The feeling of ‘unsettling’ was very strong in me just then, in spite of my big discovery which was to clear everything up. And at that moment I ran into Frances on the stairs, with a portfolio of sketches under her arm.
It came across me then abruptly that, although she had worked a great deal since we came, she had shown me nothing. It struck me suddenly as odd, unnatural. The way she tried to pass me now confirmed my new-born suspicion that — well, that her results were hardly what they ought to be.
‘Stand and deliver!’ I laughed, stepping in front of her. ‘I’ve seen nothing you’ve done since you’ve been here, and as a rule you show me all your things. I believe they are atrocious and degrading!’ Then my laughter froze.
She made a sly gesture to slip past me, and I almost decided to let her go, for the expression that flashed across her face shocked me. She looked uncomfortable and ashamed; the colour came and went a moment in her cheeks, making me think of a child detected in some secret naughtiness. It was almost fear.
‘It’s because they’re not finished then?’ I said, dropping the tone of banter, ‘or because they’re too good for me to understand?’ For my criticism of painting, she told me, was crude and ignorant sometimes. ‘But you’ll let me see them later, won’t you?’
Frances, however, did not take the way of escape I offered. She changed her mind. She drew the portfolio from beneath her arm instead. ‘You can see them if you really want to, Bill,’ she said quietly, and her tone reminded me of a nurse who says to a boy just grown out of childhood, ‘you are old enough now to look upon horror and ugliness — only I don’t advise it.’
‘I do want to,’ I said, and made to go downstairs with her. But, instead, she said in the same low voice as before, ‘Come up to my room, we shall be undisturbed there.’ So I guessed that she had been on her way to show the paintings to our hostess, but did not care for us all three to see them together. My mind worked furiously.
‘Mabel asked me to do them,’ she explained in a tone of submissive horror, once the door was shut, ‘in fact, she begged it of me. You know how persistent she is in her quiet way. I — er — had to.’
She flushed and opened the portfolio on the little table by the window, standing behind me as I turned the sketches over — sketches of the grounds and trees and garden. In the first moment of inspection, however, I did not take in clearly why my sister’s sense of modesty had been offended. For my attention flashed a second elsewhere. Another bit of the puzzle had dropped into place, defining still further the nature of what I called ‘the Shadow.’ Mrs. Franklyn, I now remembered, had suggested to me in the library that I might perhaps write something about the place, and I had taken it for one of her banal sentences and paid no further attention. I realised now that it was said in earnest. She wanted our interpretations, as expressed in our respective ‘talents,’ painting and writing. Her invitation was explained. She left us to ourselves on purpose.
‘I should like to tear them up,’ Frances was whispering behind me with a shudder, ‘only I promised — —’ She hesitated a moment.
‘Promised not to?’ I asked with a queer feeling of distress, my eyes glued to the papers.
‘Promised always to show them to her first,’ she finished so low I barely caught it.
I have no intuitive, immediate grasp of the value of paintings; results come to me slowly, and though every one believes his own judgment to be good, I dare not claim that mine is worth more than that of any other layman. Frances had too often convicted me of gross ignorance and error. I can only say that I examined these sketches with a feeling of amazement that contained revulsion, if not actually horror and disgust. They were outrageous. I felt hot for my sister, and it was a relief to know she had moved across the room on some pretence or other, and did not examine them with me. Her talent, of course, is mediocre, yet she has her moments of inspiration — moments, that is to say, when a view of Beauty not normally her own flames divinely through her. And these interpretations struck me forcibly as being thus ‘inspired’ — not her own. They were uncommonly well done; they were also atrocious. The meaning in them, however, was never more than hinted. There the unholy skill and power came in: they suggested so abominably, leaving most to the imagination. To find such significance in a bourgeois villa garden, and to interpret it with such delicate yet legible certainty, was a kind of symbolism that was sinister, even diabolical. The delicacy was her own, but the point of view was another’s. And the word that rose in my mind was not the gross description of ‘impure,’ but the more fundamental qualification— ‘un-pure.’
In silence I turned the sketches over one by one, as a boy hurries through the pages of an evil book lest he be caught.
‘What does Mabel do with them?’ I asked presently in a low tone, as I neared the end. ‘Does she keep them?’
‘She makes notes about them in a book and then destroys them,’ was the reply from the end of the room. I heard a sigh of relief. ‘I’m glad you’ve seen them, Bill. I wanted you to — but was afraid to show them. You understand?’
‘I understand,’ was my reply, though it was not a question intended to be answered. All I understood really was that Mabel’s mind was as sweet and pure as my sister’s, and that she had some good reason for what she did. She destroyed the sketches, but first made notes! It was an interpretation of the place she sought. Brother-like, I felt resentment, though, that Frances should waste her time and talent, when she might be doing work that she could sell. Naturally, I felt other things as well....
