“Just about,” Theodora said. Luke came across the room and held out a hand to each of them to help them up, and Eleanor, moving awkwardly, almost fell; Theodora rose in a quick motion and stretched and yawned. “Theo is sleepy,” she said.
“I’ll have to lead you upstairs,” the doctor said. “Tomorrow we must really start to learn our way around. Luke, will you screen the fire?”
“Had we better make sure that the doors are locked?” Luke asked. “I imagine that Mrs. Dudley locked the back door when she left, but what about the others?”
“I hardly think we’ll catch anyone breaking in,” Theodora said. “Anyway, the little companion used to lock her doors, and what good did it do her?”
“Suppose we want to break out?” Eleanor asked.
The doctor glanced quickly at Eleanor and then away. “I see no need for locking doors,” he said quietly.
“There is certainly not much danger of burglars from the village,” Luke said.
“In any case,” the doctor said, “I will not sleep for an hour or so yet; at my age an hour’s reading before bedtime is essential, and I wisely brought Pamela with me. If any of you has trouble sleeping, I will read aloud to you. I never yet knew anyone who could not fall asleep with Richardson being read aloud to him.” Talking quietly, he led them down the narrow hallway and through the great front hall and to the stairs. “I have often planned to try it on very small children,” he went on.
Eleanor followed Theodora up the stairs; she had not realized until now how worn she was, and each step was an effort. She reminded herself naggingly that she was in Hill House, but even the blue room meant only, right now, the bed with the blue coverlet and the blue quilt. “On the other hand,” the doctor continued behind her, “a Fielding novel comparable in length, although hardly in subject matter, would never do for very young children. I even have doubts about Sterne—”
Theodora went to the door of the green room and turned and smiled. “If you feel the least bit nervous,” she said to Eleanor, “run right into my room.”
“I will,” Eleanor said earnestly. “Thank you; good night.”
“—and certainly not Smollett. Ladies, Luke and I are here, on the other side of the stairway—”
“What color are your rooms?” Eleanor asked, unable to resist.
“Yellow,” the doctor said, surprised.
“Pink,” Luke said with a dainty gesture of distaste.
“We’re blue and green down here,” Theodora said.
“I will be awake, reading,” the doctor said. “I will leave my door ajar, so I will certainly hear any sound. Good night. Sleep well.”
“Good night,” Luke said. “Good night, all.”
As she closed the door of the blue room behind her Eleanor thought wearily that it might be the darkness and oppression of Hill House that tired her so, and then it no longer mattered. The blue bed was unbelievably soft. Odd, she thought sleepily, that the house should be so dreadful and yet in many respects so physically comfortable—the soft bed, the pleasant lawn, the good fire, the cooking of Mrs. Dudley. The company too, she thought, and then thought, Now I can think about them; I am all alone. Why is Luke here? But why am I here? Journeys end in lovers meeting. They all saw that I was afraid.
She shivered and sat up in bed to reach for the quilt at the foot. Then, half amused and half cold, she slipped out of bed and went, barefoot and silent, across the room to turn the key in the lock of the door; they won’t know I locked it, she thought, and went hastily back to bed. With the quilt pulled up around her she found herself looking with quick apprehension at the window, shining palely in the darkness, and then at the door. I wish I had a sleeping pill to take, she thought, and looked again over her shoulder, compulsively, at the window, and then again at the door, and thought, Is it moving? But I locked it; is it moving?
I think, she decided concretely, that I would like this better if I had the blankets over my head. Hidden deep in the bed under the blankets, she giggled and was glad none of the others could hear her. In the city she never slept with her head under the covers; I have come all this way today, she thought.
Then she slept, secure; in the next room Theodora slept, smiling, with her light on. Farther down the hall the doctor, reading Pamela, lifted his head occasionally to listen, and once went to his door and stood for a minute, looking down the hall, before going back to his book. A nightlight shone at the top of the stairs over the pool of blackness which was the hall. Luke slept, on his bedside table a flashlight and the lucky piece he always carried with him. Around them the house brooded, settling and stirring with a movement that was almost like a shudder.
