Chapter VI
And instinctively, once alone, I made for the places where she hadpainted her extraordinary pictures; I tried to see what she had seen.Perhaps, now that she had opened my mind to another view, I should besensitive to some similar interpretation--and possibly by way ofliterary expression. If I were to write about the place, I asked myself,how should I treat it? I deliberately invited an interpretation in theway that came easiest to me--writing.
But in this case there came no such revelation. Looking closely at thetrees and flowers, the bits of lawn and terrace, the rose-garden andcorner of the house where the flaming creeper hung so thickly, Idiscovered nothing of the odious, unpure thing her color and groupinghad unconsciously revealed. At first, that is, I discovered nothing. Thereality stood there, commonplace and ugly, side by side with herdistorted version of it that lay in my mind. It seemed incredible. Itried to force it, but in vain. My imagination, ploughed less deeplythan hers, or to another pattern, grew different seed. Where I saw thegross soul of an overgrown suburban garden, inspired by the spirit of avulgar, rich revivalist who loved to preach damnation, she saw this rushof 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, forcingthemselves 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 variousaspects I had not noticed before--trivial enough, yet for me, just then,significant. Some I remembered from previous days; others I saw now as Iwandered to and fro, uneasy, uncomfortable,--almost, it seemed, watchedby some one who took note of my impressions. The details were sofoolish, the total result so formidable. I was half aware that otherstried 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 goblingarden--house, grounds, trees, and flowers belonged to a goblin worldthat children enter through the pages of their fairy tales. And whatmade me first aware of it was the whisper of the wind behind me, so thatI turned with a sudden start, feeling that something had moved closer.An old ash tree, ugly and ungainly, had been artificially trained toform an arbor at one end of the terrace that was a tennis lawn, and theleaves 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 momentbetween doors into this goblin garden that crouched behind the real one.Below, at a deeper layer perhaps, lay hidden the one my sister hadentered.
To deal with my own, however, I call it goblin, because an odd aspect ofthe quaint in it yet never quite achieved the picturesque. Grotesque,probably, is the truer word, for everywhere I noticed, and for the firsttime, this slight alteration of the natural due either to theexaggeration of some detail, or to its suppression, generally, I think,to the latter. Life everywhere appeared to me as blocked from the fulldelivery of its sweet and lovely message. Some counter influence stoppedit--suppression; or sent it awry--exaggeration. The house itself, mereexpression, of course, of a narrow, limited mind, was sheer ugliness; itrequired no further explanation. With the grounds and garden, so far asshape and general plan were concerned, this was also true; but thattrees and flowers and other natural details should share the samedeficiency perplexed my logical soul, and even dismayed it. I stood andstared, then moved about, and stood and stared again. Everywhere wasthis mockery of a sinister, unfinished aspect. I sought in vain torecover my normal point of view. My mind had found this goblin gardenand wandered to and fro in it, unable to escape.
The change was in myself, of course, and so trivial were the detailswhich illustrated it, that they sound absurd, thus mentioned one by one.For me, they proved it, is all I can affirm. The goblin touch layplainly everywhere: in the forms of the trees, planted at neat intervalsalong the lawns; in this twisted ash that rustled just behind me; in theshadow of the gloomy wellingtonias, whose sweeping skirts obscured thegrass; but especially, I noticed, in the tops and crests of them. Forhere, the delicate, graceful curves of last year's growth seemed toshrink back into themselves. None of them pointed upwards. Their lifehad failed and turned aside just when it should have become triumphant.The character of a tree reveals itself chiefly at the extremities, andit was precisely here that they all drooped and achieved this hint ofgoblin distortion--in the growth, that is, of the last few years. Whatought to have been fairy, joyful, natural, was instead uncomely to theverge of the grotesque. Spontaneous expression was arrested. My mindperceived a goblin garden, and was caught in it. The place grimaced atme.
With the flowers it was similar, though far more difficult to detect indetail for description. I saw the smaller vegetable growth as impish,half-malicious. Even the terraces sloped ill, as though their ends hadsagged since they had been so lavishly constructed; their varying anglesgave a queerly bewildering aspect to their sequence that was unpleasantto the eye. One might wander among their deceptive lengths and get lost--lost among open terraces!--with the house quite close at hand. Unhomelyseemed the entire garden, unable to give repose, restlessness in iteverywhere, almost strife, and discord certainly.
