Chapter 29 Chapter nine

The house was left behind, abandoned.It's like a lifeless shell in a dune, full of dry salt.The long night seemed to have begun; the frivolous sea breeze nibbled, and the clammy air rolled up and down as if they had won.The iron pots are rusted, and the straw mats are rotten.The toad crawled in cautiously.The flickering veil floated lazily and aimlessly to and fro.A piece of thistle stuck between the tiles in the pantry.Swallows made their nests in the drawing room; the floor was strewn with straw; plaster was peeling off in great flakes; the rafters were bare;The tortoise shell butterfly got out of its cocoon and slammed into the window pane with all its might.Poppies sowed seeds in Italian flowerbeds; The sound of the light tapping on the casements became the drumming of the strong trees, and in summer the thorny briars greened the whole room.

What power can now stand in the way of that fecundity, the insouciant fertility of nature?Could Mrs. McNab's dreams of a lady, a child, and a pot of cream soup hold back the fecundity of nature?The phantom, like a ray of sunlight, trembles across the wall and disappears.She locked the door; she walked away.She said that the house was not for a woman to take care of.They never send anyone.They never wrote.Quite a few things were rotting in the drawers—it would be a shame to waste them like that, she said.The place is run down.Only the beam of the lighthouse shone for a moment in those rooms, and it stared suddenly in the winter night at the bed and the wall, at the thistle and the swallow, the mouse and the straw.There is nothing against them now; nothing to say no to them.Let the sea breeze blow, let the poppies sow freely, and let the pink and cabbage go together.Let the swallows nest in the parlor, the thistles push back the tiles, the butterflies bask in the faded calico cushions.Let shards of glass and china lie out on the lawn, covered with tangles of grass and wild berries.

The hour has come, the hour of indecision when the night is over and the dawn still trembles, when a feather should fall on the balance and weigh down one side of the scale.Just a feather, and the sinking, collapsing house will turn over and plunge into the dark abyss.In crumbling rooms picnickers build fires and boil water; lovers come for shelter and lie on chipped paint floors; shepherds lay their lunch on bricks; A coat is wrapped around the body to keep out the cold.Then the roof will give way, and briars and hemlocks will shade paths and stone steps and windows; You can tell by a fiery red iron fence in the middle of a tree or a piece of china in a hemlock grove that someone lived here, that there was a house once.

If that feather had fallen, tipping one end of the scale slightly, the whole house would have sunk into the abyss and lay on the sand of oblivion.But there was a force at work; something involuntary, some squinting, crippled figure, something not at work inspired by solemn religious service and solemn church bells.Mrs. McNab was grumbling; Mrs. Bates was creaking about.They are old, their limbs are stiff, their backs are sore and their legs hurt.At last they came with brooms and buckets; they set to work.Suddenly Mrs. McNab got a letter from one of those young ladies asking her to clean up the house; get this ready; get that ready; in a real hurry.They might be coming for the summer; they had left everything behind at last; now they longed to see everything just as it was when they left.Mrs. McNabb and Mrs. Bates, with broom and bucket, sweeping and scouring, slow and labored, checked the process of rot and mildew: they lifted a sinking washbasin from the abyss of time, and salvaged A sinking cupboard; one morning they picked up the whole Waverley novel and a tea set from the sunken dust; that afternoon they found a brass grate and a pair of steel Stove utensils, take them out for exposure and ventilation.Mrs. Bates' son George came to catch mice and mow the grass.They invited craftsmen again.They scrub squeaky hinges and rusty latches, and refinish wooden furniture that's swollen with damp and doors that won't close.The two women stooped, straightened up, hummed, sang, clacked and dusted, slammed the door, ran upstairs and down the cellar, and the whole house seemed to be going through An extremely difficult and strenuous childbirth.Oh, they said, what a job!

Sometimes they drink tea in the bedroom or study and take a lunch break; their faces are covered with dirt, and their old hands are cramped and stretched because they have held the broom for too long.They slumped down in their chairs with a thump, thinking now of their marvelous conquest of those taps and that bathroom; now of their harder, partial triumph over the rows of books that had once been black and shiny, Both are white now, with pale mold growing, hiding sneaky spiders.She felt that the hot tea she drank made her whole body warm, and the telescope of reminiscing the past was automatically raised to Mrs. McNabb's eyes, and in the circular halo, she saw the old gentleman again, like an old gentleman. Lean and straight as a rake, he was shaking his head when she came with the laundry, and she figured he must be talking to himself on the lawn there.He never paid attention to her.Some say he is dead; others say his wife is dead.Which one is dead?Mrs. Bates was not sure either.That young master is dead, she is sure of that.She had seen his name in a newspaper list of the dead.

And now the cook is in front of me again, Madeleine?Mariana?That's what she was called anyway--a red-haired woman, irascible like all women of her kind, but kind-hearted, if you know her temper.How many times have they laughed together.She always left a pot of soup for Maggie; sometimes a slice of ham, or whatever was left over.In those years, their life was very beautiful.There was nothing short of what they needed (she drank the steaming tea and became articulate and happy, and she sat in the wicker chair by the nursery fence, the threads of her memory like a ball pulled apart like wool).There was always a lot of work to be done, and sometimes there were twenty people in the house, and she did the laundry until late at night.

Mrs. Bates (she never knew the people, she was living in Glasgow at the time) put down her teacup, wondering: why did they hang that beast's head there?They must have been shot while hunting somewhere abroad. Very likely, Mrs. McNabb said, they had some friends in the Eastern countries; her recollection went on erratically: the gentlemen stayed there, the ladies in evening dress; she saw them once from the door of the dining-room They were all sitting there eating, there were about twenty of them, and she dared say the ladies wore jewellery, and she was left to help with the washing, perhaps until well after midnight.

Ah, said Mrs. Bates, they'll find the place changed.She looked out the window and watched her son George mowing the grass.They are likely to ask: Has this lawn ever been groomed?Seeing how old Kennedy, the old gardener who used to be in charge of the lawn, has been, and how bad his legs have been since he fell off the wagon, they think: Maybe there is no one around all year, or most of the year. to tend the lawn; and David MacDonnell is here, the seeds may have been sent, but who's to say whether they've been planted or not?They must find that the place has changed. She watched her son cut the grass.He was good at his work--he was a man who kept his head down and worked quietly.Well, she guessed the craftsmen were continuing to work on the cupboard.They automatically shut down.

After a few days of hard cleaning indoors and mowing and digging outdoors, they finally brushed the casements with a feather duster, closed the windows, locked the doors of the whole house with keys, and locked the front gate. Slam shut: you're done. Now there seemed to be the faintly audible melody that had just been drowned out by the washing, brushing, mowing, mowing, that part of the intermittent music that was caught by the ear and then allowed to disappear: a bark of a dog, a bleat of a sheep, nothing at all. Irregular and intermittent, but there seems to be some connection; an insect buzzes, the mowed grass trembles, and the sounds that are separated from each other seem to belong to each other; a low, yet mysterious connection; the ear strains to bring these voices together, and nearly achieves harmony, but never quite clearly, and never in full harmony, and finally, in At dusk, these voices finally died away one by one, the harmonious melody was broken stammeringly, and silence finally came.As the sun goes down, clear outlines disappear, silence rises and spreads like mist, the wind stops, the trees are still, the whole world sways loosely, lies down and sleeps, here is dark and there is no light, only through the gaps in the leaves. A green gleam of light descending, or a pale moonlight reflected by glass windows onto white petals in a flowerbed.

(On a September evening, Lily Briscoe had her luggage brought to the front of the house.)