‘Mabel pays me five guineas for each one,’ I heard. ‘Absolutely insists.’
I stared at her stupidly a moment, bereft of speech or wit.
‘I must either accept, or go away,’ she went on calmly, but a little white. ‘I’ve tried everything. There was a scene the third day I was here — when I showed her my first result. I wanted to write to you, but hesitated — —’
‘It’s unintentional, then, on your part — forgive my asking it, Frances, dear?’ I blundered, hardly knowing what to think or say. ‘Between the lines’ of her letter came back to me. ‘I mean, you make the sketches in your ordinary way and — the result comes out of itself, so to speak?’
She nodded, throwing her hands out like a Frenchman. ‘We needn’t keep the money for ourselves, Bill. We can give it away, but — I must either accept or leave,’ and she repeated the shrugging gesture. She sat down on the chair facing me, staring helplessly at the carpet.
‘You say there was a scene?’ I went on presently. ‘She insisted?’
‘She begged me to continue,’ my sister replied very quietly. ‘She thinks — that is, she has an idea or theory that there’s something about the place — something she can’t get at quite.’ Frances stammered badly. She knew I did not encourage her wild theories.
‘Something she feels — yes,’ I helped her, more than curious.
‘Oh, you know what I mean, Bill,’ she said desperately. ‘That the place is saturated with some influence that she is herself too positive or too stupid to interpret. She’s trying to make herself negative and receptive, as she calls it, but can’t, of course, succeed. Haven’t you noticed how dull and impersonal and insipid she seems, as though she had no personality? She thinks impressions will come to her that way. But they don’t — —’
‘Naturally.’
‘So she’s trying me — us — what she calls the sensitive and impressionable artistic temperament. She says that until she is sure exactly what this influence is, she can’t fight it, turn it out, “get the house straight,” as she phrases it.’
Remembering my own singular impressions, I felt more lenient than I might otherwise have done. I tried to keep impatience out of my voice.
‘And this influence, what — whose is it?’
We used the pronoun that followed in the same breath, for I answered my own question at the same moment as she did:
‘His.’ Our heads nodded involuntarily towards the floor, the dinin
g-room being directly underneath.
And my heart sank, my curiosity died away on the instant, I felt bored. A commonplace haunted house was the last thing in the world to amuse or interest me. The mere thought exasperated, with its suggestions of imagination, overwrought nerves, hysteria, and the rest. Mingled with my other feelings was certainly disappointment. To see a figure or feel a ‘presence,’ and report from day to day strange incidents to each other would be a form of weariness I could never tolerate.
‘But really, Frances,’ I said firmly, after a moment’s pause, ‘it’s too far-fetched, this explanation. A curse, you know, belongs to the ghost stories of early Victorian days.’ And only my positive conviction that there was something after all worth discovering, and that it most certainly was not this, prevented my suggesting that we terminate our visit forthwith, or as soon as we decently could. ‘This is not a haunted house, whatever it is,’ I concluded somewhat vehemently, bringing my hand down upon her odious portfolio.
My sister’s reply revived my curiosity sharply.
‘I was waiting for you to say that. Mabel says exactly the same. He is in it — but it’s something more than that alone, something far bigger and more complicated.’ Her sentence seemed to indicate the sketches, and though I caught the inference I did not take it up, having no desire to discuss them with her just then, indeed, if ever.
I merely stared at her and listened. Questions, I felt sure, would be of little use. It was better she should say her thought in her own way.
‘He is one influence, the most recent,’ she went on slowly, and always very calmly, ‘but there are others — deeper layers, as it were — underneath. If his were the only one, something would happen. But nothing ever does happen. The others hinder and prevent — as though each were struggling to predominate.’
I had felt it already myself. The idea was rather horrible. I shivered.
‘That’s what is so ugly about it — that nothing ever happens,’ she said. ‘There is this endless anticipation — always on the dry edge of a result that never materialises. It is torture. Mabel is at her wits’ end, you see. And when she begged me — what I felt about my sketches — I mean — —’ She stammered badly as before.
I stopped her. I had judged too hastily. That queer symbolism in her paintings, pagan and yet not innocent, was, I understood, the result of mixture. I did not pretend to understand, but at least I could be patient. I consequently held my peace. We did talk on a little longer, but it was more general talk that avoided successfully our hostess, the paintings, wild theories, and him — until at length the emotion Frances had hitherto so successfully kept under burst vehemently forth again. It had hidden between her calm sentences, as it had hidden between the lines of her letter. It swept her now from head to foot, packed tight in the thing she then said.
‘Then, Bill, if it is not an ordinary haunted house,’ she asked, ‘what is it?’
The words were commonplace enough. The emotion was in the tone of her voice that trembled; in the gesture she made, leaning forward and clasping both hands upon her knees, and in the slight blanching of her cheeks as her brave eyes asked the question and searched my own with anxiety that bordered upon panic. In that moment she put herself under my protection. I winced.
