pagan thing that assaulted me--so trivial yet oh,
+so significant at the time--when I dreamed that a herd of centaurs
+rolled up with a great stamping of hoofs round the house to destroy it,
+and then woke to hear the horses tramping across the field below the
+lawns; they neighed ominously and their noisy panting was audible as if
+it were just outside my windows.
+
+But the tree episode, I think, was the most curious of all--except,
+perhaps, the incident with the children which I shall mention in a
+moment--for its closeness to reality was so unforgettable.
+
+Outside the east window of my room stood a giant wellingtonia on the
+lawn, its head rising level with the upper sash. It grew some twenty
+feet away, planted on the highest terrace, and I often saw it when
+closing my curtains for the night, noticing how it drew its heavy skirts
+about it, and how the light from other windows threw glimmering streaks
+and patches that turned it into the semblance of a towering, solemn
+image. It stood there then so strikingly, somehow like a great old-world
+idol, that it claimed attention. Its appearance was curiously
+formidable. Its branches rustled without visibly moving and it had a
+certain portentous, forbidding air, so grand and dark and monstrous in
+the night that I was always glad when my curtains shut it out. Yet, once
+in bed, I had never thought about it one way or the other, and by day
+had certainly never sought it out.
+
+One night, then, as I went to bed and closed this window against a
+cutting easterly wind, I saw--that there were two of these trees. A
+brother wellingtonia rose mysteriously beside it, equally huge, equally
+towering, equally monstrous. The menacing pair of them faced me there
+upon the lawn. But in this new arrival lay a strange suggestion that
+frightened me before I could argue it away. Exact counterpart of its
+giant companion, it revealed also that gross, odious quality that all my
+sister's paintings held. I got the odd impression that the rest of these
+trees, stretching away dimly in a troop over the farther lawns, were
+similar, and that, led by this enormous pair, they had all moved boldly
+closer to my windows. At the same moment a blind was drawn down over an
+upper room; the second tree disappeared into the surrounding darkness.
+
+It was, of course, this chance light that had brought it into the field
+of vision, but when the black shutter dropped over it, hiding it from
+view, the manner of its vanishing produced the queer effect that it had
+slipped into its companion--almost that it had been an emanation of the
+one I so disliked, and not really a tree at all! In this way the garden
+turned vehicle for expressing what lay behind it all ...!
+
+The behavior of the doors, the little, ordinary doors, seems scarcely
+worth mention at all, their queer way of opening and shutting of their
+own accord; for this was accountable in a hundred natural ways, and to
+tell the truth, I never caught one in the act of moving. Indeed, only
+after frequent repetitions did the detail force itself upon me, when,
+having noticed one, I noticed all. It produced, however, the unpleasant
+impression of a continual coming and going in the house, as though,
+screened cleverly and purposely from actual sight, some one in the
+building held constant invisible intercourse with--others.
+
+Upon detailed descriptions of these uncertain incidents I do not
+venture, individually so trivial, but taken all together so impressive
+and so insolent. But the episode of the children, mentioned above, was
+different. And I give it because it showed how vividly the intuitive
+child-mind received the impression--one impression, at any rate--of what
+was in the air. It may be told in a very few words. I believe they were
+the coachman's children, and that the man had been in Mr. Franklyn's
+service; but of neither point am I quite positive.
+
+I heard screaming in the rose-garden that runs along the stable walls--
+it was one afternoon not far from the tea-hour--and on hurrying up I
+found a little girl of nine or ten fastened with ropes to a rustic seat,
+and two other children--boys, one about twelve and one much younger--
+gathering sticks beneath the climbing rose trees. The girl was white and
+frightened, but the others were laughing and talking among themselves so
+busily while they picked that they did not notice my abrupt arrival.
+Some game, I understood, was in progress, but a game that had become too
+serious for the happiness of the prisoner, for there was a fear in the
+girl's eyes that was a very genuine fear indeed. I unfastened her at
+once; the ropes were so loosely and clumsily knotted that they had not
+hurt her skin; it was not that which made her pale. She collapsed a
+moment upon the bench, then picked up her tiny skirts and dived away at
+full speed into the safety of the stable-yard.
