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Extract From Rebecca' by Daphne Du Maurier

The narrator dreams of returning to Manderley, their former home. When they approach through the gate, they find the lodge is empty and the drive overgrown with encroaching woods. The once neatly maintained drive is now narrow and choked with uncontrolled plant growth. After struggling along the dilapidated path, the narrator emerges to find Manderley just as it always was, hidden in the moonlight with its symmetrical walls and lawns stretching down to the placid sea.

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Li Jeffery
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278 views

Extract From Rebecca' by Daphne Du Maurier

The narrator dreams of returning to Manderley, their former home. When they approach through the gate, they find the lodge is empty and the drive overgrown with encroaching woods. The once neatly maintained drive is now narrow and choked with uncontrolled plant growth. After struggling along the dilapidated path, the narrator emerges to find Manderley just as it always was, hidden in the moonlight with its symmetrical walls and lawns stretching down to the placid sea.

Uploaded by

Li Jeffery
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Extract

from ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne Du Maurier


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 a 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 unkept, 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.
There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey
stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green
lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, nor the
site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand. The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns
stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a
lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and
no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky.

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