‘And why,’ she added, lowering her voice to a still and furtive whisper, ‘does nothing ever happen? If only,’ — this with great emphasis— ‘something would happen — break this awful tension — bring relief. It’s the waiting I cannot stand.’ And she shivered all over as she said it, a touch of wildness in her eyes.
I would have given much to have made a true and satisfactory answer. My mind searched frantically for a moment, but in vain. There lay no sufficient answer in me. I felt what she felt, though with differences. No conclusive explanation lay within reach. Nothing happened. Eager as I was to shoot the entire business into the rubbish heap where ignorance and superstition discharge their poisonous weeds, I could not honestly accomplish this. To treat Frances as a child, and merely ‘explain away’ would be to strain her confidence in my protection, so affectionately claimed. It would further be dishonest to myself — weak, besides — to deny that I had also felt the strain and tension even as she did. While my mind continued searching, I returned her stare in silence; and Frances then, with more honesty and insight than my own, gave suddenly the answer herself — an answer whose truth and adequacy, so far as they went, I could not readily gainsay:
‘I think, Bill, because it is too big to happen here — to happen anywhere, indeed, all at once — and too awful!’
To have tossed the sentence aside as nonsense, argued it away, proved that it was really meaningless, would have been easy — at any other time or in any other place; and, had the past week brought me none of the vivid impressions it had brought me, this is doubtless what I should have done. My narrowness again was proved. We understand in others only what we have in ourselves. But her explanation, in a measure, I knew was true. It hinted at the strife and struggle that my notion of a Shadow had seemed to cover thinly.
‘Perhaps,’ I murmured lamely, waiting in vain for her to say more. ‘But you said just now that you felt the thing was “in layers,” as it were. Do you mean each one — each influence — fighting for the upper hand?’
I used her phraseology to conceal my own poverty. Terminology, after all, was nothing, provided we could reach the idea itself.
Her eyes said yes. She had her clear conception, arrived at independently, as was her way. And, unlike her sex, she kept it clear, unsmothered by too many words.
‘One set of influences gets at me, another gets at you. It’s according to our temperaments, I think.’ She glanced significantly at the vile portfolio. ‘Sometimes they are mixed — and therefore false. There has always been in me, more than in you, the pagan thing, perhaps, though never, thank God, like that.’
The frank confession of course invited my own, as it was meant to do. Yet it was difficult to find the words.
‘What I have felt in this place, Frances, I honestly can hardly tell you, because — er — my impressions have not arranged themselves in any definite form I can describe. The strife, the agony of vainly-sought escape, and the unrest — a sort of prison atmosphere — this I have felt at different times and with varying degrees of strength. But I find, as yet, no final label to attach. I couldn’t say pagan, Christian, or anything like that, I mean, as you do. As with the blind and deaf, you may have an intensification of certain senses denied to me, or even another sense altogether in embryo — —’
‘Perhaps,’ she stopped me, anxious to keep to the point, ‘you feel it as Mabel does. She feels the whole thing complete.’
‘That also is possible,’ I said very slowly. I was thinking behind my words. Her odd remark that it was ‘big and awful’ came back upon me as true. A vast sensation of distress and discomfort swept me suddenly. Pity was in it, and a fierce contempt, a savage, bitter anger as well. Fury against some sham authority was part of it.
‘Frances,’ I said, caught unawares, and dropping all pretence, ‘what in the world can it be?’ I looked hard at her. For some minutes neither of us spoke.
‘Have you felt no desire to interpret it?’ she asked presently.
‘Mabel did suggest my writing something about the house,’ was my reply, ‘but I’ve felt nothing imperative. That sort of writing is not my line, you know. My only feeling,’ I added, noticing that she waited for more, ‘is the impulse to explain, discover, get it out of me somehow, and so get rid of it. Not by writing, though — as yet.’ And again I repeated my former question: ‘What in the world do you think it is?’ My voice had become involuntarily hushed. There was awe in it.
Her answer, given with slow emphasis, brought back all my reserve: the phraseology provoked me rather: —
‘Whatever it is, Bill, it is not of God.’
I got up to go downstairs. I believe I shrugged my shoulders, ‘Would you like to leave, Frances? Shall we go back to town?
’ I suggested this at the door, and hearing no immediate reply, I turned back to look. Frances was sitting with her head bowed over and buried in her hands. The attitude horribly suggested tears. No woman, I realised, can keep back the pressure of strong emotion as long as Frances had done, without ending in a fluid collapse. I waited a moment uneasily, longing to comfort, yet afraid to act — and in this way discovered the existence of the appalling emotion in myself, hitherto but half guessed. At all costs a scene must be prevented: it would involve such exaggeration and over-statement. Brutally, such is the weakness of the ordinary man, I turned the handle to go out, but my sister then raised her head. 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 realised 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.
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.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 494