Chapter IX
It seems I became a mere spectator after that; my sister's lead was soassured for one thing, and, for another, the responsibility of leavingMabel alone--Frances laid it bodily upon my shoulders--was a little morethan I cared about. Moreover, when we all three met later in the day,things went on so exactly as before, so absolutely without friction ordistress, that to present a sudden, obvious excuse for cutting our visitshort seemed ill-judged. And on the lowest grounds it would have beendesertion. At any rate, it was beyond my powers, and Frances was quitefirm that she must stay. We therefore did stay. Things that happen inthe night always seem exaggerated and distorted when the sun shinesbrightly next morning; no one can reconstruct the terror of a nightmareafterwards, nor comprehend why it seemed so overwhelming at the time.
I slept till ten o'clock, and when I rang for breakfast, a note from mysister lay upon the tray, its message of counsel couched in a calm andcomforting strain. Mabel, she assured me, was herself again andremembered nothing of what had happened; there was no need of anyviolent measures; I was to treat her exactly as if I knew nothing. "And,if you don't mind, Bill, let us leave the matter unmentioned betweenourselves as well. Discussion exaggerates; such things are best nottalked about. I'm sorry I disturbed you so unnecessarily; I was stupidlyexcited. Please forget all the things I said at the moment." She hadwritten "nonsense" first instead of "things," then scratched it out. Shewished to convey that hysteria had been abroad in the night, and Ireadily gulped the explanation down, though it could not satisfy me inthe smallest degree.
There was another week of our visit still, and we stayed it out to theend without disaster. My desire to leave at times became that franticthing, desire to escape; but I controlled it, kept silent, watched andwondered. Nothing happened. As before, and everywhere, there was nosequence of development, no connection between cause and effect; andclimax, none whatever. The thing swayed up and down, backwards andforwards like a great loose curtain in the wind, and I could onlyvaguely surmise what caused the draught or why there was a curtain atall. A novelist might mold the queer material into coherent sequencethat would be interesting but could not be true.
It remains, therefore, not a story but a history. Nothing happened.
Perhaps my intense dislike of the fall of darkness was due wholly to mystirred imagination, and perhaps my anger when I learned that Francesnow occupied a bed in our hostess's room was unreasonable. Nerves wereunquestionably on edge. I was forever on the lookout for some event thatshould make escape imperative, but yet that never presented itself. Islept lightly, left my door ajar to catch the slightest sound, even madestealthy tours of the house below-stairs while everybody dreamed intheir beds. But I discovered nothing; the doors were always locked; Ineither saw the housekeeper again in unreasonable times and places, norheard a footstep in the passages and halls. The Noise was never oncerepeated. That horrible, ultimate thunder, my intensest dread of all,lay withdrawn into the abyss whence it had twice arisen. And though inmy thoughts it was sternly denied existence, the great black reason forthe fact afflicted me unbelievably. Since Mabel's fruitless effort toescape, the Doors kept closed remorselessly. She had failed; they gaveup hope. For this was the explanation that haunted the region of my mindwhere feelings stir and hint before they clothe themselves in actuallanguage. Only I firmly kept it there; it never knew expression.
But, if my ears were open, my eyes were opened too, and it were idle topretend that I did not notice a hundred details that were capable ofsinister interpretation had I been weak enough to yield. Some protectivebarrier had fallen into ruins round me, so that Terror stalked behindthe general collapse, feeling for me through all the gaping fissures.Much of this, I admit, must have been merely the elaboration of thosesensations I had first vaguely felt, before subsequent events and mytalks with Frances had dramatized them into living thoughts. I thereforeleave them unmentioned in this history, just as my mind left themunmentioned in that interminable final week. Our life went on preciselyas before--Mabel unreal and outwardly so still; Frances, secretive,anxious, tactful to the point of slyness, and keen to save to the pointof self-forgetfulness.
