The
sunlight caught her face, framed untidily in its auburn hair, and I saw
her wonderful expression with a start. Pity, tenderness, and sympathy
shone in it like a flame. It was undeniable. There shone through all her
features the imperishable love and yearning to sacrifice self for others
which I have seen in only one type of human being. It was the great
mother look. "We must stay by Mabel and help her get it straight," she whispered,
making the decision for us both. I murmured agreement. Abashed and half ashamed, I stole softly from the
room and went out into the grounds. And the first thing clearly realized
when alone was this: that the long scene between us was without definite
result. The exchange of confidence was really nothing but hints and
vague suggestion. We had decided to stay, but it was a negative decision
not to leave rather than a positive action. All our words and questions,
our guesses, inferences, explanations, our most subtle allusions and
insinuations, even the odious paintings themselves, were without
definite result. Nothing had happened. Chapter 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 color and grouping
had unconsciously revealed. At first, that is, I discovered nothing. The
reality stood there, commonplace and ugly, side by side with her
distorted version of it that lay in my mind. It seemed incredible. I
tried to force it, but in vain. My imagination, ploughed less deeply
than hers, or to another pattern, grew different seed. Where I saw the
gross soul of an overgrown suburban garden, inspired by the spirit of a
vulgar, rich revivalist who loved to preach damnation, she saw this rush
of pagan liberty and joy, this strange license of primitive flesh which,
tainted by the other, produced the adulterated, vile result. Certain things, however, gradually then became apparent, forcing
themselves upon me, willy-nilly. They came slowly, but overwhelmingly. Not that facts had changed, or natural details altered in the grounds--
this was impossible--but that I noticed for the first time various
aspects I had not noticed before--trivial enough, yet for me, just then,
significant. Some I remembered from previous days; others I saw now as I
wandered to and fro, uneasy, uncomfortable,--almost, it seemed, watched
by some one who took note of my impressions. The details were so
foolish, the total result so formidable. I was half aware that others
tried hard to make me see. It was deliberate. My sister's phrase, "one layer got at me, another gets at you," flashed,
undesired, upon me. For I saw, as with the eyes of a child, what I can only call a goblin
garden--house, grounds, trees, and flowers belonged to a goblin world
that children enter through the pages of their fairy tales. And what
made me first aware of it was the whisper of the wind behind me, so that
I turned with a sudden start, feeling that something had moved closer. An old ash tree, ugly and ungainly, had been artificially trained to
form an arbor at one end of the terrace that was a tennis lawn, and the
leaves of it now went rustling together, swishing as they rose and fell. I looked at the ash tree, and felt as though I had passed that moment
between doors into this goblin garden that crouched behind the real one. Below, at a deeper layer perhaps, lay hidden the one my sister had
entered. To deal with my own, however, I call it goblin, because an odd aspect of
the quaint in it yet never quite achieved the picturesque. Grotesque,
probably, is the truer word, for everywhere I noticed, and for the first
time, this slight alteration of the natural due either to the
exaggeration of some detail, or to its suppression, generally, I think,
to the latter. Life everywhere appeared to me as blocked from the full
delivery of its sweet and lovely message. Some counter influence stopped
it--suppression; or sent it awry--exaggeration. The house itself, mere
expression, of course, of a narrow, limited mind, was sheer ugliness; it
required no further explanation. With the grounds and garden, so far as
shape and general plan were concerned, this was also true; but that
trees and flowers and other natural details should share the same
deficiency perplexed my logical soul, and even dismayed it. I stood and
stared, then moved about, and stood and stared again. Everywhere was
this mockery of a sinister, unfinished aspect. I sought in vain to
recover my normal point of view. My mind had found this goblin garden
and wandered to and fro in it, unable to escape. The change was in myself, of course, and so trivial were the details
which illustrated it, that they sound absurd, thus mentioned one by one. For me, they proved it, is all I can affirm. The goblin touch lay
plainly everywhere: in the forms of the trees, planted at neat intervals
along the lawns; in this twisted ash that rustled just behind me; in the
shadow of the gloomy wellingtonias, whose sweeping skirts obscured the
grass; but especially, I noticed, in the tops and crests of them. For
here, the delicate, graceful curves of last year's growth seemed to
shrink back into themselves. None of them pointed upwards. Their life
had failed and turned aside just when it should have become triumphant. The character of a tree reveals itself chiefly at the extremities, and
it was precisely here that they all drooped and achieved this hint of
goblin distortion--in the growth, that is, of the last few years. What
ought to have been fairy, joyful, natural, was instead uncomely to the
verge of the grotesque. Spontaneous expression was arrested. My mind
perceived a goblin garden, and was caught in it. The place grimaced at
me. With the flowers it was similar, though far more difficult to detect in
detail for description. I saw the smaller vegetable growth as impish,
half-malicious. Even the terraces sloped ill, as though their ends had
sagged since they had been so lavishly constructed; their varying angles
gave a queerly bewildering aspect to their sequence that was unpleasant
to the eye. One might wander among their deceptive lengths and get lost
--lost among open terraces!--with the house quite close at hand. Unhomely
seemed the entire garden, unable to give repose, restlessness in it
everywhere, almost strife, and discord certainly.