+
+There was no response to my brief comforting, but she ran as though for
+her life, and I divined that some horrid boys' cruelty had been afoot.
+It was probably mere thoughtlessness, as cruelty with children usually
+is, but something in me decided to discover exactly what it was.
+
+And the boys, not one whit alarmed at my intervention, merely laughed
+shyly when I explained that their prisoner had escaped, and told me
+frankly what their "gime" had been. There was no vestige of shame in
+them, nor any idea, of course, that they aped a monstrous reality.
+
+That it was mere pretence was neither here nor there. To them, though
+make-believe, it was a make-believe of something that was right and
+natural and in no sense cruel. Grown-ups did it too. It was necessary
+for her good.
+
+"We was going to burn her up, sir," the older one informed me, answering
+my "Why?" with the explanation, "Because she wouldn't believe what we
+wanted 'er to believe."
+
+And, game though it was, the feeling of reality about the little episode
+was so arresting, so terrific in some way, that only with difficulty did
+I confine my admonitions on this occasion to mere words. The boys slunk
+off, frightened in their turn, yet not, I felt, convinced that they had
+erred in principle. It was their inheritance. They had breathed it in
+with the atmosphere of their bringing-up. They would renew the salutary
+torture when they could--till she "believed" as they did.
+
+I went back into the house, afflicted with a passion of mingled pity and
+distress impossible to describe, yet on my short way across the garden
+was attacked by other moods in turn, each more real and bitter than its
+predecessor. I received the whole series, as it were, at once. I felt
+like a diver rising to the surface through layers of water at different
+temperatures, though here the natural order was reversed, and the cooler
+strata were uppermost, the heated ones below. Thus, I was caught by the
+goblin touch of the willows that fringed the field; by the sensuous
+curving of the twisted ash that formed a gateway to the little grove of
+sapling oaks where fauns and satyrs lurked to play in the moonlight
+before Pagan altars; and by the cloaking darkness, next, of the copse of
+stunted pines, close gathered each to each, where hooded figures stalked
+behind an awful cross. The episode with the children seemed to have
+opened me like a knife. The whole Place rushed at me.
+
+I suspect this synthesis of many moods produced in me that climax of
+loathing and disgust which made me feel the limit of bearable emotion
+had been reached, so that I made straight to find Frances in order to
+convince her that at any rate I must leave. For, although this was our
+last day in the house, and we had arranged to go next day, the dread was
+in me that she would still find some persuasive reason for staying on.
+And an unexpected incident then made my dread unnecessary. The front
+door was open and a cab stood in the drive; a tall, elderly man was
+gravely talking in the hall with the parlor maid we called the
+Grenadier. He held a piece of paper in his hand. "I have called to see
+the house," I heard him say, as I ran up the stairs to Frances, who was
+peering like an inquisitive child over the banisters....
+
+"Yes," she told me with a sigh, I know not whether of resignation or
+relief, "the house is to be let or sold. Mabel has decided. Some Society
+or other, I believe--"
+
+I was overjoyed: this made our leaving right and possible. "You never
+told me, Frances!"
+
+"Mabel only heard of it a few days ago. She told me herself this
+morning. It is a chance, she says. Alone she cannot get it 'straight'.
+
+"Defeat?" I asked, watching her closely.
+
+"She thinks she has found a way out. It's not a family, you see, it's a
+Society, a sort of Community--they go in for thought--"
+
+"A Community!" I gasped. "You mean religious?"
+
+She shook her head. "Not exactly," she said smiling, "but some kind of
+association of men and women who want a headquarters in the country--a
+place where they can write and meditate--think--mature their plans and
+all the rest--I don't know exactly what."
+
+"Utopian dreamers?" I asked, yet feeling an immense relief come over me
+as I heard. But I asked in ignorance, not cynically. Frances would know.
+She knew all this kind of thing.
