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 forever 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 fulfillment. 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 a 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 realize--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, realizing 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 color 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 civilization 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 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 or
playing field, even indeed in church--how could the memory of what I had
seen 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 sound
that I recognized 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 savior who had failed her.