Moreover, the garden grew into the house, the house into the garden, andin both was this idea of resistance to the natural--the spirit that saysNo 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 expressionthat should be happy and natural, yet the effort forever frustrated bythe weight of this dark shadow that rendered it abortive. Life crawledaside into a channel that was a cul-de-sac, then turned horribly uponitself. Instead of blossom and fruit, there were weeds. This approach oflife 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 understandthe unpure thing that had stammered out into expression through mysister's talent. For the unpure is merely negative; it has no existence;it is but the cramped expression of what is true, stammering its waybrokenly over false boundaries that seek to limit and confine. Great,full expression of anything is pure, whereas here was only theincomplete, unfinished, and therefore ugly. There was a strife and painand desire to escape. I found myself shrinking from house and grounds asone shrinks from the touch of the mentally arrested, those in whom lifehas 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 remembereddays of rain that refreshed the countryside, but left these grounds,cracked with the summer heat, unsatisfied and thirsty; and how the bigwinds, that cleaned the woods and fields elsewhere, crawled here withdifficulty through the dense foliage that protected The Towers from theNorth and West and East. They were ineffective, sluggish currents. Therewas no real wind. Nothing happened. I began to realize--far more clearlythan in my sister's fanciful explanation about "layers"--that here weremany contrary influences at work, mutually destructive of one another.House and grounds were not haunted merely; they were the arena of pastthinking and feeling, perhaps of terrible, impure beliefs, each strivingto suppress the others, yet no one of them achieving supremacy becauseno 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 mymind at all. For some obscure reason--possibly because my temperamenthad a natural bias towards the grotesque--it was the goblin layer. Withme, it was the line of least resistance....
In my own thoughts this "goblin garden" revealed, of course, merely mypersonal interpretation. I felt now objectively what long ago my mindhad felt subjectively. My work, essential sign of spontaneous life withme, had stopped dead; production had become impossible.
I stood now considerably closer to the cause of this sterility. TheCause, rather, turned bolder, had stepped insolently nearer. Nothinghappene
d anywhere; house, garden, mind alike were barren, abortive, tornby the strife of frustrate impulse, ugly, hateful, sinful. Yet behind itall was still the desire of life--desire to escape--accomplish. Hope--anintolerable hope--I became startlingly aware--crowned torture.
And, realizing this, though in some part of me where Reason lost herhold, there rose upon me then another and a darker thing that caught meby the throat and made me shrink with a sense of revulsion that touchedactual loathing. I knew instantly whence it came, this wave ofabhorrence and disgust, for even while I saw red and felt revolt rise inme, it seemed that I grew partially aware of the layer next below thegoblin. I perceived the existence of this deeper stratum. One opened theway for the other, as it were. There were so many, yet allinter-related; to admit one was to clear the way for all. If I lingeredI should be caught--horribly. They struggled with such violence forsupremacy among themselves, however, that this latest uprising wasinstantly smothered and crushed back, though not before a glimpse hadbeen revealed to me, and the redness in my thoughts transferred itselfto color my surroundings thickly and appallingly--with blood. This luridaspect drenched the garden, smeared the terraces, lent to the very soila tinge as of sacrificial rites, that choked the breath in me, while itseemed to fix me to the earth my feet so longed to leave. It was sorevolting that at the same time I felt a dreadful curiosity as offascination--I wished to stay. Between these contrary impulses I think Iactually reeled a moment, transfixed by a fascination of the Awful.Through the lighter goblin veil I felt myself sinking down, down, downinto this turgid layer that was so much more violent and so much moreancient. The upper layer, indeed, seemed fairy by comparison with thisterror born of the lust for blood, thick with the anguish of humansacrificial victims.
Upper! Then I was already sinking; my feet were caught; I was actuallyin it! What atavistic strain, hidden deep within me, had been touchedinto vile response, giving this flash of intuitive comprehension, Icannot say. The coatings laid on by civilization are probably thinenough in all of us. I made a supreme effort. The sun and wind cameback. I could almost swear I opened my eyes. Something very atrocioussurged back into the depths, carrying with it a thought of tangledwoods, of big stones standing in a circle, motionless, white figures,the one form bound with ropes, and the ghastly gleam of the knife. Likesmoke upon a battlefield, it rolled away....
I was standing on the gravel path below the second terrace when thefamiliar goblin garden danced back again, doubly grotesque now, doublymocking, yet, by way of contrast, almost welcome. My glimpse into thedepths was momentary, it seems, and had passed utterly away.
The common world rushed back with a sense of glad relief, yet ominousnow 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 orplaying field, even indeed in church--how could the memory of what I hadseen 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 soundthat I recognized for the first time in my life as wholly desirable. Thereturning motor meant that my hostess was back.
