Was

she noting the effect upon me, I wondered?

‘You’ll write here—perhaps a story about the house,’ she said,

‘Thompson will bring you anything you want; you only have to ring.’

She pointed to the electric bell on the central table, the wire

running neatly down the leg. ‘No one has ever worked here before, and

the library has been hardly used since it was put in. So there’s no

previous atmosphere to affect your imagination—er—adversely.’

We laughed. ‘Bill isn’t that sort,’ said my sister; while I wished

they would go out and leave me to arrange my little nest and set to

work.

I thought, of course, it was the huge listening library that made

me feel so inconsiderable—the fifteen thousand silent, staring books,

the solemn aisles, the deep, eloquent shelves. But when the women had

gone and I was alone, the beginning of the truth crept over me, and I

felt that first hint of disconsolateness which later became an

imperative No. The mind shut down, images ceased to rise and flow. I

read, made copious notes, but I wrote no single line at The Towers.

Nothing completed itself there. Nothing happened.

The morning sunshine poured into the library through ten long narrow

windows; birds were singing; the autumn air, rich with a faint aroma

of November melancholy that stung the imagination pleasantly, filled

my antechamber. I looked out upon the undulating wooded landscape,

hemmed in by the sweep of distant Downs, and I tasted a whiff of the

sea. Rooks cawed as they floated above the elms, and there were lazy

cows in the nearer meadows. A dozen times I tried to make my nest and

settle down to work, and a dozen times, like a turning fastidious dog

upon a hearth-rug, I rearranged my chair and books and papers. The

temptation of the Catalogue and shelves, of course, was accountable

for much, yet not, I felt, for all. That was a manageable seduction.

My work, moreover, was not of the creative kind that requires absolute

absorption; it was the mere readable presentation of data I had

accumulated. My note-books were charged with facts ready to tabulate—

facts, too, that interested me keenly. A mere effort of the will was

necessary, and concentration of no difficult kind. Yet, somehow, it

seemed beyond me:

something for ever pushed the facts into disorder… and in the end I

sat in the sunshine, dipping into a dozen books selected from the

shelves outside, vexed with myself and only half-enjoying it. I felt

restless. I wanted to be elsewhere.

And even while I read, attention wandered. Frances, Mabel, her late

husband, the house and grounds, each in turn and sometimes all

together, rose uninvited into the stream of thought, hindering any

consecutive flow of work. In disconnected fashion came these pictures

that interrupted concentration, yet presenting themselves as broken

fragments of a bigger thing my mind already groped for unconsciously.

They fluttered round this hidden thing of which they were aspects,

fugitive interpretations, no one of them bringing complete revelation.

There was no adjective, such as pleasant or unpleasant, that I could

attach to what I felt, beyond that the result was unsettling. Vague as

the atmosphere of a dream, it yet persisted, and I could not dissipate

it.

Isolated words or phrases in the lines I read sent questions

scouring across my mind, sure sign that the deeper part of me was

restless and ill at ease.

Rather trivial questions too—half-foolish interrogations, as of a

puzzled or curious child: Why was my sister afraid to sleep alone, and

why did her friend feel a similar repugnance, yet seek to conquer it?

Why was the solid luxury of the house without comfort, its shelter

without the sense of permanence? Why had Mrs.