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A Haunted House PDF
A Haunted House PDF
I82—I)4l, English
843
344 Vaciy \X’OOLF
Wmtever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From to room they
room
went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.
“I lere we left it,’ she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s up
stairs,’ she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly,” they said,
“or we shall wake them.”
But it wasnt that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re
drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page to two. “Now
they’ve found it,” one would he certain, stopping the pencil on the margin.
And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all
empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with con
tent and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the firm, “What
dd I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Per
[taps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the
garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see
them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were
green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned
its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about
the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands
were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells
of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe,” the
pulse of the house beat softly. “i’he treasure buried; the room the pulse
stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?
in
A moment later the light had faded. Out the garden then? But the trees
spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So tine, so rare, coolly sunk be
neath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. I)eath was
the glass: death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years
ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He
left it, left her, went North, went F.ast, saw the stars turned in the Southern
sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,”
the pulse of the house beat gladly. “Fhe’Iieasure yours.”
The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that.
Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls
straight from the window. i’he candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through
the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly cou
ple seek their joy.
“Here we slept” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Wak
ing in the morning—” “Silver between the trees—” “Upstairs—” “In the gar
den—” “When summer came—” “In winter snowtime—” The doors go shut
ting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides sil
ver down the glass. Our eyes darken: we hear no steps beside us; we see no
lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he
breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”
Xicu nd 1i. ron
mping, holding their silver lamp above us. long they look and deeply.
I ong they pause. Ihe wind drives straightly; i he flame stoops shghtly. Wild
Iscanis ol moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain ihe fices bent;
he laces pondering; the races that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.
“ale, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he
tgbs Again you found me Hcr. she murmurs slceping in thc. gardcn
reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. I fere we left our treasure—” Stoop—
ng, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes, “Safi! safe! safe!” the pulse of the
house bears wildly, Wtking, I cry “( )h, is this your buried treasure The light in
the heart.’
a Au’ri-ioR’s PERSPECTIVE
Virginia Woo’f
Women and Fiction 1920?
Fiction was, as fiction still is, the easiest thing for a woman to write. Nor
is it difficult to find the reason, A novel is the least concentrated form of art.
A novel can be taken up or put down more easily than a play or a poem.
(;e<>rge Eliot left her work to nurse her father, (Zharlotte [3ronte put down her
pen to pick the eyes out of the potatoes. And living as she did in the common
sitting-room. surrounded by people, a woman was trained to use her mind in
observation and upon the analysis of character, She was trained to he a novel
ist and not to be a poet.
Even in the nineteenth century, a woman lived almost solely in her home
and her emotions. And those nineteenth-century novels, remarkable as they
were, were profoundly influenced by the fact that the women who wrote them
were excluded by their sex from certain kinds of experience. That experience
has a great influence upon fiction is indisputable. The best part of Conrads
novels, for instance, would be destroyed if it had been impossible for him to
he a sailor. Take away all that Tolstoi knew of war as a soldier, of life and soci
ety as a rich young man whose education admitted him to all sorts of experi
ence, and War and Peace would be incredibly impoverished.
Yet Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Villette, and Middlemarch were
written by women from whom was forcibly withheld all experience save that
which could be met with in a middle-class drawing-room. No first-hand ex
perience of war or seafaring or politics or business was possible for them. Even
their emotional life was strictly regulated by law and custom. When George
Eliot ventured to live with Mr. Lewes without being his wife, public opinion
was scandalized. Under its pressure she withdrew into a suburban seclusion
which, inevitably, had the worst possible effects upon her work. She wrote
that unless people asked of their own accord to come and see her, she never
invited them. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, Tolstoi was
living a free life as a soldier, with men and women of all classes, for which no
body censured him and from which his novels drew much of their astonish
ing breadth and vigor.
SiR \io,i.i \ IR’ RE
But the tiovels of women were not affected only by the etessa riB’ narr iw
rjnre of the writers experience. lltev showed, at least in the nineteenth ecu
ttirv, another L IlaraF kr istiE whit. h may be traced to the writers SeX. In ,Ilf/(//C
nii re/i and in line [vie we are conscious not merely o[ the svn ter’s character, ,is
we are conscious ol the character ui ( harles [)ickens, hut we are ionsciouis (it
,i WOtflaFIs piesence --of someone resenting the treatment of her sex arid
ph. udint, for us rit,ht s I his hi nts Into women s v ritint, in lenu., nt v, ft ii. h is
entirely absent from a niatis, unless indeed, he happens to be a workint—tn.iti.
a Negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious o disability. It intro
duces a distortion md is Irecjuiently the cause of weakness. liw desire to plead
some personal cause or ro make a character the mouthpiece of some persott.il