+
+"No, not that exactly," she smiled. "Their teachings are grand and
+simple--old as the world too, really--the basis of every religion before
+men's minds perverted them with their manufactured creeds--"
+
+Footsteps on the stairs, and the sound of voices, interrupted our odd
+impromptu conversation, as the Grenadier came up, followed by the tall,
+grave gentleman who was being shown over the house. My sister drew me
+along the corridor towards her room, where she went in and closed the
+door behind me, yet not before I had stolen a good look at the caller--
+long enough, at least, for his face and general appearance to have made
+a definite impression on me. For something strong and peaceful emanated
+from his presence; he moved with such quiet dignity; the glance of his
+eyes was so steady and reassuring, that my mind labeled him instantly as
+a type of man one would turn to in an emergency and not be disappointed.
+I had seen him but for a passing moment, but I had seen him twice, and
+the way he walked down the passage, looking competently about him,
+conveyed the same impression as when I saw him standing at the door--
+fearless, tolerant, wise. "A sincere and kindly character," I judged
+instantly, "a man whom some big kind of love has trained in sweetness
+towards the world; no hate in him anywhere." A great deal, no doubt, to
+read in so brief a glance! Yet his voice confirmed my intuition, a deep
+and very gentle voice, great firmness in it too.
+
+"Have I become suddenly sensitive to people's atmospheres in this
+extraordinary fashion?" I asked myself, smiling, as I stood in the room
+and heard the door close behind me. "Have I developed some clairvoyant
+faculty here?" At any other time I should have mocked.
+
+And I sat down and faced my sister, feeling strangely comforted and at
+peace for the first time since I had stepped beneath The Towers' roof a
+month ago. Frances, I then saw, was smiling a little as she watched me.
+
+"You know him?" I asked.
+
+"You felt it too?" was her question in reply. "No," she added, "I don't
+know him--beyond the fact that he is a leader in the Movement and has
+devoted years and money to its objects. Mabel felt the same thing in him
+that you have felt--and jumped at it."
+
+"But you've seen him before?" I urged, for the certainty was in me that
+he was no stranger to her.
+
+She shook her head. "He called one day early this week, when you were
+out. Mabel saw him. I believe--" she hesitated a moment, as though
+expecting me to stop her with my usual impatience of such subjects--"I
+believe he has explained everything to her--the beliefs he embodies, she
+declares, are her salvation--might be, rather, if she could adopt them."
+
+"Conversion again!" For I remembered her riches, and how gladly a
+Society would gobble them.
+
+"The layers I told you about," she continued calmly, shrugging her
+shoulders slightly--"the deposits that are left behind by strong
+thinking and real belief--but especially by ugly, hateful belief,
+because, you see--unfortunately there's more vital passion in that
+sort--"
+
+"Frances, I don't understand a bit," I said out loud, but said it a
+little humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong upon
+me and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he had
+somehow introduced. The horrors had been so dreadful. My nerves,
+doubtless, were more than a little overstrained. Absurd as it must
+sound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confiding
+robins who believed in everybody and thought no evil! I laughed a moment
+at my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign of
+patience in me, continued more fluently.
+
+"Of course you don't understand, Bill? Why should you? You've never
+thought about such things. Needing no creed yourself, you think all
+creeds are rubbish."
+
+"I'm open to conviction--I'm tolerant," I interrupted.
+
+"You're as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice," she
+answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.
+
+"Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society's beliefs?" I asked,
+feeling no desire to argue, "and how are they going to prove your
+Mabel's salvation? Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate
+and ugliness?"
+
+"Certain hope and peace," she said, "that peace which is understanding,
+and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates
+them."
+
+"Toleration! The one word a religious man loathes above all others! His
+pet word is damnation--"
+
+"Tolerates them," she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion,
+"because it includes them all."
+
+"Fine, if true" I admitted, "very fine. But how, pray, does it include
+them all?"
+
+"Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, 'There is no
+religion higher than Truth,' and it has no single dogma of any kind.
