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
antechamber. 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 notebooks 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 forever
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
fervor 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 realize
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. 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 emphasized 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."