ELLEN TERHUNE
519
had oneself.'' I answered shortly, got up brusquely, and said that she
must come to my office: I would give her an examination there. She
seemed puzzled and a little displeased as if she had imagined that this
was what I had called for, and suggested that the sooner I could examine
her the better, as she felt that her condition was becoming more acute.
"I'll phone you tomorrow," I said-then feared I had slipped in my
role; they had certainly had telephones then-or now, hut had they talked
about "phoning" then? I was frightened a moment, then fortified by the
thought that my instinct had kept me straight-! was still in the actual
world. I almost smiled at the joke; hut the woman would not allow me.
She looked at me a moment seriously, as
if
she were a trifle dismayed and
even not quite sure what I meant; and I saw that she thought I had spoken
of some Wlfamiliar clinical technique. I seized the moment to shake hands
with her reassuringly and get out of the house and away.
All the way down the "drive, however, I had the illusion that her
insistence was attached to me, lengthening like a rubber hand, whose pull
I felt growing stiffer as it was thinner and thinner drawn out. At the gate
I hoped the pull would snap, hut I awaited the moment with a fear that
it might not after all bring relief: it was as if I were cheating on some
perverse obligation, leaving unfinished some ugly task. Whatever I was
leaving behind me-and I did not quite know what it was-1 was definitely
involved in that thing.
I woke up in the night in a panic: a seizure of horror and disgust
which had projected itself in a nightmare. I had thought I was in the
hallway of Ellen's house, struggling with the
tromba marina,
which I was
trying to carry upstairs. It would catch in the mahogany-stained ban–
isters in such a way that it was difficult to extricate or it would get
between my legs and cause me to fall on all fours on the heavily-carpeted
stairs. And
this
was all hound up in some way with the naked Canova
Hebe, which I had noted the day before in the hallway, though Ellen had
always kept it in a musewn-like reception room. The statue in the dream
had represented some ideal of nineteenth-century womanhood, symmetrical,
smooth and chaste, to which my clwnsy mishaps with the obsolete instru–
ments were somehow an impious affront. But then the thing took a sinister
turn. I had the bow of the
tromba TT14rina
and I was trying to do something
damaging to a modern violin: instead of using it to draw forth music, I
was jabbing it into the £-holes; I was compelled to do this, but whenever
I did, Mrs. TerhWle would shriek in a way that I felt was purposely
exaggerated-it was all, as a matter of fact, prearranged-and yet which
convicted me of hideous guilt.
I turned on the light to make sure that that woman was not with
me there, and as I looked at my green-stained woodwork and my rough–
finished plaster walls, whose leaded folding windows opened right on the
trees and the grass, I knew that a realization had been pushing to the
surface in my sleep. In that loneliness of the woods surrounding my