Yet, so urgent had been my temporary obsession, that my firstpresentation of her was--well, not as I knew her now. Floating alongwith a face of anguished torture I saw Mabel, a mere effigy captured byothers' thinking, pass down into those depths of fire and blood thatonly just had closed beneath my feet. She dipped away. She vanished, herfading 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 thefall of dusk, and the ghost of slanting sunshine was as unreal as thoughbadly painted. The garden stood at attention all about me. I cannotexplain it, but I can tell it, I think, exactly as it happened, for itremains vivid in me forever--that, for the first time, something almosthappened, myself apparently the combining link through which it pressedtowards delivery:
I had already turned towards the house. In my mind were pictures--notactual thoughts--of the motor, tea on the verandah, my sister, Mabel--when there came behind me this tumultuous, awful rush--as I left thegarden. The ugliness, the pain, the striving to escape, the wholenegative and suppressed agony that was the Place, focused that secondinto a concentrated effort to produce a result. It was a blindingtempest of long-frustrate desire that heaved at me, surging appallinglybehind me like an anguished mob. I was in the act of crossing thefrontier into my normal self again, when it came, catching fearfully atmy skirts. I might use an entire dictionary of descriptive adjectivesyet come no nearer to it than this--the conception of a huge assemblagedetermined to escape with me, or to snatch me back among themselves. Mylegs trembled for an instant, and I caught my breath--then turned andran as fast as possible up the ugly terraces.
At the same instant, as though the clanging of an iron gate cut shortthe 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 tokeep me:
"The Damned!"
For there was sound in it. I know full well it was subjective, notactually heard at all; yet somehow sound was in it--a great volume,roaring and booming thunderously, far away, and below me. The sentencedipped back into the depths that gave it birth, unfinished. Itscompletion was prevented. As usual, nothing happened. But it drovebehind me like a hurricane as I ran towards the house, and the sound ofit I can only liken to those terrible undertones you may hear standingbeside Niagara. They lie behind the mere crash of the falling flood,within it somehow, not audible to all--felt rather than definitelyheard.
It seemed to echo back from the surface of those sagging terraces as Iflew across their sloping ends, for it was somehow underneath them. Itwas in the rustle of the wind that stirred the skirts of the droopingwellingtonias. The beds of formal flowers passed it on to the creepers,red as blood, that crept over the unsightly building. Into the structureof the vulgar and forbidding house it sank away; The Towers took ithome. The uncomely doors and windows seemed almost like mouths that haduttered the words themselves, and on the upper floors at that verymoment 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. Inthe faces of both were clearly legible the signs of shock. They watchedme coming, yet so full of their own distress that they hardly noticedthe state in which I came. In the face of my hostess, however, I readanother and a bigger thing than in the face of Frances. Mabel knew. Shehad experienced what I had experienced. She had heard that awfulsentence 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 itsharply before I could say a word. Her manner was confused; she lookedstraight 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 thewalls. It's risen rather suddenly." My voice faltered rather.
"No. It wasn't wind," she insisted, with a significance meant for mealone, 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 alreadyheard the sound before and were anxious to know if I had heard it, andhow. My interpretation was what they sought.
"It was a curiously deep sound, I admit. It may have been big guns atsea," I suggested, "forts or cruisers practicing. The coast isn't sovery 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 getout." The gravity, t
he note of hopelessness in her tones, was shocking.
Frances had gone into the house the instant Mabel began to speak. "I'mcold," 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 Iarrived. 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 thepresent tense.
She changed her stare from one eye to the other; it was absolutelyexpressionless. My sister's step sounded on the floor of the room behindus.
"If only--" Mabel began, then stopped, and my own feelings leaping outinstinctively completed the sentence I felt was in her mind:
"--something would happen."
She instantly corrected me. I had caught her thought, yet somehowphrased 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 mannerstruck me utterly dumb. There was ice and terror in it. It was a dyingwoman speaking--a lost and hopeless soul.
In that atrocious moment I hardly noticed what was said exactly, but Iremember 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 matchto the logs in the great open fireplace. It was, after all, foolish torisk the sharp evening air, for dusk was falling steadily, and even thesunshine of the day just fading could not turn autumn into summer. I wasthe last to come in. Just as I left the verandah a large black birdswooped down in front of me past the pillars; it dropped from overhead,swerved abruptly to one side as it caught sight of me, and flappedheavily towards the shrubberies on the left of the terraces, where itdisappeared into the gloom. It flew very low, very close. And itstartled me, I think because in some way it seemed like my Shadowmaterialized--as though the dark horror that was rising everywhere fromhouse and garden, then settling back so thickly yet so imperceptiblyupon us all, were incarnated in that whirring creature that passedbetween the daylight and the coming night.