There were the same stupid meals, the same wearisome long evenings, thestifling ugliness of house and grounds, the Shadow settling in sothickly that it seemed almost a visible, tangible thing. I came to feelthe only friendly things in all this hostile, cruel place were therobins that hopped boldly over the monstrous terraces and even up to thewindows of the unsightly house itself. The robins alone knew joy; theydanced, believing no evil thing was possible in all God's radiant world.They believed in everybody; their god's plan of life had no room in itfor hell, damnation, and lakes of brimstone. I came to love the littlebirds. Had Samuel Franklyn known them, he might have preached adifferent sermon, bequeathing love in place of terror!
Most of my time I spent writing; but it was a pretence at best, andrather a dangerous one besides. For it stirred the mind to production,with the result that other things came pouring in as well. With readingit was the same. In the end I found an aggressive, deliberate resistanceto be the only way of feasible defense. To walk far afield was out ofthe question, for it meant leaving my sister too long alone, so that myexercise was confined to nearer home. My saunters in the grounds,however, never surprised the goblin garden again. It was close at hand,but I seemed unable to get wholly into it. Too many things assailed mymind for any one to hold exclusive possession, perhaps.
Indeed, all the interpretations, all the "layers," to use my sister'sphrase, slipped in by turns and lodged there for a time. They came dayand night, and though my reason denied them entrance they held their ownas by a kind of squatter's right. They stirred moods already in me, thatis, and did not introduce entirely new ones; for every mind concealsancestral deposits that have been cultivated in turn along the wholeline of its descent. Any day a chance shower may cause this one or thatto blossom. Thus it came to me, at any rate. After darkness theInquisition paced the empty corridors and set up ghastly apparatus inthe dismal halls; and once, in the library, there swept over me thateasy and delicious conviction that by confessing my wickedness I couldresume it later, since Confession is expression, and expression bringsrelief and leaves one ready to accumulate again. And in such mood I feltbitter and unforgiving towards all others who thought differently.Another time it was a Pagan thing that assaulted me--so trivial yet oh,so significant at the time--when I dreamed that a herd of centaursrolled up with a great stamping of hoofs round the house to destroy it,and then woke to hear the horses tramping across the field below thelawns; they neighed ominously and their noisy panting was audible as ifit were just outside my windows.
But the tree episode, I think, was the most curious of all--except,perhaps, the incident with the children which I shall mention in amoment--for its closeness to reality was so unforgettable.
Outside the east window of my room stood a giant wellingtonia on thelawn, its head rising level with the upper sash. It grew some twentyfeet away, planted on the highest terrace, and I often saw it whenclosing my curtains for the night, noticing how it drew its heavy skirtsabout it, and how the light from other windows threw glimmering streaksand patches that turned it into the semblance of a towering, solemnimage. It stood there then so strikingly, somehow like a great old-worldidol, that it claimed attention. Its appearance was curiouslyformidable. Its branches rustled without visibly moving and it had acertain portentous, forbidding air, so grand and dark and monstrous inthe night that I was always glad when my curtains shut it out. Yet, oncein bed, I had never thought about it one way or the other, and by dayhad certainly never sought it out.
One night, then, as I went to bed and closed this window against acutting easterly wind, I saw--that there were two of these trees. Abrother wellingtonia rose mysteriously beside it, equally huge, equallytowering, equally monstrous. The menacing pair of them faced me thereupon the lawn. But in this new arrival lay a strange suggestion thatfrightened me before I could argue it away. Exact coun
terpart of itsgiant companion, it revealed also that gross, odious quality that all mysister's paintings held. I got the odd impression that the rest of thesetrees, stretching away dimly in a troop over the farther lawns, weresimilar, and that, led by this enormous pair, they had all moved boldlycloser to my windows. At the same moment a blind was drawn down over anupper room; the second tree disappeared into the surrounding darkness.
It was, of course, this chance light that had brought it into the fieldof vision, but when the black shutter dropped over it, hiding it fromview, the manner of its vanishing produced the queer effect that it hadslipped into its companion--almost that it had been an emanation of theone I so disliked, and not really a tree at all! In this way the gardenturned vehicle for expressing what lay behind it all ...!
