Rebecca.pdf

Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier

First published in Great Britain 1938

Chapter one

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood

by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter,

for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and chain upon the

gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and

peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge

was uninhabited.

No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped

forlorn. Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with

supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before

me. The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had

always done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon

it; it was narrow and unkempt, not the drive that we had known. At first

I was puzzled and did not understand, and it was only when I bent my head

to avoid the low swinging branch of a tree that I realized what had happened.

Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy,

insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long, tenacious fingers.

The woods, always a menace even in the past, had triumphed in the end.

They crowded, dark and uncontrolled, to the borders of the drive. The

beeches with white, naked limbs leant close to one another, their branches

intermingled in a strange embrace, making a vault above my head like the

archway of a church. And there were other trees as well, trees that I

did not recognize, squat oaks and tortured elms that straggled cheek by

jowl with the beeches, and had thrust themselves out of the quiet earth,

along with monster shrubs and plants, none of which I remembered.

The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface

gone, and choked with grass and moss. The trees had thrown out low branches,

making an impediment to progress; the gnarled roots looked like skeleton

claws. Scattered here and again amongst this jungle growth I would

recognize shrubs that had been landmarks in our time, things of culture

and grace, hydrangeas whose blue heads had been famous. No hand had checked

their progress, and they had gone native now, rearing to monster height

without a bloom, black and ugly as the nameless parasites that grew beside

them.

On and on, now east now west, wound the poor thread that once had been

our drive. Sometimes I thought it lost, but it appeared again, beneath

a fallen tree perhaps, or struggling on the other side of a muddied ditch

created by the winter rains. I had not thought the way so long. Surely

the miles had multiplied, even as the trees had done, and this path led

but to a labyrinth, some choked wilderness, and not to the house at all.

I came upon it suddenly; the approach masked by the unnatural growth of

a vast shrub that spread in all directions, and I stood, my heart thumping

in my breast, the strange prick of tears behind my eyes.

There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always

been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned

windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck

the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the site itself, a jewel in the

hollow of a hand.

The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and

turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a

lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this

dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure

the clarity of this pale sky. I turned again to the house, and though

it stood inviolate, untouched, as though we ourselves had left but

yesterday, I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the

woods had done. The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and

entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a

host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard things that clung about their roots

as though conscious of their spurious origin. A lilac had mated with a

copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another the

malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils about

the pair and made them prisoners. Ivy held prior place in this lost garden,

the long strands crept across the lawns, and soon would encroach upon

the house itself. There was another plant too, some half-breed from the

woods, whose seed had been scattered long ago beneath the trees and then

forgotten, and now, marching in unison with the ivy, thrust its ugly form

like a giant rhubarb towards the soft grass where the daffodils had blown.

Nettles were everywhere, the vanguard of the army. They choked the terrace,

they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky, against the

very windows of the house. They made indifferent sentinels, for in many

places their ranks had been broken by the rhubarb plant, and they lay

with crumpled heads and listless stems, making a pathway for the rabbits.

I left the drive and went on to the terrace, for the nettles were no barrier

to me, a dreamer. I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.

Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy, even upon a dreamer's fancy.

As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the house was not

an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before.

Light came from the windows, the curtains blew softly in the night air,

and there, in the library, the door would stand half open as we had left

it, with my handkerchief on the table beside the bowl of autumn roses.

The room would bear witness to our presence. The little heap of library

books marked ready to return, and the discarded copy of The Times. Ashtrays,

with the stub of a cigarette; cushions, with the imprint of our heads

upon them, lolling in the chairs; the charred embers of our log fire still

smouldering against the morning. And Jasper, dear Jasper, with his soulful

eyes and great, sagging jowl, would be stretched upon the floor, his tail

a-thump when he heard his master's footsteps.

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like

a dark hand before a face. The illusion went with it, and the lights in

the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless

at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.

The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins.

There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking

hours I would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been,

could I have lived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden

in summer, and the birds that sang at dawn. Tea under the chestnut tree,

and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns below. I would

think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent,

they could not be dissolved. They were memories that cannot hurt. All

this I resolved in my dream, while the clouds lay across the face of the

moon, for like most sleepers I knew that I dreamed. In reality I lay many

hundred miles away in an alien land, and would wake, before many seconds

had passed, in the bare little hotel bedroom, comforting in its very lack

of atmosphere. I would sigh a moment, stretch myself and turn, and opening

my eyes, be bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky, so

different from the soft moonlight of my dream. The day would lie before

us both, long no doubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain

stillness, a dear tranquillity we had not known before. We would not talk

of Manderley, I would not tell my dream. For Manderley was ours no longer.

Manderley was no more.

Chapter two

We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too

close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would

stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length

to blind unreasoning panic - now mercifully stilled, thank God - might

in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before.

