The mind shut down, images ceased to rise and flow. I read, made copious
notes, but I wrote no single line at The Towers.
Nothing completed itself there. Nothing happened.
The morning sunshine poured into the library through ten long narrow
windows; birds were singing; the autumn air, rich with a faint aroma of
November melancholy that stung the imagination pleasantly, filled my
antechamber. I looked out upon the undulating wooded landscape, hemmed
in by the sweep of distant Downs, and I tasted a whiff of the sea. Rooks
cawed as they floated above the elms, and there were lazy cows in the
nearer meadows. A dozen times I tried to make my nest and settle down to
work, and a dozen times, like a turning fastidious dog upon a hearth
rug, I rearranged my chair and books and papers. The temptation of the
Catalogue and shelves, of course, was accountable for much, yet not, I
felt, for all. That was a manageable seduction. My work, moreover, was
not of the creative kind that requires absolute absorption; it was the
mere readable presentation of data I had accumulated. My notebooks were
charged with facts ready to tabulate--facts, too, that interested me
keenly. A mere effort of the will was necessary, and concentration of no
difficult kind.
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