The behavior of the doors, the little, ordinary doors, seems scarcelyworth mention at all, their queer way of opening and shutting of theirown accord; for this was accountable in a hundred natural ways, and totell the truth, I never caught one in the act of moving. Indeed, onlyafter frequent repetitions did the detail force itself upon me, when,having noticed one, I noticed all. It produced, however, the unpleasantimpression of a continual coming and going in the house, as though,screened cleverly and purposely from actual sight, some one in thebuilding held constant invisible intercourse with--others.
Upon detailed descriptions of these uncertain incidents I do notventure, individually so trivial, but taken all together so impressiveand so insolent. But the episode of the children, mentioned above, wasdifferent. And I give it because it showed how vividly the intuitivechild-mind received the impression--one impression, at any rate--of whatwas in the air. It may be told in a very few words. I believe they werethe coachman's children, and that the man had been in Mr. Franklyn'sservice; but of neither point am I quite positive.
I heard screaming in the rose-garden that runs along the stable walls--it was one afternoon not far from the tea-hour--and on hurrying up Ifound a little girl of nine or ten fastened with ropes to a rustic seat,and two other children--boys, one about twelve and one much younger--gathering sticks beneath the climbing rose trees. The girl was white andfrightened, but the others were laughing and talking among themselves sobusily while they picked that they did not notice my abrupt arrival.Some game, I understood, was in progress, but a game that had become tooserious for the happiness of the prisoner, for there was a fear in thegirl's eyes that was a very genuine fear indeed. I unfastened her atonce; the ropes were so loosely and clumsily knotted that they had nothurt her skin; it was not that which made her pale. She collapsed amoment upon the bench, then picked up her tiny skirts and dived away atfull speed into the safety of the stable-yard.
There was no response to my brief comforting, but she ran as though forher life, and I divined that some horrid boys' cruelty had been afoot.It was probably mere thoughtlessness, as cruelty with children usuallyis, but something in me decided to discover exactly what it was.
And the boys, not one whit alarmed at my intervention, merely laughedshyly when I explained that their prisoner had escaped, and told mefrankly what their "gime" had been. There was no vestige of shame inthem, nor any idea, of course, that they aped a monstrous reality.
That it was mere pretence was neither here nor there. To them, thoughmake-believe, it was a make-believe of something that was right andnatural and in no sense cruel. Grown-ups did it too. It was necessaryfor her good.
"We was going to burn her up, sir," the older one informed me, answeringmy "Why?" with the explanation, "Because she wouldn't believe what wewanted 'er to believe."
And, game though it was, the feeling of reality about the little episodewas so arresting, so terrific in some way, that only with difficulty didI confine my admonitions on this occasion to mere words. The boys slunkoff, frightened in their turn, yet not, I felt, convinced that they haderred in principle. It was their inheritance. They had breathed it inwith the atmosphere of their bringing-up. They would renew the salutarytorture when they could--till she "believed" as they did.
I went back into the house, afflicted with a passion of mingled pity anddistress impossible to describe, yet on my short way across the gardenwas attacked by other moods in turn, each more real and bitter than itspredecessor. I received the whole series, as it were, at once. I feltlike a diver rising to the surface through layers of water at differenttemperatures, though here the natural order was reversed, and the coolerstrata were uppermost, the heated ones below. Thus, I was caught by thegoblin touch of the willows that fringed the field; by the sensuouscurving of the twisted ash that formed a gateway to the little grove ofsapling oaks where fauns and satyrs lurked to play in the moonlightbefore Pagan altars; and by the cloaking darkness, next, of the copse ofstunted pines, close gathered each to each, where hooded figures stalkedbehind an awful cross. The episode with the children seemed to haveopened me like a knife. The whole Place rushed at me.
I suspect this synthesis of many moods produced in me that climax ofloathing and disgust which made me feel the limit of bearable emotionhad been reached, so that I made straight to find Frances in order toconvince her that at any rate I must leave. For, although this was ourlast day in the house, and we had arranged to go next day, the dread wasin me that she would still find some persuasive reason for staying on.And an unexpected incident then made my dread unnecessary. The frontdoor was open and a cab stood in the drive; a tall, elderly man wasgravely talking in the hall with the parlor maid we called theGrenadier. He held a piece of paper in his hand. "I have called to seethe house," I heard him say, as I ran up the stairs to Frances, who waspeering like an inquisitive child over the banisters....