He is wonderfully patient and never complains, not even when he

remembers ... which happens, I think, rather more often than he would

have me know.

I can tell by the way he will look lost and puzzled suddenly, all expression

dying away from his dear face as though swept clean by an unseen hand,

and in its place a mask will form, a sculptured thing, formal and cold,

beautiful still but lifeless. He will fall to smoking cigarette after

cigarette, not bothering to extinguish them, and the glowing stubs will

lie around on the ground like petals. He will talk quickly and eagerly

about nothing at all, snatching at any subject as a panacea to pain. I

believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger

after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure

ordeal by fire. This we have done in full measure, ironic though it seems.

We have both known fear, and. loneliness, and very great distress. I

suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial.

We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and

we must give battle in the end. We have conquered ours, or so we believe.

The devil does not ride us any more. We have come through our crisis,

not unscathed of course. His premonition of disaster was correct from

the beginning; and like a ranting actress in an indifferent play, I might

say that we have paid for freedom. But I have had enough melodrama in

this life, and would willingly give my five senses if they could ensure

us our present peace and security. Happiness is not a possession to be

prized, it is § quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have

our moments of depression; but there are other moments too, when time,

unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and, catching his smile,

I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of

opinion makes a barrier between us.

We have no secrets now from one another. All things are shared. Granted

that our little hotel is dull, and the food indifferent, and that day

after day dawns very much the same, yet we would not have it otherwise.

We should meet too many of the people he knows in any of the big hotels.

We both appreciate simplicity, and we are sometimes bored - well, boredom

is a pleasing antidote to fear. We live very much by routine, and I -

I have developed a genius for reading aloud. The only time I have known

him show impatience is when the postman lags, for it means we must wait

another day before the arrival of our English mail. We have tried wireless,

but the noise is such an irritant, and we prefer to store up our excitement;

the result of a cricket match played many days ago means much to us.

Oh, the Test matches that have saved us from ennui, the boxing bouts,

even the billiard scores. Finals of schoolboy sports, dog racing, strange

little competitions in the remoter counties, all these are grist to our

hungry mill. Sometimes old copies of the Field come my way, and I am

transported from this indifferent island to the realities of an English

spring. I read of chalk streams, of the mayfly, of sorrel growing in green

meadows, of rooks circling above the woods as they used to do at Manderley.

The smell of wet earth comes to me from those thumbed and tattered pages,

the sour tang of moorland peat, the feel of soggy moss spattered white

in places by a heron's droppings.

Once there was an article on wood pigeons, and as I read it aloud it seemed

to me that once again I was in the deep woods at Manderley, with pigeons

fluttering above my head. I heard their soft, complacent call, so

comfortable and cool on a hot summer's afternoon, and there would be no

disturbing of their peace until Jasper came loping through the undergrowth

to find me, his damp muzzle questing the ground. Like old ladies caught

at their ablutions, the pigeons would flutter from their hiding-place,

shocked into silly agitation, and, making a monstrous to-do with their

wings, streak away from us above the tree-tops, and so out of sight and

sound. When they were gone a new silence would come upon the place, and

I - uneasy for no known reason - would realize that the sun no longer

wove a pattern on the rustling leaves, that the branches had grown darker,

the shadows longer; and back at the house there would be fresh raspberries

for tea. I would rise from my bed of bracken then, shaking the feathery

dust of last year's leaves from my skirt and whistling to Jasper, set

off towards the house, despising myself even as I walked for my hurrying

feet, my one swift glance behind.

How strange that an article on wood pigeons could so recall the past and

make me falter as I read aloud. It was the grey look on his face that

made me stop abruptly, and turn the pages until I found a paragraph on

cricket, very practical and dull - Middlesex batting on a dry wicket at

the Oval and piling up interminable dreary runs. How I blessed those solid,

flannelled figures, for in a few minutes his face had settled back into

repose, the colour had returned, and he was deriding the Surrey bowling

in healthy irritation.

We were saved a retreat into the past, and I had learnt my lesson. Read

English news, yes, and English sport, politics, and pomposity, but in

future keep the things that hurt to myself alone. They can be my secret

indulgence. Colour and scent and sound, rain and the lapping of water,

even the mists of autumn, and the smell of the flood tide, these are

memories of Manderley that will not be denied. Some people have a vice

of reading Bradshaws. They plan innumerable journeys across country for

the fun of linking up impossible connexions. My hobby is less tedious,

if as strange. I am a mine of information on the English countryside.

I know the name of every owner of every British moor, yes - and their

tenants too. I know how many grouse are killed, how many partridge, how

many head of deer. I know where trout are rising, and where the salmon

leap. I attend all meets, I follow every run. Even the names of those

who walk hound puppies are familiar to me. The state of the crops, the

price of fat cattle, the mysterious ailments of swine, I relish them all.

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