life-likemask (past even the dexterity of a Chinese artist to rival), and – though I hardly know why – it was inconceivably shocking.
My objections to indiscriminate spiritualism the evening before may have been hasty and shallow. They seemed now to have been grotesquely inadequate . This house was not haunted, it was infested. Catspaw, poor young Mr Champneys may have been, but he had indeed helped with the chestnuts. A horrible weariness swept over me. Without another glance at the bed, I made my way as rapidly as possible to the door – and broke into a run.
Still thickly muffled with her last journey’s dust – except for the fingerprints I afterwards noticed on her bonnet – and just as I had left her the previous evening, my car stood awaiting me in the innocent blue of dawn beneath the porch. So must Tobias have welcomed his angel. My heart literally stood still as I inserted the key – but all was well. The first faint purring of the engine was accompanied by the sound of a window being flung open. It was above and behind me, and beyond the porch. I turned my head, and detected a vague greyish figure standing a little within cover of the hollies and ilexes – a short man, about twenty or thirty yards away, not looking at me. But he too may have been pure illusion, pure hallucination. When I had blinked and looked again he was gone. There was no sunshine yet; the garden was as still as a mechanical panorama, but the hubbub, the gabbling was increasing overhead.
In an instant I had shot out from under the porch, and dignity forgotten, was on my way helter-skelter round the semicircular drive. But to my utter confusion the gates at this end of it were heavily padlocked. I all but stripped the gears in my haste to retreat, but succeeded nonetheless; and then, without so much as turning my head towards the house, I drove clean across the lawn, the boughs of the blossom-burdened trees actually brushing the hood of the car as I did so. In five minutes I must have been nearly as many miles from Mr Bloom’s precincts.
It was fortunate perhaps the day was so early; even the most phlegmatic of rural constables might look a little askance at a motorist desperately defying the speed limit in a purple dressing-gown and red morocco slippers. But I was innocent of robbery, for in exchange for these articles I had left behind me as valuable a jacket and a pair of brown leather shoes. I wonder what they will fetch at the sale? I wonder if Mr Bloom would have offered me Mr Champneys’s full £ 300 per annum if I had consented to stay? He was sorely in need, I am afraid, of human company, and a less easily prejudiced ally might have been of help to him in his extremity. But I ran away.
And it is now too late to make amends. He has gone home – as we all shall – and taken his wages. And what troubles me, and now and then with acute misgiving, is the thought of Miss Algood. She was so simple and soeasy a prey to enthusiasm. She dabbled her fingers in the obscure waters frequented by Mr Bloom as heedlessly and as absorbedly as some little dark intense creature on the banks of the Serpentine over a gallipot of ‘tiddlers’. I hate to think of any of ‘them’ taking her seriously – or even otherwise; and of the possibility also, when she is groping her way through their underworld , for she never really found it in this – the possibility of her meeting him there. For whatever Mr Bloom’s company in his charming house may have consisted of –and here edges in the obscure problem of what the creatures of our thoughts, let alone our dreams, are ‘made on’ – and quite apart too from Mr Bloom’s personal appearance, character, and ‘effects’, my chief quarrel with him was his scorn of my old harmless family friend. I would like, if only I could, to warn her against him – those dark, affectionate , saddened, hungry eyes.
* First published in The Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith, London 1926.
Willows
Willows
My objections to indiscriminate spiritualism the evening before may have been hasty and shallow. They seemed now to have been grotesquely inadequate . This house was not haunted, it was infested. Catspaw, poor young Mr Champneys may have been, but he had indeed helped with the chestnuts. A horrible weariness swept over me. Without another glance at the bed, I made my way as rapidly as possible to the door – and broke into a run.
Still thickly muffled with her last journey’s dust – except for the fingerprints I afterwards noticed on her bonnet – and just as I had left her the previous evening, my car stood awaiting me in the innocent blue of dawn beneath the porch. So must Tobias have welcomed his angel. My heart literally stood still as I inserted the key – but all was well. The first faint purring of the engine was accompanied by the sound of a window being flung open. It was above and behind me, and beyond the porch. I turned my head, and detected a vague greyish figure standing a little within cover of the hollies and ilexes – a short man, about twenty or thirty yards away, not looking at me. But he too may have been pure illusion, pure hallucination. When I had blinked and looked again he was gone. There was no sunshine yet; the garden was as still as a mechanical panorama, but the hubbub, the gabbling was increasing overhead.
In an instant I had shot out from under the porch, and dignity forgotten, was on my way helter-skelter round the semicircular drive. But to my utter confusion the gates at this end of it were heavily padlocked. I all but stripped the gears in my haste to retreat, but succeeded nonetheless; and then, without so much as turning my head towards the house, I drove clean across the lawn, the boughs of the blossom-burdened trees actually brushing the hood of the car as I did so. In five minutes I must have been nearly as many miles from Mr Bloom’s precincts.
It was fortunate perhaps the day was so early; even the most phlegmatic of rural constables might look a little askance at a motorist desperately defying the speed limit in a purple dressing-gown and red morocco slippers. But I was innocent of robbery, for in exchange for these articles I had left behind me as valuable a jacket and a pair of brown leather shoes. I wonder what they will fetch at the sale? I wonder if Mr Bloom would have offered me Mr Champneys’s full £ 300 per annum if I had consented to stay? He was sorely in need, I am afraid, of human company, and a less easily prejudiced ally might have been of help to him in his extremity. But I ran away.
And it is now too late to make amends. He has gone home – as we all shall – and taken his wages. And what troubles me, and now and then with acute misgiving, is the thought of Miss Algood. She was so simple and soeasy a prey to enthusiasm. She dabbled her fingers in the obscure waters frequented by Mr Bloom as heedlessly and as absorbedly as some little dark intense creature on the banks of the Serpentine over a gallipot of ‘tiddlers’. I hate to think of any of ‘them’ taking her seriously – or even otherwise; and of the possibility also, when she is groping her way through their underworld , for she never really found it in this – the possibility of her meeting him there. For whatever Mr Bloom’s company in his charming house may have consisted of –and here edges in the obscure problem of what the creatures of our thoughts, let alone our dreams, are ‘made on’ – and quite apart too from Mr Bloom’s personal appearance, character, and ‘effects’, my chief quarrel with him was his scorn of my old harmless family friend. I would like, if only I could, to warn her against him – those dark, affectionate , saddened, hungry eyes.
* First published in The Ghost Book, ed. Cynthia Asquith, London 1926.
Willows
Willows