The House That Time Forgot
By ROBERT F. YOUNG
Illustrator SCHELUNG
For want of a better name, she called them “Obbly-Gobblies”. Thus far, the only evidence of their presence in the house had been an occasional flapping of their wings, but just the same she was certain that the term fitted them.
NODDING in the wing-back chair before the brightly blazing fire, she heard the flapping again—the dismal sweep of leathery tissue against stagnant, overheated air. “Come,” she said, “I know you don’t like me, but you are my guests you know, so the very least you can do is reveal yourselves and sit down and keep me company while you’re deciding how to dispose of me.”
She had a hunch that her hospitality disconcerted them, because no sooner had she spoken than the flapping faded away. Probably, she reflected, they were accustomed to people who shivered in their shoes at the mere thought of death, or maybe they were so used to being hated that not being hated hurt their feelings. No doubt it was difficult for them to go about their dirty work in a congenial atmosphere.
Opening her eyes, she regarded the emptiness of the room. When you live in emptiness long enough, you can see it. Elizabeth Dickenson could, anyway. Of recent years she had become quite an expert in the field of emptiness. She put on the horn rimmed spectacles which, when her eyes had started to go bad, she had resurrected from an old chest that had once belonged to her grandmother. They didn’t entirely correct her presbyopia, but they were better than no spectacles at all. Picking up the book she had been reading, she chose a page at random and let her eyes rest briefly on its all-too-familiar words—
The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love.
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WEARILY, she closed the book and let it drop to the floor beside her chair. She removed her spectacles and laid them on the yellow lap robe which she had drawn over her legs. She had heard his footsteps in the dim and distant future, and had let them go unanswered. She had never heard them again.
Flap-flap! went the melancholy wings.
She returned her gaze to the emptiness of the room. All of the furniture was gone now except her chair and her footstool, and her spool bed upstairs; but the emptiness had been there even when the rest of the furniture was present. In the beginning, she had sold the various pieces to pay her taxes; after that, she had burned them to keep warm. She had burned her books, too—save for the one that lay beside the chair. As for her bridges, she had burned them long ago. Now that the house had finally found itself, plenty of cordwood was available, but she couldn’t order cordwood and expect to pay for it by means of a checking account that hadn’t come into existence yet, and the same objection applied to the trees that stood in the yard. Presumably, she owned them, but she could hardly burn them in the fireplace or in the wood stove without first hiring someone to cut them down and saw and split them into appropriate dimensions. And besides, even assuming that she could manage to keep from freezing to death, what was to keep her from starving to death after her meager food-supply gave out? No wonder the obbly-gobblies had come!
On the mantel, a clock without hands stood. None of the other clocks in Elizabeth’s house had had hands either, before they disappeared. As for calendars, she had dispensed with them almost from the start. In a way, the house was more of a time-ship than it was a house—a time-ship in which she had set sail for the islands of the past. But the sea of time had turned out to be a dark and treacherous river, and the river had been unkind. Equally as distressing, rats of memory had crawled on board before she had cast off, and down through the years she had heard them scrabbling in the darkness of long and lonely nights. But the obbly-gobblies were going -to change all that. She liked the obbly-gobblies, Elizabeth Dickenson did.
The dismal flapping of their wings had faded away again. But she knew that they were still in the room. She could sense their presence. What were they waiting for? she wondered. She had known the minute she first heard them in the house that they had come to do her in. Why, then, did they not get on with the grisly task and have done with it? . . . She leaned back in the wing-back chair and closed her eyes. The flapping intensified. Now I lay me down to sleep, she thought, I pray the obbly-gobblies my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the obbly-globblies my soul to take…
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THE HOUSE had an interesting history. In the phase we are concerned with here (in a different phase he was to build it), Theodore Dickenson discovered it when he came to Sweet Clover in 1882 to establish the Dickenson Grain-Machinery Company, and he fell in love with it at first sight. It was large and Victorian and built of red brick, and it stood all alone about a quarter of a mile outside the village on a dirt road that would someday be known as Linden Street. On the first floor there was a spacious living room, a huge library, a majestic dining room, a commodious kitchen, and a compact pantry; on the second floor there were six big bedrooms. The cellar was roomy and dry, and the untouched grounds—there was neither driveway nor walk—would lend themselves readily to landscaping.
Upon making inquiries with a view to purchasing the place, Theodore learned a number of disconcerting facts : all of the villagers were familiar enough with the house, but none of them could remember who had built it, or when; apparently no one had lived in it for years, a circumstance which strongly suggested, to the majority of the villagers at least, that it was haunted ; in the absence of either owner or heirs, the village of Sweet Clover had legally confiscated it and was eager to sell it for a song, provided the buyer could pay cash. Needless to say, this final fact was not nearly as disconcerting as the two previous ones, and Theodore, the recent recipient of a deceased uncle’s modest fortune, wasted no time in taking advantage of the opportunity. He bought the house, plus a large lot on either side, and shortly afterward moved in with his wife Ann.