+Above all," she went on, "because it claims that no individual can be
+'lost.' It teaches universal salvation. To damn outsiders is
+uncivilized, childish, impure. Some take longer than others--it's
+according to the way they think and live--but all find peace, through
+development, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it
+regards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation--"
+
+"Well, well," I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby horse too
+wildly, too roughly over me, "but what is the bearing of all this upon
+this dreadful place, and upon Mabel? I'll admit that there is this
+atmosphere--this--er--inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and
+that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I'm not too
+prejudiced to deny that, for I've felt it myself."
+
+To my relief she was brief. She made her statement, leaving me to take
+it or reject it as I would.
+
+"The thought and belief its former occupants--have left behind. For
+there has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare. The
+site on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that Early
+Britain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid--the Druid stones
+still lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexes
+behind the drive. The older building Sam Franklyn altered and
+practically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into a
+meeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, the
+house was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance or
+vision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it,
+Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable--so they all have left
+their--"
+
+"Even so," I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, "what of it?"
+
+"Simply this," said Frances with conviction, "that each in turn has left
+his layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because each
+believed intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt
+--the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere today, the
+kind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts,
+in a word. And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned
+with equally positive conviction the rest of the world. One and all
+preached that implicitly if not explicitly. It's the root of every
+creed. Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn."
+
+I listened in amazement that increased as she went on. Up to this point
+her explanation was so admirable. It was, indeed, a pretty study in
+psychology if it were true.
+
+"Then why does nothing ever happen?" I enquired mildly. "A place so
+thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!"
+
+"There lies the proof," she went on in a lowered voice, "the proof of
+the horror and the ugly reality. The thought and belief of each occupant
+in turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at the
+time. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again the
+moment there's an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negative
+state, believing nothing positive herself the place for the first time
+found itself free to reproduce its buried stores.
+
+"Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest--the most permanent and vital
+thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the
+world--broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back.
+Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. There
+results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of
+agonized, bitter warring to find safety, peace--salvation. The place is
+saturated by that appalling stream of thinking--the terror of the
+damned. It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnished
+the channel of deliverance. You and I, according to our sympathy with
+her, were similarly involved. Nothing happened, because no one layer
+could ever gain the supremacy."
+
+I was so interested--I dare not say amused--that I stared in silence
+while she paused a moment, afraid that she would draw rein and end the
+fairy tale too soon.
+
+"The beliefs of this man, of his Society rather, vigorously thought and
+therefore vigorously given out here, will put the whole place straight.
+It will act as a solvent. These vitriolic layers actively denied, will
+fuse and disappear in the stream of gentle, tolerant sympathy which is
+love. For each member, worthy of the name, loves the world, and all
+creeds go into the melting-pot; Mabel, too, if she joins them out of
+real conviction, will find salvation--"
+
+"Thinking, I know, is of the first importance," I objected, "but don't
+you, perhaps, exaggerate the power of feeling and emotion which in
+religion are au fond always hysterical?"
+
+"What is the world," she told me, "but thinking and feeling? An
+individual's world is entirely what that individual thinks and believes
+--interpretation. There is no other. And unless he really thinks and
+really believes, he has no permanent world at all. I grant that few
+people think, and still fewer believe, and that most take ready-made
+suits and make them do. Only the strong make their own things; the
+lesser fry, Mabel among them, are merely swept up into what has been
+manufactured for them. They get along somehow. You and I have made for
+ourselves, Mabel has not. She is a nonentity, and when her belief is
+taken from her, she goes with it."
+
+It was not in me just then to criticize the evasion, or pick out the
+sophistry from the truth. I merely waited for her to continue.
+
+"None of us have Truth, my dear Frances," I ventured presently, seeing
+that she kept silent.
+
+"Precisely," she answered, "but most of us have beliefs. And what one
+believes and thinks affects the world at large. Consider the legacy of
+hatred and cruelty involved in the doctrines men have built into their
+creeds where the sine qua non of salvation is absolute acceptance of one
+particular set of views or else perishing everlastingly--for only by
+repudiating history can they disavow it--"
+
+"You're not quite accurate," I put in. "Not all the creeds teach
+damnation, do they? Franklyn did, of course, but the others are a bit
+modernized now surely?"
