Mrs. God by Peter Straub Page B

Standish could see Esswood’s terraces falling away into a hazy green distance. Stands of trees that might have been painted by Constable bent toward the pond at the bottom of the terraces. Everything, grass, trees, and pond, looked as if it had just been born. A windmill revolved in slow motion atop a distant hill.
    â€œIsobel’s never really been taken seriously before,” Wall said. “You’re convinced, are you, that she was a poet of the first rank? She was something other than a normal guest, you know.”
    Standish turned to face him, and the taller man edged sideways.
    â€œPerhaps it’s the wrong time for this discussion,” Wall said. “Let me show you where the Isobel Standish material is kept.”
    Standish was surprised by the extent of his desire to be left alone. Wall had insulted him twice, obscurely, and with ironic English good manners.
    â€œIt’s in the first recess, straight through and on the right.” He hesitated, as if puzzled by Standish’s sudden diffidence. The “hungry” look was very clear on his face. “Well. I suppose there’s nothing left to do but wish you luck in your research.”
    Standish thanked him.
    â€œI’ll leave you to it, then.”
    â€œFine, good, okay.”
    Wall seemed to decide not to say something that came into his mind. He nodded and walked away with what seemed a deliberate lack of hurry.
    Standish walked around the great room, trying to familiarize himself with the library as a whole. He peeked into the recesses but did not leave the central room until he thought he understood its basic organization.
    The Seneschals had laid down their library in almost geological layers. The first serious accumulation of books seemed to begin in the seventeenth century, with a strong preponderance toward religion. Shelf after shelf had been filled with theology, the Patristic writings in huge leather folios, Greek and Latin commentaries, and church histories. Bound volumes of sermons filled two shelves. In the eighteenth century, the focus of the collection shifted toward politics, geography, and natural history. The only items of literary interest amongst the volumes concerning Antipodean Flora and Parliamentary papers were complete collections of The Spectator , Johnson and Boswell, as well as various editions of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan dramatists. In the nineteenth century Esswood’s library had nearly doubled in size, and for the first time became primarily concentrated on literature. Standish idled past books by Dickens from Sketches by Boz to The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the part-numbers in which some of them had first appeared, in individual volumes, and in bound sets; past complete collections of Trollope, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Cardinal Newman, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Mrs. Gaskell, and the Brontë sisters; past ranks of The Cornhill in brown leather bindings; and Swinburne and Dowson and Oscar Wilde; and Henry James—an astonishing amount of Henry James, which took Standish up to the twentieth-century collection.
    Edith Seneschal took over around the time of The Ambassadors , Standish reckoned, and continued as the main force behind the library until a few years after the publication of The Wasteland and Ulysses . Everything in between, Georgians, Edwardians, Vorticists, Imagists, Futurists, War poets and Modernists, in little magazines, broadsides, pamphlets, chapbooks, every sort of publication possible, was represented as only a passionate collector could manage it. The approximately thirty-five years of Edith’s reign occupied as much shelf space as the whole of the nineteenth century. Afterward, the collection dwindled away to a few almost randomly selected novels—on the library’s last shelves, looking far too contemporary and almost out of place, were books by Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Isherwood, E. F. Benson. P. G.