I stood a moment, wondering if it would appear again, before I followedthe others indoors, and as I was in the act of closing the windows afterme, I caught a glimpse of a figure on the lawn. It was some distanceaway, on the other side of the shrubberies, in fact where the bird hadvanished. But in spite of the twilight that half magnified, halfobscured it, the identity was unmistakable. I knew the housekeeper'sstiff walk too well to be deceived. "Mrs. Marsh taking the air," I saidto myself. I felt the necessity of saying it, and I wondered why she wasdoing so at this particular hour. If I had other thoughts they were sovague, and so quickly and utterly suppressed, that I cannot recall themsufficiently to relate them here.
And, once indoors, it was to be expected that there would comeexplanation, discussion, conversation, at any rate, regarding thesingular noise and its cause, some uttered evidence of the mood that hadbeen strong enough to drive us all inside. Yet there was none. Each ofus purposely, and with various skill, ignored it. We talked little, andwhen we did it was of anything in the world but that. Personally, Iexperienced a touch of that same bewilderment which had come over meduring my first talk with Frances on the evening of my arrival, for Irecall now the acute tension, and the hope, yet dread, that one or otherof us must sooner or later introduce the subject. It did not happen,however; no reference was made to it even remotely. It was the presenceof Mabel, I felt positive, that prohibited. As soon might we havediscussed Death in the bedroom of a dying woman.
The only scrap of conversation I remember, where all was ordinary andcommonplace, was when Mabel spoke casually to the grenadier asking whyMrs. 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 Iscarcely know what prompted the words, whether she had injured herselfseverely, and the reply, "She upset a lamp and burnt herself," was saidin a tone that made me feel my curiosity was indiscreet, "but she alwayshas an excuse for not doing things she ought to do." The little bit ofconversation remained with me, and I remember particularly the quick wayFrances interrupted and turned the talk upon the delinquencies ofservants in general, telling incidents of her own at our flat with avolubility that perhaps seemed forced, and that certainly did notencourage general talk as it may have been intended to do. We lapsedinto silence immediately she finished.
But for all our care and all our calculated silence, each knew thatsomething had, in these last moments, come very close; it had brushed usin passing; it had retired; and I am inclined to think now that thelarge dark thing I saw, riding the dusk, probably bird of prey, was insome sense a symbol of it in my mind--that actually there had been nobird at all, I mean, but that my mood of apprehension and dismay hadformed the vivid picture in my thoughts. It had swept past us, it hadretreated, but it was now, at this moment, in hiding very close. And itwas watching us.
Perhaps, too, it was mere coincidence that I encountered Mrs. Marsh, hishousekeeper, several times that evening in the short interval betweentea 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 thetelephone, I ran into her just where the passage is somewhat jammed by asquare table carrying the Chinese gong, a grandfather's clock and a boxof croquet mallets. We both gave way, then both advanced, then againgave way--simultaneously. It seemed, impossible to pass. We stepped withdecision to the same side, finally colliding in the middle, while sayingthose futile little things, half apology, half excuse, that areinevitable at such times. In the end she stood upright against the wallfor 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 shesidled off, murmuring apologies, but opening the door for me while shedid so. Our hands met a moment on the handle.
There was a second's awkwardness--it was too stupid. I remembered herinjury, and by way of something to say, I enquired after it. She thankedme; it was entirely healed now, but it might have been much worse; andthere was something about the "mercy of the Lord" that I didn't quitecatch. While telephoning, however--London call, and my attention focusedon it--realized sharply that this was the first time I had spoken withher; also, that I had--touched her.
It happened to be a Sunday, and the lines were clear. I got myconnection quickly, and the incident was forgotten while my thoughtswent up to London. On my way upstairs, then, the woman came back into mymind, so that I recalled other things about her--how she seemed all overthe house, in unlikely places often; how I had caught her sitting in thehall alone that night; how she was forever coming and going with herlugubrious visage and that untidy hair at the back that had made melaugh three years ago with the idea that it looked singed or burnt; andhow the impression on my first arrival at The Towers was that this womansomehow kept alive, though its evidence was outwardly suppressed, theinfluence of her late employer and of his somber teachings. Somewherewith her was associated the idea of punishment, vindictiveness, revenge.I remembered again suddenly my odd notion that she sought to keep herpresent mistress here, a prisoner in this bleak and comfortless house,and that really, in spite of her obsequious silence, she was intenselyopposed to the change of thought that had reclaimed Mabel to a happierview of life.
All this in a passing second flashed in review before me, and Idiscovered, or at any rate reconstructed, the real Mrs. Marsh. She wasdecidedly in the Shadow. More, she stood in the forefront of it,stealthily leading an assault, as it were, against The Towers and itsoccupants, as though, consciously or unconsciously, she laboredincessantly to this hateful end.
