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.