"Yes," she told me with a sigh, I know not whether of resignation orrelief, "the house is to be let or sold. Mabel has decided. Some Societyor other, I believe--"
I was overjoyed: this made our leaving right and possible. "You nevertold me, Frances!"
"Mabel only heard of it a few days ago. She told me herself thismorning. It is a chance, she says. Alone she cannot get it 'straight'.
"Defeat?" I asked, watching her closely.
"She thinks she has found a way out. It's not a family, you see, it's aSociety, a sort of Community--they go in for thought--"
"A Community!" I gasped. "You mean religious?"
She shook her head. "Not exactly," she said smiling, "but some kind ofassociation of men and women who want a headquarters in the country--aplace where they can write and meditate--think--mature their plans andall the rest--I don't know exactly what."
"Utopian dreamers?" I asked, yet feeling an immense relief come over meas I heard. But I asked in ignorance, not cynically. Frances would know.She knew all this kind of thing.
"No, not that exactly," she smiled. "Their teachings are grand andsimple--old as the world too, really--the basis of every religion beforemen's minds perverted them with their manufactured creeds--"
Footsteps on the stairs, and the sound of voices, interrupted our oddimpromptu conversation, as the Grenadier came up, followed by the tall,grave gentleman who was being shown over the house. My sister drew mealong the corridor towards her room, where she went in and closed thedoor behind me, yet not before I had stolen a good look at the caller--long enough, at least, for his face and general appearance to have madea definite impression on me. For something strong and peaceful emanatedfrom his presence; he moved with such quiet dignity; the glance of hiseyes was so steady and reassuring, that my mind labeled him instantly asa type of man one would turn to in an emergency and not be disappointed.I had seen him but for a passing moment, but I had seen him twice, andthe way he walked down the passage, looking competently about him,conveyed the same impression as when I saw him standing at the door--fearless, tolerant, wise. "A sincere and kindly character," I judgedinstantly, "a man whom some big kind of love has trained in sweetnesstowards the world; no hate in him anywhere." A great deal, no doubt, toread in so brief a glance! Yet his voice confirmed my intuition, a deepand very gentle voice, great firmness i
n it too.
"Have I become suddenly sensitive to people's atmospheres in thisextraordinary fashion?" I asked myself, smiling, as I stood in the roomand heard the door close behind me. "Have I developed some clairvoyantfaculty here?" At any other time I should have mocked.
And I sat down and faced my sister, feeling strangely comforted and atpeace for the first time since I had stepped beneath The Towers' roof amonth ago. Frances, I then saw, was smiling a little as she watched me.
"You know him?" I asked.
"You felt it too?" was her question in reply. "No," she added, "I don'tknow him--beyond the fact that he is a leader in the Movement and hasdevoted years and money to its objects. Mabel felt the same thing in himthat you have felt--and jumped at it."
"But you've seen him before?" I urged, for the certainty was in me thathe was no stranger to her.
She shook her head. "He called one day early this week, when you wereout. Mabel saw him. I believe--" she hesitated a moment, as thoughexpecting me to stop her with my usual impatience of such subjects--"Ibelieve he has explained everything to her--the beliefs he embodies, shedeclares, are her salvation--might be, rather, if she could adopt them."
"Conversion again!" For I remembered her riches, and how gladly aSociety would gobble them.
"The layers I told you about," she continued calmly, shrugging hershoulders slightly--"the deposits that are left behind by strongthinking and real belief--but especially by ugly, hateful belief,because, you see--unfortunately there's more vital passion in thatsort--"
"Frances, I don't understand a bit," I said out loud, but said it alittle humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong uponme and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he hadsomehow introduced. The horrors had been so dreadful. My nerves,doubtless, were more than a little overstrained. Absurd as it mustsound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confidingrobins who believed in everybody and thought no evil! I laughed a momentat my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign ofpatience in me, continued more fluently.
"Of course you don't understand, Bill? Why should you? You've neverthought about such things. Needing no creed yourself, you think allcreeds are rubbish."
