The Haunting of Hill House: Chapters 4-6

Theodora was waiting for her in the hall, vivid in the dullness in gaudy plaid; looking at Theodora, it was not possible for Eleanor to believe that she ever dressed or washed or moved or ate or slept or talked without enjoying every minute of what she was doing; perhaps Theodora never cared at all what other people thought of her.

“Suppose I told you, Luke, that I would meet you clandestinely in the second-best drawing room—how would you ever know where to find me?”

The cold greens of the table tops were reflected unhappily in the dark tiles around the fireplace; the inevitable wood paneling was, here, not at all enlivened by a series of sporting prints which seemed entirely devoted to various methods of doing wild animals to death, and over the mantel a deer-head looked down upon them in patent embarrassment.

“Precisely. Have you not wondered at our extreme difficulty in finding our way around? An ordinary house would not have had the four of us in such confusion for so long, and yet time after time we choose the wrong doors, the room we want eludes us. Even I have had my troubles.”

Of course the result of all these tiny aberrations of measurement adds up to a fairly large distortion in the house as a whole.

A marble-topped table held wax flowers under glass, and the chairs were twig-thin and gilded.

One entire end of the drawing room was in possession of a marble statuary piece; against the mauve stripes and flowered carpet it was huge and grotesque and somehow whitely naked; Eleanor put her hands over her eyes, and Theodora clung to her.

“Not at all,” said Luke, finding his voice, “it’s Saint Francis curing the lepers.”

The one on the right who seems to be brandishing an ear of corn is actually telling about her lawsuit, and the other one, the little one on the end, is the companion, and the one on the other end—”

Mrs. Dudley was still for a minute and then, moving her head acquiescently, turned and walked deliberately across the kitchen to a farther doorway.

“After my vigil last night, I feel the need of a rest this afternoon, and you,” he said to Eleanor, “would do well to lie down for an hour. Perhaps a regular afternoon rest might be more comfortable for all of us.”

It’s as though she were saying it deliberately, Eleanor thought, telling the house she knows its name, calling the house to tell it where we are; is it bravado?

“And Black Michael will no doubt take over the country now in a coup d’état?”

“You carried off one of my stockings last night, and you are a thieving cad, and I hope Mrs. Dudley can hear me.”

One cannot even say that the ghost attacks the mind, because the mind, the conscious, thinking mind, is invulnerable; in all our conscious minds, as we sit here talking, there is not one iota of belief in ghosts.

She shut her eyes quickly in delight and then said demurely to the doctor, “And what do we do today?”

“Insolent graybeard,” Luke said. “Sacrificing me for a cup of coffee..."

“I entreat you to regard your lunch with the gravest suspicion.”

The writing was large and straggling and ought to have looked, Eleanor thought, as though it had been scribbled by bad boys on a fence.

“Perhaps the spirit of the poor little companion has found a means of communication at last. Maybe she was only waiting for some drab, timid—”

“‘The air is so bracing, particularly in the upstairs hall....’”

The doctor smiled a little wanly.

Does he think that I will be content with small mysticism, or will he exert himself to seem unique?

That would be humiliating, because then he would show that he knows that gallantry enchants me; will he be mysterious?

I will tell him that I can never understand such a thing, that maudlin self-pity does not move directly at my heart; I will not make a fool of myself by encouraging him to mock me.

“I am entirely selfish,” he said ruefully, “and always hoping that someone will tell me to behave, someone will make herself responsible for me and make me be grown-up.”

Honor thy father and thy mother, Daughter, authors of thy being, upon whom a heavy charge has been laid, that they lead their child in innocence and righteousness along the fearful narrow path to everlasting bliss, and render her up at last to her God a pious and a virtuous soul...

Honor thy father and thy mother, Daughter, authors of thy being, upon whom a heavy charge has been laid, that they lead their child in innocence and righteousness along the fearful narrow path to everlasting bliss, and render her up at last to her God a pious and a virtuous soul...

Honor thy father and thy mother, Daughter, authors of thy being, upon whom a heavy charge has been laid, that they lead their child in innocence and righteousness along the fearful narrow path to everlasting bliss, and render her up at last to her God a pious and a virtuous soul...

“Poor baby,” Eleanor said, and gasped as Luke turned the page; Hugh Crain’s second moral lesson derived from a color plate of a snake pit, and vividly painted snakes writhed and twisted along the page...

“Don’t look if you’re squeamish.”

“An illustration from Foxe; one of the less attractive deaths, I have always thought, although who can fathom the ways of martyrs?”

Daughter, your father has this minute touched the corner of his page to his candle, and seen the frail paper shrivel and curl in the flame; consider, Daughter, that the heat of this candle is to the everlasting fires of Hell as a grain of sand to the reaching desert, and, as this paper burns in its slight flame so shall your soul burn forever, in fire a thousandfold more keen.’

“I’ll sit over here with Nell, and if you come across any particularly edifying moral precepts you think would do me good, read them aloud.”

“I’ll sit over here with Nell, and if you come across any particularly edifying moral precepts you think would do me good, read them aloud.”

“How the poor child dared transgress...”

She made a wild, derisive gesture around the room, and for a minute, still remembering, they were all silent, as though waiting for an answer, and then the coals in the fire fell with a little crash, and the doctor looked at his watch and Luke rose.

A person angry, or laughing, or terrified, or jealous, will go stubbornly on into extremes of behavior impossible at another time; neither Eleanor nor Theodora reflected for a minute that it was imprudent for them to walk far from Hill House after dark.

Eleanor spoke first, finally; she had hurt her foot against a rock and tried to be too proud to notice it, but after a minute, her foot paining, she said, in a voice tight with the attempt to sound level, “I can’t imagine why you think you have any right to interfere in my affairs,” her language formal to prevent a flood of recrimination, or undeserved reproach (were they not strangers? cousins?).

They walked slowly, meditating, wondering, and the path sloped down from their feet and they followed, walking side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation; their feinting and hesitation done with, they could only await passively for resolution.