Her heart sprang; there, a good way off-thanks to a merciful God—it was, materialized from nowhere in a moment. She knew it at once, however far, her own young figure, her own walk, her own dress and hat-had not her first sight of it been attracted so?
changing, growing…. It was coming up at her pace—doppelgaenger, doppelgaenger—her control began to give … two… she didn’t run, lest it should, nor did it. She reached her gate, slipped through, went up the path. If it should be running very fast up the road behind her now? She was biting back the scream and fumbling for her key. Quiet, quiet! “A terrible good.” She got the key into the keyhole; she would not look back; would it click the gate or not? The door opened; and she was in, and the door banged behind her. She all but leant against it, only the doppelgaenger might be leaning similarly on the other side.
The witch figure in the book is a powerful characterisation, she gibbers extensively in a wheedling drooling manner promising in order to confound:’win us with honest trifles to betray us in matters of deepest consequence’.
“Why not?” Mrs. Sammile said. “Everything lovely in you for a perpetual companion, so that you’d never be frightened or disappointed or ashamed any more. There are tales that can give you yourself completely and the world could never treat you so badly then that you wouldn’t neglect it. One can get everything by listening or looking in the right way: there are all sorts of turns.”
One of the great effects of the writing, both Eliot and Auden were admirers, is the incantatory aspect, the falling continuous prose poetry that creates an uncanny atmosphere. C.S. Lewis was influenced by him and probably appalled too, the mixture of mystical theology, Golden Dawn theophany, all too Witch of Endor don’t you know. He was the oddest of the Inklings.
Charles Williams
I found this book on Gutenberg Australia.
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