"I'm open to conviction--I'm tolerant," I interrupted.
"You're as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice," sheanswered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.
"Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society's beliefs?" I asked,feeling no desire to argue, "and how are they going to prove yourMabel's salvation? Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hateand ugliness?"
"Certain hope and peace," she said, "that peace which is understanding,and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore toleratesthem."
"Toleration! The one word a religious man loathes above all others! Hispet word is damnation--"
"Tolerates them," she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion,"because it includes them all."
"Fine, if true" I admitted, "very fine. But how, pray, does it includethem all?"
"Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, 'There is noreligion higher than Truth,' and it has no single dogma of any kind.Above all," she went on, "because it claims that no individual can be'lost.' It teaches universal salvation. To damn outsiders isuncivilized, childish, impure. Some take longer than others--it'saccording to the way they think and live--but all find peace, throughdevelopment, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, itregards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation--"
"Well, well," I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby horse toowildly, too roughly over me, "but what is the bearing of all this uponthis dreadful place, and upon Mabel? I'll admit that there is thisatmosphere--this--er--inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, andthat if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I'm not tooprejudiced to deny that, for I've felt it myself."
To my relief she was brief. She made her statement, leaving me to takeit or reject it as I would.
"The thought and belief its former occupants--have left behind. Forthere has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare. Thesite on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that EarlyBritain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid--the Druid stonesstill lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexesbehind the drive. The older building Sam Franklyn altered andpractically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into ameeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, thehouse was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance orvision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it,Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable--so they all have lefttheir--"
"Even so," I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, "what of it?"
"Simply this," said Frances with conviction, "that each in turn has lefthis layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because eachbelieved intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt--the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere today, thekind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts,in a word. And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damnedwith equally positive conviction the rest of the world. One and allpreached that implicitly if not explicitly. It's the root of everycreed. Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn."
I listened in amazement that increased as she went on. Up to this pointher explanation was so admirable. It was, indeed, a pretty study inpsychology if it were true.
"Then why does nothing ever happen?" I enquired mildly. "A place sothickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!"
"There lies the proof," she went on in a lowered voice, "the proof ofthe horror and the ugly reality. The thought and belief of each occupantin turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at thetime. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again themoment there's an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negativestate, believing nothing positive herself the place for the first timefound itself free to reproduce its buried stores.
"Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest--the most permanent and vitalthought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of theworld--broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back.Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. Thereresults a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, ofagonized, bitter warring to find safety, peace--salvation. The place issaturated by that appalling stream of thinking--the terror of thedamned. It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnishedthe channel of deliverance. You and I, according to our sympathy withher, were similarly involved. Nothing happened, because no one layercould ever gain the supremacy."
I was so interested--I dare not say amused--that I stared in silencewhile she paused a moment, afraid that she would draw rein and end thefairy tale too soon.
"The beliefs of this man, of his Society rather, vigorously thought andtherefore vigorously given out here, will put the whole place straight.It will act as a solvent. These vitriolic layers actively denied, willfuse and disappear in the stream of gentle, tolerant sympathy which islove. For each member, worthy of the name, loves the world, and allcreeds go into the melting-pot; Mabel, too, if she joins them out ofreal conviction, will find salvation--"
"Thinking, I know, is of the first importance," I objected, "but don'tyou, perhaps, exaggerate the power of feeling and emotion which inreligion are au fond always hysterical?"
"What is the world," she told me, "but thinking and feeling? Anindividual's world is entirely what that individual thinks and believes--interpretation. There is no other. And unless he really thinks andreally believes, he has no permanent world at all. I grant that fewpeople think, and still fewer believe, and that most take ready-madesuits and make them do. Only the strong make their own things; thelesser fry, Mabel among them, are merely swept up into what has beenmanufactured for them. They get along somehow. You and I have m
ade forourselves, Mabel has not. She is a nonentity, and when her belief istaken from her, she goes with it."
It was not in me just then to criticize the evasion, or pick out thesophistry from the truth. I merely waited for her to continue.
"None of us have Truth, my dear Frances," I ventured presently, seeingthat she kept silent.
