The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a
sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night
seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths,
fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the
mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying
shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the larder.
The swallows nested in the drawing- roon; the floor was strewn
with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls; rafters were laid bare; rats carried
off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butterflies
burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the windowpane.
Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved
with long grass; giant artichokes towered among roses; a fringed carnation
flowered among the cabbages; while the gentle tapping of a weed at
the window had become, on winters' nights, a drumming from sturdy
trees and thorned briars which made the whole room green in summer.
What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of
nature? Mrs McNab's dream of a lady, of a child, of a plate of milk soup?
It had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and vanished. She
had locked the door; she had gone. It was beyond the strength of one
woman, she said. They never sent. They never wrote. There were things
up there rotting in the drawers—it was a shame to leave them so, she
said. The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the Lighthouse beam
entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall
in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the
swallow, the rat and the straw. Nothing now withstood them; nothing
said no to them. Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the
carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawingroom,
and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on
the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie
out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.
For now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles
and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed
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down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned
and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. In the ruined room,
picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying
on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks, and
the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold. Then the
roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have blotted out
path, step and window; would have grown, unequally but lustily over
the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could have told only
by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of china in the hemlock,
that here once some one had lived; there had been a house.
If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the
whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of
oblivion. But there was a force working; something not highly conscious;
something that leered, something that lurched; something not inspired to
go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting. Mrs McNab
groaned; Mrs Bast creaked. They were old; they were stiff; their legs
ached. They came with their brooms and pails at last; they got to work.
All of a sudden, would Mrs McNab see that the house was ready, one of
the young ladies wrote: would she get this done; would she get that
done; all in a hurry. They might be coming for the summer; had left
everything to the last; expected to find things as they had left them.
Slowly and painfully, with broom and pail, mopping, scouring, Mrs
McNab, Mrs Bast, stayed the corruption and the rot; rescued from the
pool of Time that was fast closing over them now a basin, now a cupboard;
fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley novels and a tea-set
one morning; in the afternoon restored to sun and air a brass fender and
a set of steel fire-irons. George, Mrs Bast's son, caught the rats, and cut
the grass. They had the builders. Attended with the creaking of hinges
and the screeching of bolts, the slamming and banging of damp-swollen
woodwork, some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place, as the
women, stooping, rising, groaning, singing, slapped and slammed, upstairs
now, now down in the cellars. Oh, they said, the work!
They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes, or in the study; breaking
off work at mid-day with the smudge on their faces, and their old
hands clasped and cramped with the broom handles. Flopped on chairs,
they contemplated now the magnificent conquest over taps and bath;
now the more arduous, more partial triumph over long rows of books,
black as ravens once, now white-stained, breeding pale mushrooms and
secreting furtive spiders. Once more, as she felt the tea warm in her, the
telescope fitted itself to Mrs McNab's eyes, and in a ring of light she saw
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the old gentleman, lean as a rake, wagging his head, as she came up with
the washing, talking to himself, she supposed, on the lawn. He never noticed
her. Some said he was dead; some said she was dead. Which was
it? Mrs Bast didn't know for certain either. The young gentleman was
dead. That she was sure. She had read his name in the papers.
There was the cook now, Mildred, Marian, some such name as that—a
red- headed woman, quick-tempered like all her sort, but kind, too, if
you knew the way with her. Many a laugh they had had together. She
saved a plate of soup for Maggie; a bite of ham, sometimes; whatever
was over. They lived well in those days. They had everything they
wanted (glibly, jovially, with the tea hot in her, she unwound her ball of
memories, sitting in the wicker arm-chair by the nursery fender). There
was always plenty doing, people in the house, twenty staying sometimes,
and washing up till long past midnight.
Mrs. Bast (she had never known them; had lived in Glasgow at that
time) wondered, putting her cup down, whatever they hung that beast's
skull there for? Shot in foreign parts no doubt.
It might well be, said Mrs McNab, wantoning on with her memories;
they had friends in eastern countries; gentlemen staying there, ladies in
evening dress; she had seen them once through the dining-room door all
sitting at dinner. Twenty she dared say all in their jewellery, and she
asked to stay help wash up, might be till after midnight.
Ah, said Mrs. Bast, they'd find it changed. She leant out of the window.
She watched her son George scything the grass. They might well ask,
what had been done to it? seeing how old Kennedy was supposed to
have charge of it, and then his leg got so bad after he fell from the cart;
and perhaps then no one for a year, or the better part of one; and then
Davie Macdonald, and seeds might be sent, but who should say if they
were ever planted? They'd find it changed.
She watched her son scything. He was a great one for work—one of
those quiet ones. Well they must be getting along with the cupboards,
she supposed. They hauled themselves up.
At last, after days of labour within, of cutting and digging without,
dusters were flicked from the windows, the windows were shut to, keys
were turned all over the house; the front door was banged; it was
finished.
And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the
mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent
music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular,
intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor
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of cut grass, disevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dorbeetle, the
squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear
strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising, but
they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the
evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters,
and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising,
quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself
down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green
suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers in the bed by the
window.
[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in
September. Mr Carmichael came by the same train.]
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