The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough,
and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered
it, but just as you get well underway in following, it
turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down,
and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. The outside
pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a
toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools,
budding and sprouting in endless convolutions why, that is something like it.
That is, sometimes! There is one marked peculiarity about this
paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it
changes as the light changes. When the sun shoots in through the east
window— I always watch for that first long, straight ray— it changes
so quickly that I never can quite believe it. That is why I watch it
always. By moonlight— the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—
I wouldn't know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light, in
twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes
bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.
I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight
she is subdued, quiet.
I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It
is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour. I lie down ever so much now.
John says it is good for me, and to sleep all I can. Indeed he started the
habit by making me lie down for an hour after each meal. It is a very bad
habit I am convinced, for you see I don't sleep. And that cultivates deceit,
for I don't tell them I'm awake, no! The fact is I am getting a little afraid
of John. He seems very queer sometimes, and even Jennie has an inexplicable
look. It strikes me occasionally, just as a scientific hypothesis, that perhaps
it is the paper! I have watched John when he did not know I was looking,
and come into the room suddenly on the most innocent excuses, and I've caught
him several times looking at the paper! And Jennie too. I caught Jennie with
her hand on it once. She didn't know I was in the room, and when I asked her in
a quiet, a very quiet voice, with the most restrained manner possible, what
she was doing with the paper— she turned around as if she had been caught
stealing, and looked quite angry— asked me why I should frighten her so! Then
she said that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches
on all my clothes and John's, and she wished we would be more careful!
Did not that sound innocent? But I know she was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!
