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.