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.
[Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca]