+
+"Trying to get out of it," she admitted, "perhaps they are, but
+damnation of unbelievers--of most of the world, that is--is their rather
+favorite idea if you talk with them."
+
+"I never have."
+
+She smiled. "But I have," she said significantly, "so, if you consider
+what the various occupants of this house have so strongly held and
+thought and believed, you need not be surprised that the influence they
+have left behind them should be a dark and dreadful legacy. For thought,
+you know, does leave--"
+
+The opening of the door, to my great relief, interrupted her, as the
+Grenadier led in the visitor to see the room. He bowed to both of us
+with a brief word of apology, looked round him, and withdrew, and with
+his departure the conversation between us came naturally to an end. I
+followed him out. Neither of us in any case, I think, cared to argue
+further.
+
+And, so far as I am aware, the curious history of The Towers ends here
+too. There was no climax in the story sense. Nothing ever really
+happened. We left next morning for London. I only know that the Society
+in question took the house and have since occupied it to their entire
+satisfaction, and that Mabel, who became a member shortly afterwards,
+now stays there frequently when in need of repose from the arduous and
+unselfish labors she took upon herself under its aegis. She dined with
+us only the other night, here in our tiny Chelsea flat, and a jollier,
+saner, more interesting and happy guest I could hardly wish for. She was
+vital--in the best sense; the lay figure had come to life. I found it
+difficult to believe she was the same woman whose fearful effigy had
+floated down those dreary corridors and almost disappeared in the depths
+of that atrocious Shadow.
+
+What her beliefs were now I was wise enough to leave unquestioned, and
+Frances, to my great relief, kept the conversation well away from such
+inappropriate topics. It was clear, however, that the woman had in
+herself some secret source of joy, that she was now an aggressive,
+positive force, sure of herself, and apparently afraid of nothing in
+heaven or hell. She radiated something very like hope and courage about
+her, and talked as though the world were a glorious place and everybody
+in it kind and beautiful. Her optimism was certainly infectious.
+
+The Towers were mentioned only in passing. The name of Marsh came up--
+not the Marsh, it so happened, but a name in some book that was being
+discussed--and I was unable to restrain myself. Curiosity was too
+strong. I threw out a casual enquiry Mabel could leave unanswered if she
+wished. But there was no desire to avoid it. Her reply was frank and
+smiling.
+
+"Would you believe it? She married," Mabel told me, though obviously
+surprised that I remembered the housekeeper at all; "and is happy as the
+day is long. She's found her right niche in life. A sergeant--"
+
+"The army!" I ejaculated.
+
+"Salvation Army," she explained merrily.
+
+Frances exchanged a glance with me. I laughed too, for the information
+took me by surprise. I cannot say why exactly, but I expected at least
+to hear that the woman had met some dreadful end, not impossibly by
+burning.
+
+"And The Towers, now called the Rest House," Mabel chattered on, "seems
+to me the most peaceful and delightful spot in England--"
+
+"Really," I said politely.
+
+"When I lived there in the old days--while you were there, perhaps,
+though I won't be sure."
+
+Mabel went on, "the story got abroad that it was haunted. Wasn't it odd?
+A less likely place for a ghost I've never seen. Why, it had no
+atmosphere at all." She said this to Frances, glancing up at me with a
+smile that apparently had no hidden meaning. "Did you notice anything
+queer about it when you were there?"
+
+This was plainly addressed to me.
+
+"I found it--er--difficult to settle down to anything," I said, after an
+instant's hesitation. "I couldn't work there--"
+
+"But I thought you wrote that wonderful book on the Deaf and Blind while
+you stayed with me," she asked innocently.
+
+I stammered a little. "Oh no, not then. I only made a few notes--er--at
+The Towers. My mind, oddly enough, refused to produce at all down there.
+But--why do you ask? Did anything--was anything supposed to happen
+there?"
+
+She looked searchingly into my eyes a moment before she answered:
+
+"Not that I know of," she said simply.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Damned, by Algernon Blackwood
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