I can only judge that some state of nervousness in me permitted theseries of insignificant thoughts to assume this dramatic shape, and thatwhat had gone before prepared the way and led
her up at the head of soformidable a procession. I relate it exactly as it came to me. My nerveswere doubtless somewhat on edge by now. Otherwise I should hardly havebeen a prey to the exaggeration at all. I seemed open to so manystrange, impressions.
Nothing else, perhaps, can explain my ridiculous conversation with her,when, for the third time that evening, I came suddenly upon the womanhalf-way down the stairs, standing by an open window as if in the act oflistening. She was dressed in black, a black shawl over her squareshoulders and black gloves on her big, broad hands. Two black objects,prayer books apparently, she clasped, and on her head she wore a bonnetwith shaking beads of jet. At first I did not know her, as I camerunning down upon her from the landing; it was only when she stood asideto let me pass that I saw her profile against the tapestry andrecognized Mrs. Marsh. And to catch her on the front stairs, dressedlike this, struck me as incongruous--impertinent. I paused in mydangerous descent. Through the opened window came the sound of bells--church bells--a sound more depressing to me than superstition, and asnauseating. Though the action was ill judged, I obeyed the suddenprompting--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 thatmoved its lips and turned its eyes, but made no other imitation of lifeat all.
"Some of us still goes, sir," she said unctuously.
It was respectful enough, yet the implied judgment of the rest of theworld made me almost angry. A deferential insolence lay behind theaffected meekness.
"For those who believe no doubt it is helpful," I smiled. "True religionbrings peace and happiness, I'm sure--joy, Mrs. Marsh, joy!" I foundkeen satisfaction in the emphasis.
She looked at me like a knife. I cannot describe the implacable thingthat shone in her fixed, stern eyes, nor the shadow of felt darknessthat 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 inchurch 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 waslike the gloom about a hearse, a tomb, a darkness of great hopelessdungeons. 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 Godcould ever have devised such a fearful plan--"
Her voice, interrupting me, seemed to rise out of the bowels of theearth:
"They rejected the salvation when it was offered to them, sir, onearth."
"But you wouldn't have them tortured forever because of one mistake inignorance," I said, fixing her with my eye. "Come now, would you, Mrs.Marsh? No God worth worshipping could permit such cruelty. Think amoment what it means."
She stared at me, a curious expression in her stupid eyes. It seemed tome as though the "woman" in her revolted, while yet she dared not sufferher grim belief to trip. That is, she would willingly have had itotherwise but for a terror that prevented.
"We may pray for them, sir, and we do--we may 'ope." She dropped hereyes 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 salvationnot being forever," as I tried to pass her. Then a half gesture that shemade stopped me. There was something more she wished to say--to ask. Shelooked up furtively. In her eyes I saw the "woman" peering out throughfear.
"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. "Ofcourse," I exclaimed, "of course. For God is love, remember, and lovemeans charity, tolerance, sympathy, and sparing others pain," and Ihurried past her, determined to end the outrageous conversation forwhich yet I knew myself entirely to blame. Behind me, she stoodstock-still for several minutes, half bewildered, half alarmed, as Isuspected. I caught the fragment of another sentence, one word of it,rather--"punishment"--but the rest escaped me. Her arrogance andcondescending tolerance exasperated me, while I was at the same timesecretly pleased that I might have touched some string of remorse orsympathy 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 Ishould be tempted to say more, and in me was a disagreeable sensation asthough I had just left the Incurable Ward of some great hospital. Areaction caught me as of nausea. Ugh! I wanted such people cleansed byfire. They seemed to me as centers of contamination whose viciousthoughts flowed out to stain God's glorious world. I saw myself,Frances, Mabel too especially, on the rack, while that odious figure ofcruelty and darkness stood over us and ordered the awful handles turnedin order that we might be "saved"--forced, that is, to think and believeexactly as she thought and believed.
I found relief for my somewhat childish indignation by letting myselfloose upon the organ then. The flood of Bach and Beethoven brought backthe sense of proportion. It proved, however, at the same time that therehad been this growth of distortion in me, and that it had been providedapparently by my closer contact--for the first time--with that funerealpersonality, the woman who, like her master, believed that all holdingviews of God that differed from her own, must be damned eternally. Itgave me, moreover, some faint clue perhaps, though a clue I was unequalof following up, to the nature of the strife and terror and frustrateinfluence in the house. That housekeeper had to do with it. She kept italive. Her thought was like a spell she waved above her mistress's head.