They went to work immediately on the desolate and dingy place, hiring painters, masons, and carpenters to refurbish it inside and out. Generally speaking, Victorian furniture was already losing its popularity in the year 1882, but in small towns like Sweet Clover it was still very much in vogue. Accordingly, Theodore and Ann furnished the entire house with the best Victorian pieces they could buy, supplementing them with objects d’art endemic to the era. Out of sentimentalism they retained the several pieces that had come with the house, and refinished them with loving care. In addition Theodore bought an imported harpsichord, hoping that his wife would take up music. Ann, however, gave the instrument a wide berth, and it was left all to itself in an unfrequented corner of the living room, there to gather dust and desuetude.
The Dickenson Grain Machinery Company, let it be said forthwith, was left to gather neither. Under Theodore’s shrewd generalship and despite the depression then in progress, the factory grew from an infantile sprawl of shed-like structures into a proud young plant and brought a prosperity to Sweet Clover such as the little town had never known. In 1888, as though by way of reward, Ann bore him a son, whom they named Nelson and whom Theodore began grooming to take over the business almost from the moment the child began to walk. This process continued through puberty and adolescence, and meanwhile DGM survived three more depressions and matured into one of the most stable firms in the state.
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NELSON TURNED OUT to be as shrewd a businessman as his father. In 1917, he married Nora James, a reticent girl two years his senior, but, as Theodore put it, “of good ari
stocratic stock.” It was said around Sweet Clover that the main reason Nelson married her was to enhance his chances of not being conscripted under the newly-enacted Selective Service Act, but this was unjust to say in the least. Had Theodore desired to, he could have kept all of the young men in Sweet Clover out of the army, to say nothing of his own son. In any event, Nelson did not go to war, and in 1919, when his father died suddenly of a stroke, he took over both the House of Dickenson (as it was now referred to by the villagers) and DGM. A few months later, his mother died, bringing to a close a way of life that had endured in the house for thirty-seven years.
But only partly to a close. Nelson had inherited both his father’s and his mother’s sentimentalism, and as a result he was reluctant to disturb the atmosphere of their somewhat antiquated way of living. At the same time he was reluctant to go on staying in the house without investing it with some evidence of his own existence. Theodore and Ann had resisted change insofar as it involved furniture, and for the most part the House of Dickenson was still furnished with the same Victorian pieces they had bought when they first moved in. These pieces, however, had never been allowed to fall into disrepair, and, well-built to begin with, were in as good condition now as they had been originally. Nelson loved them, each and every one, but fortunately— or unfortunately, as the case may be—there was a limit to his love. New furniture was being manufactured every day, and he and Nora certainly had as much right to buy it as their less encumbered neighbors did. Moreover, there was no real reason why they shouldn’t: it was perfectly possible to bring in the new and still retain the old, provided you used a reasonable amount of good taste and provided you weren’t afraid to be a little bit unconventional. So he and Nora began replacing some, although by no means all, of the Victorian pieces with post-WW I furniture, in each case blending in the new with the old to the maximum extent possible. The result, when they completed the project, both surprised and enchanted them. Here was not heterogeneity, but charm—the charm of two worlds tied tastefully and unobtrusively together.
In 1920, Nora gave birth to a son whom they named Byron, after her favorite poet. Byron, too, turned out to be an only child, but here any and all similarity to his father ended and similarity to his namesake began. He even looked like George
Gordon, Lord Byron; certainly, he acted like him. In fact, the only thing that disqualified him for total identification was his disinclination to write poetry. Possibly it was this sole dissimilarity that heartened Nelson; in any event, despite the depression years that presently came along he saw to it that his son learned everything there was to know about the anatomy of DGM. WW II interfered considerably with his overall plans, but did not completely dash them to the ground. Byron, as might have been expected, became a war hero; he also, as might have been expected, became involved in a fly-by-night wartime marriage that resulted in a baby girl whose custody became his and his alone when, at the end of the war, his wife left the child in a basket at the gate of the separation center where he was being processed for discharge and ran off with another man. Undaunted, Byron brought the child to the House of Dickenson and dared his parents not to love and adore it as much as he did, after which he settled down grimly and went to work at DGM, channeling his wild ways into souping up specimens of the new cars that presently began appearing on the post-war scene.
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THE child’s name was Elizabeth. From the beginning she was shy and sensitive, and, except for her father’s, preferred no one’s company to her own. Her father, she revered. It was not surprising that, living in an atmosphere predominated by antique furniture, Currier & Ives prints, and grandfather’s clocks, she should come to prefer the old to the new; nor was it surprising that she should insist on taking lessons on the harpsichord which still stood in its unfrequented corner in the living room. She took to Bach the way a duck takes to water, and she came to love both Couperin and Scarlatti. Music, however, was far from being the major passion in her young life. She had begun to read almost as soon as she had begun to talk, and at the age of nine she had penned her first poem. Twelve found her with the three heroines who were to remain with her down through the years and upon one of those lives she was to model her own: Elizabeth Barret Browning, Christina Georgina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson. Laughingly—and lovingly —her father bestowed upon her the nickname of “Elizabeth Georgina Dickinson”.