Six miles away Mrs. Dudley awakened, looked at her clock, thought of Hill House, and shut her eyes quickly. Mrs. Gloria Sanderson, who owned Hill House and lived three hundred miles away from it, closed her detective story, yawned, and reached up to turn off her light, wondering briefly if she had remembered to put the chain on the front door. Theodora’s friend slept; so did the doctor’s wife and Eleanor’s sister. Far away, in the trees over Hill House, an owl cried out, and toward morning a thin, fine rain began, misty and dull.
4
Eleanor awakened to find the blue room gray and colorless in the morning rain. She found that she had thrown the quilt off during the night and had finished sleeping in her usual manner, with her head on the pillow. It was a surprise to find that she had slept until after eight, and she thought that it was ironic that the first good night’s sleep she had had in years had come to her in Hill House. Lying in the blue bed, looking up into the dim ceiling with its remote carved pattern, she asked herself, half asleep still, What did I do; did I make a fool of myself? Were they laughing at me?
Thinking quickly over the evening before, she could remember only that she had—must have—seemed foolishly, childishly contented, almost happy; had the others been amused to see that she was so simple? I said silly things, she told herself, and of course they noticed. Today I will be more reserved, less openly grateful to all of them for having me.
Then, awakening completely, she shook her head and sighed. You are a very silly baby, Eleanor, she told herself, as she did every morning.
The room came clearly alive around her; she was in the blue room at Hill House, the dimity curtains were moving slightly at the window, and the wild splashing in the bathroom must be Theodora, awake, sure to be dressed and ready first, certain to be hungry. “Good morning,” Eleanor called, and Theodora answering, gasping, “Good morning—through in a minute—I’ll leave the tub filled for you—are you starving? Because I am.” Does she think I wouldn’t bathe unless she left a full tub for me? Eleanor wondered, and then was ashamed; I came here to stop thinking things like that, she told herself sternly and rolled out of bed and went to the window. She looked out across the veranda roof to the wide lawn below, with its bushes and little clumps of trees wound around with mist. Far down at the end of the lawn was the line of trees which marked the path to the creek, although the prospect of a jolly picnic on the grass was not, this morning, so appealing. It was clearly going to be wet all day, but it was a summer rain, deepening the green of the grass and the trees, sweetening and cleaning the air. It’s charming, Eleanor thought, surprised at herself; she wondered if she was the first person ever to find Hill House charming and then thought, chilled, Or do they all think so, the first morning? She shivered, and found herself at the same time unable to account for the excitement she felt, which made it difficult to remember why it was so odd to wake up happy in Hill House.
“I’ll starve to death.” Theodora pounded on the bathroom door, and Eleanor snatched at her robe and hurried. “Try to look like a stray sunbeam,” Theodora called out from her room. “It’s such a dark day we’ve got to be a little brighter than usual.”
Sing before breakfast you’ll cry before night, Eleanor told herself, because she had been singing softly, “In delay there lies no plenty. . . .”
“I thought I was the lazy
one,” Theodora said complacently through the door, “but you’re much, much worse. Lazy hardly begins to describe you. You must be clean enough now to come and have breakfast.”
“Mrs. Dudley sets out breakfast at nine. What will she think when we show up bright and smiling?”
“She will sob with disappointment. Did anyone scream for her in the night, do you suppose?”
Eleanor regarded a soapy leg critically. “I slept like a log,” she said.
“So did I. If you are not ready in three minutes I will come in and drown you. I want my breakfast.”
Eleanor was thinking that it had been a very long time since she had dressed to look like a stray sunbeam, or been so hungry for breakfast, or arisen so aware, so conscious of herself, so deliberate and tender in her attentions; she even brushed her teeth with a niceness she could not remember ever feeling before. It is all the result of a good night’s sleep, she thought; since Mother died I must have been sleeping even more poorly than I realized.
