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 arm-chair, but

a good solid writing-table that does not wriggle, and that has wide

elbow-room. 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 arm-chair department of a big shop. My

bedroom was easily managed; it was the private work-room, prepared

especially for my reception, that made me feel alien and outcast.

Externally, it was all one could desire: an ante-chamber 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 pot-boiling 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 ante-chamber. 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 note-books 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 for ever 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 fervour 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 realise 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 that 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 emphasised 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 realised 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 ante-chamber 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.

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 visitors called. For

one thing, she was not supposed to be back from abroad yet; and for

another, I think, the neighbourhood--her husband’s neighbourhood--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 for ever--live there. She would prevent her escape,

prevent her ‘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 ante-chamber, 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 brain

work 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

realised 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, gaolers. ‘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 that

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 new-born

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 colour came and went a moment

in her 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 realised 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.’