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 colour 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 licence 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 arbour 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

for ever 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 fulfilment. 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 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 realise--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, realising 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 colour 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 civilisation 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

for ever, I felt, for the knowledge of what its past had built upon.

In street, in theatre, 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 not 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 recognised 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 saviour 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 for ever--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 practising. 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 colourless voice,

‘enormous metal doors shutting against a mass of people clamouring

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

materialised--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 so 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--a London call, and my attention focused on it--I

realised 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 for ever 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 sombre

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 laboured

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 recognised 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 hoffered to them, sir, on

earth.’

‘But you wouldn’t have them tortured for ever 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 for ever,’ 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 centres 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 to 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.