“Aren’t you ready yet?”
“Coming, coming,” Eleanor said, and ran to the door, remembered that it was still locked, and unlocked it softly. Theodora was waiting for her in the hall, vivid in the dullness in gaudy plaid; looking at Theodora, it was not possible for Eleanor to believe that she ever dressed or washed or moved or ate or slept or talked without enjoying every minute of what she was doing; perhaps Theodora never cared at all what other people thought of her.
“Do you realize that we may be another hour or so just finding the dining room?” Theodora said. “But maybe they have left us a map—did you know that Luke and the doctor have been up for hours? I was talking to them from the window.”
They have started without me, Eleanor thought; tomorrow I will wake up earlier and be there to talk from the window too. They came to the foot of the stairs, and Theodora crossed the great dark hall and put her hand confidently to a door. “Here,” she said, but the door opened into a dim, echoing room neither of them had seen before. “Here,” Eleanor said, but the door she chose led onto the narrow passage to the little parlor where last night they had sat before a fire.
“It’s across the hall from that,” Theodora said, and turned, baffled. “Damn it,” she said, and put her head back and shouted. “Luke? Doctor?”
Distantly they heard an answering shout, and Theodora moved to open another door. “If they think,” she said over her shoulder, “that they are going to keep me forever in this filthy hall, trying one door after another to get to my breakfast—”
“That’s the right one, I think,” Eleanor said, “with the dark room to go through, and then the dining room beyond.”
Theodora shouted again, blundered against some light piece of furniture, cursed, and then the door beyond was opened and the doctor said, “Good morning.”
“Foul, filthy house,” Theodora said, rubbing her knee. “Good morning.”
“You will never believe this now, of course,” the doctor said, “but three minutes ago these doors were wide open. We left them open so you could find your way. We sat here and watched them swing shut just before you called. Well. Good morning.”
“Kippers,” Luke said from the table. “Good morning. I hope you ladies are the kipper kind.”
They had come through the darkness of one night, they had met morning in Hill House, and they were a family, greeting one another with easy informality and going to the chairs they had used last night at dinner, their own places at the table.
“A fine big breakfast is what Mrs. Dudley certainly agreed to set out at nine,” Luke said, waving a fork. “We had begun to wonder if you were the coffee-and-a-roll-in-bed types.”
“We would have been here much sooner in any other house,” Theodora said.
“Did you really leave all the doors open for us?” Eleanor asked.
“That’s how we knew you were coming,” Luke told her. “We saw the doors swing shut.”
“Today we will nail all the doors open,” Theodora said. “I am going to pace this house until I can find food ten times out of ten. I slept with my light on all night,” she confided to the doctor, “but nothing happened at all.”
“It was all very quiet,” the doctor said.
“Did you watch over us all night?” Eleanor asked.
“Until about three, when Pamela finally put me to sleep. There wasn’t a sound until the rain started sometime after two. One of you ladies called out in her sleep once—”
“That must have been me,” Theodora said shamelessly. “Dreaming about the wicked sister at the gates of Hill House.”
“I dreamed about her too,” Eleanor said. She looked at the doctor and said suddenly, “It’s embarrassing. To think about being afraid, I mean.”
“We’re all in it together, you know,” Theodora said.
“It’s worse if you try not to show it,” the doctor said.
“Stuff yourself very full of kippers,” Luke said. “Then it will be impossible to feel anything at all.”
Eleanor felt, as she had the day before, that the conversation was being skillfully guided away from the thought of fear, so very present in her own mind. Perhaps she was to be allowed to speak occasionally for all of them so that, quieting her, they quieted themselves and could leave the subject behind them; perhaps, vehicle for every kind of fear, she contained enough for all. They are like children, she thought crossly, daring each other to go first, ready to turn and call names at whoever comes last; she pushed her plate away from her and sighed.
“Before I go to sleep tonight,” Theodora was saying to the doctor, “I want to be sure that I have seen every inch of this house. No more lying there wondering what is over my head or under me. And we have to open some windows and keep the doors open and stop feeling our way around.”