"Precisely," she answered, "but most of us have beliefs. And what onebelieves and thinks affects the world at large. Consider the legacy ofhatred and cruelty involved in the doctrines men have built into theircreeds where the sine qua non of salvation is absolute acceptance of oneparticular set of views or else perishing everlastingly--for only byrepudiating history can they disavow it--"
"You're not quite accurate," I put in. "Not all the creeds teachdamnation, do they? Franklyn did, of course, but the others are a bitmodernized now surely?"
"Trying to get out of it," she admitted, "perhaps they are, butdamnation of unbelievers--of most of the world, that is--is their ratherfavorite idea if you talk with them."
"I never have."
She smiled. "But I have," she said significantly, "so, if you considerwhat the various occupants of this house have so strongly held andthought and believed, you need not be surprised that the influence theyhave left behind them should be a dark and dreadful legacy. For thought,you know, does leave--"
The opening of the door, to my great relief, interrupted her, as theGrenadier led in the visitor to see the room. He bowed to both of uswith a brief word of apology, looked round him, and withdrew, and withhis departure the conversation between us came naturally to an end. Ifollowed him out. Neither of us in any case, I think, cared to arguefurther.
And, so far as I am aware, the curious history of The Towers ends heretoo. There was no climax in the story sense. Nothing ever reallyhappened. We left next morning for London. I only know that the Societyin question took the house and have since occupied it to their entiresatisfaction, and that Mabel, who became a member shortly afterwards,now stays there frequently when in need of repose from the arduous andunselfish labors she took upon herself under its aegis. She dined withus only the other night, here in our tiny Chelsea flat, and a jollier,saner, more interesting and happy guest I could hardly wish for. She wasvital--in the best sense; the lay figure had come to life. I found itdifficult to believe she was the same woman whose fearful effigy hadfloated down those dreary corridors and almost disappeared in the depthsof that atrocious Shadow.
What her beliefs were now I was wise enough to leave unquestioned, andFrances, to my great relief, kept the conversation well away from suchinappropriate topics. It was clear, however, that the woman had inherself some secret source of joy, that she was now an aggressive,positive force, sure of herself, and apparently afraid of nothing inheaven or hell. She radiated something very like hope and courage abouther, and talked as though the world were a glorious place and everybodyin it kind and beautiful. Her optimism was certainly infectious.
The Towers were mentioned only in passing. The name of Marsh came up--not the Marsh, it so happened, but a name in some book that was beingdiscussed--and I was unable to restrain myself. Curiosity was toostrong. I threw out a casual enquiry Mabel could leave unanswered if shewished. But there was no desire to avoid it. Her reply was frank andsmiling.
"Would you believe it? She married," Mabel told me, though obviouslysurprised that I remembered the housekeeper at all; "and is happy as theday is long. She's found her right niche in life. A sergeant--"
"The army!" I ejaculated.
"Salvation Army," she explained merrily.
Frances exchanged a glance with me. I laughed too, for the informationtook me by surprise. I cannot say why exactly, but I expected at leastto hear that the woman had met some dreadful end, not impossibly byburning.
"And The Towers, now called the Rest House," Mabel chattered on, "seemsto me the most peaceful and delightful spot in England--"
"Really," I said politely.
"When I lived there in the old days--while you were there, perhaps,though I won't be sure."
Mabel went on, "the story got abroad that it was haunted. Wasn't it odd?A less likely place for a ghost I've never seen. Why, it had noatmosphere at all." She said this to Frances, glancing up at me with asmile that apparently had no hidden meaning. "Did you notice anythingqueer about it when you were there?"
This was plainly addressed to me.
"I found it--er--difficult to settle down to anything," I said, after aninstant's hesitation. "I couldn't work there--"
"But I thought you wrote that wonderful book on the Deaf and Blind whileyou stayed with me," she asked innocently.
I stammered a little. "Oh no, not then. I only made a few notes--er--atThe Towers. My mind, oddly enough, refused to produce at all down there.But--why do you ask? Did anything--was anything supposed to happenthere?"
She looked searchingly into my eyes a moment before she answered:
"Not that I know of," she said simply.
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