Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/170

144 MR. GRANVILLE BARKER AND AN ALIBI be no more dalliance or compromise : like Ann, he has resolved to Face the Facts. Very well. So far, so good. This is undeniably a nineteenth - century interior. That is an unmistakable top-hat. These are certainly the red-papered walls of old England. . . . And yet — there is something queer about it all. There is a certain strangeness in the air, a lack of nitrogen, a disconcerting quality of dream. If that hat of Mr. Voysey's suddenly began quietly turning somer- saults on its little red-curtained shelf, we would not feel tremendously surprised. For in the accentuated realism of these rooms there is something oddly like the bright veracity of the streets of shops in harle- quinade ; and although the characters all apparently behave with the most absolute naturalness, we watch them as though they were figures moving in a void. Why should this be so ? What invalidates the atmo- sphere? What can make a grained oak sideboard seem bizarre? Well, put quite simply, it is because these rooms are haunted. There is a skeleton in that sideboard. The characters are under a spell. They are bowed down by a strange doom that would make any home seem eerie. The true Voysey inheritance is something far more fateful than the black bequest that burdens Edward. And it is this lurking legacy, of which they never speak, that secretly moves their minds and plucks their limbs. Now this pervasive Influence — this mysterious super- Voysey — this dread ghost, diaholus ex machina — could indeed be named at once in three short words (whereat the reader makes a sporting plunge and guesses it)~ but to do so would not only be a trifle lacking in finesse, it would also be actually misleading and unfair. The correct thing to do, the safe and decent way to track him down, is to continue our staid detective tactics — proceeding now to tap the play's red-papered walls for