“Little signs,” Luke suggested. “Arrows pointing, reading THIS WAY OUT.”
“Or DEAD END,” Eleanor said.
“Or WATCH OUT FOR FALLING FURNITURE,” Theodora said. “We’ll make them,” she said to Luke.
“First we all explore the house,” Eleanor said, too quickly perhaps, because Theodora turned and looked at her curiously. “I don’t want to find myself left behind in an attic or something,” Eleanor added uncomfortably.
“No one wants to leave you behind anywhere,” Theodora said.
“Then I suggest,” Luke said, “that we first of all finish off the coffee in the pot, and then go nervously from room to room, endeavoring to discover some rational plan to this house, and leaving doors open as we go. I never thought,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “that I would stand to inherit a house where I had to put up signs to find my way around.”
“We need to find out what to call the rooms,” Theodora said. “Suppose I told you, Luke, that I would meet you clandestinely in the second-best drawing room—how would you ever know where to find me?”
“You could keep whistling till I got there,” Luke offered.
Theodora shuddered. “You would hear me whistling, and calling you, while you wandered from door to door, never opening the right one, and I would be inside, not able to find any way to get out—”
“And nothing to eat,” Eleanor said unkindly.
Theodora looked at her again. “And nothing to eat,” she agreed after a minute. Then, “It’s the crazy house at the carnival,” she said. “Rooms opening out of each other and doors going everywhere at once and swinging shut when you come, and I bet that somewhere there are mirrors that make you look all sideways and an air hose to blow up your skirts, and something that comes out of a dark passage and laughs in your face—” She was suddenly quiet and picked up her cup so quickly that her coffee spilled.
“Not as bad as all that,” the doctor said easily. “Actually, the ground floor is laid out in what I might almost call concentric circles of rooms; at the center is the little parlor where we sat last night; around it, roughly, are a series of rooms—the billiard room, for instance, and a dismal little den entirely furnished in rose-color
ed satin—”
“Where Eleanor and I will go each morning with our needlework.”
“—and surrounding these—I call them the inside rooms because they are the ones with no direct way to the outside; they have no windows, you remember—surrounding these are the ring of outside rooms, the drawing room, the library, the conservatory, the—”
“No,” Theodora said, shaking her head. “I am still lost back in the rose-colored satin.”
“And the veranda goes all around the house. There are doors opening onto the veranda from the drawing room, and the conservatory, and one sitting room. There is also a passage—”
“Stop, stop.” Theodora was laughing, but she shook her head. “It’s a filthy, rotten house.”
The swinging door in the corner of the dining room opened, and Mrs. Dudley stood, one hand holding the door open, looking without expression at the breakfast table. “I clear off at ten,” Mrs. Dudley said.
“Good morning, Mrs. Dudley,” Luke said.
Mrs. Dudley turned her eyes to him. “I clear off at ten,” she said. “The dishes are supposed to be back on the shelves. I take them out again for lunch. I set out lunch at one, but first the dishes have to be back on the shelves.”
“Of course, Mrs. Dudley.” The doctor rose and put down his napkin. “Everybody ready?” he asked.
Under Mrs. Dudley’s eye Theodora deliberately lifted her cup and finished the last of her coffee, then touched her mouth with her napkin and sat back. “Splendid breakfast,” she said conversationally. “Do the dishes belong to the house?”
“They belong on the shelves,” Mrs. Dudley said.
“And the glassware and the silver and the linen? Lovely old things.”
“The linen,” Mrs. Dudley said, “belongs in the linen drawers in the dining room. The silver belongs in the silver chest. The glasses belong on the shelves.”
“We must be quite a bother to you,” Theodora said.
Mrs. Dudley was silent. Finally she said, “I clear up at ten. I set out lunch at one.”
Theodora laughed and rose. “On,” she said, “on, on. Let us go and open doors.”
The Haunting of Hill House Page 10