Byron did his level best at DGM, but it was obvious from the beginning that he had inherited neither his father’s nor his grandfather’s business acumen. However, this did not prevent him from inheriting the factory when, in the summer of ’60, both
Nelson and Nora drowned when Nelson’s cruiser capsized in an abrupt Lake Erie storm. Byron and sixteen-year old Elizabeth sat solemnly through church services and afterward stood solemnly in the cemetery beneath the tent that shrouded the two caskets, and when it was all over they rode solemnly back to the large and empty house. But neither of them grieved long. Byron had DGM on his shoulders now, and the unaccustomed responsibility sapped his mental and physical energies to a degree where all else seemed unreal; and as for Elizabeth, while she had loved her grandparents, the major part of her love had been— and still was—focused on her father, and she found that she could not carry her regret over their passing beyond penning a long poem in their memory. The poem finished, she penned others about more immediate subjects, and soon the summer was over and she was off to finishing school.
She had never liked regular school, and she liked finishing school even less. For one thing, it deprived her of the privacy she had come to take for granted in the House of Dickenson. There, her room had been her sanctum sanctorum, and having to share a room with two other girls was repugnant to her. However, she put up with it as best she could, penning her poetry in the dark with the aid of a small pocket torch which she flicked on after getting into bed and pulling the blankets up over her head. She wrote brief, sensitive stanzas for the most part, imagining them to be in the manner of Emily Dickinson. Happiness, she wrote one night—
I came upon you of a summer’s day
When I was dancing with my shadow.
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IN THE SUMMER of ’62, she met Matthew Pearson, the young engineer whom her father had hired to expedite production at DGM. Although young with reference to his profession, he was still ten years older than Elizabeth, and while he was an eligible enough bachelor, he wasn’t at all the sort of person someone who didn’t know her very well would have dreamed she would fall in love with. Nevertheless, fall in love with him, she did. It was her first love, and her last, and she commemorated it on the very night of their meeting with the lines,
Breasting life’s foothills I came upon him
Standing in the sun.
I had seen his eyes in the azure of autumn skies;
I had seen his hair in the blackness of winter woods.
Autumn, winter—, father seasons
Spring, I would bend thine ear!
For some time, things had been going-badly at DGM. Since settling down after the war, Byron had kept his wildness steadfastly channeled into the driving of faster and faster automobiles, and recently he had found an ideal outlet for it in the racing of his new Ferrari in the hills beyond the town. But a lack of wildness does not necessarily imply a good business head, and Byron was but little more adept in industrial strategy now than he had been the first day he had taken DGM over. The company was a victim of technological change. Before Byron hired Matthew Pearson on the recommendation of Curtis Hannock, the company’s lawyer, every operation was performed precisely as it had been performed in Nelson Dickenson’s day, and as a result, the factory was unable to compete with its modernized cousins. The necessary changes should have been instituted ten years ago, and brought about gradually; the fact that they had not been was owing not so much to Nelson’s inclination to cling to old, traditional ways as it was to Byron’s failure to lend the initiative and to come up with the new ideas which the s
ituation had required. Now, the changes needed to be made all at once, and the company’s finances were unequal to the expense. Matthew Pearson had been able to expedite operations somewhat, but, as Byron refused to act on Curtis Hannock’s advice to borrow enough money to buy and install the necessary new equipment, the firm had to limp along as best it could, picking up whatever contracts its competitors dropped in their eagerness to snare larger and more lucrative ones. The limp was rapidly becoming a shamble, more and more employees were being laid off, and Byron could be seen racing his Ferrari in the hills at more and more frequent intervals.
Elizabeth’s romance with Matthew Pearson, a one-sided affair at first, with one party penning inspired imagery and the other party totally unaware of the affair’s existence, kindled suddenly into a full-fledge flame. This came about when Matthew called at the House of Dickenson one evening to discuss a contemplated changeover at the plant with Byron. Quite by accident, he happened to be standing at the foot of the open stairway in the living room just as Elizabeth, wearing a girlish white dress, was coming down. She did not know it, for all her poetic lore, but there are times when, given the right lighting, the right moment, and the right mood, a tall, slender girl with no other claim to beauty than strong yet sensitive features and a natural grace of deportment can undergo a sort of transcendental transfiguration in the eyes of the beholder. It was so now. Matthew Pearson, newly come in out of a dismal rainy night, the warmth of the House of Dickenson rising reassuringly around him, the furniture of the House of Dickenson, its collective charm but little dimmed by the occasional modern atrocities that Byron had inserted here and there, spread out on either hand, saw a vision of loveliness that, however subjective it may have been, was destined to remain with him for the rest of his life.
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