Anthology Part 2 - Whistle and I'll Come to You

Prose viewpoint and situation

Read the complete anthology extract below. Notice when Arthur feels reassured, what interrupts that reassurance and how much the ending actually resolves.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (from The Woman in Black)

By Susan Hill

[1] During the night the wind rose. As I had lain reading I had become aware of the stronger
[2] gusts that blew every so often against the casements. But when I awoke abruptly in the
[3] early hours it had increased greatly in force. The house felt like a ship at sea, battered
[4] by the gale that came roaring across the open marsh. Windows were rattling everywhere
[5] and there was the sound of moaning down all the chimneys of the house and whistling
[6] through every nook and cranny.

[7] At first I was alarmed. Then, as I lay still, gathering my wits, I reflected on how long Eel
[8] Marsh House had stood here, steady as a lighthouse, quite alone and exposed, bearing
[9] the brunt of winter after winter of gales and driving rain and sleet and spray. It was
[10] unlikely to blow away tonight. And then, those memories of childhood began to be
[11] stirred again and I dwelt nostalgically upon all those nights when I had lain in the warm
[12] and snug safety of my bed in the nursery at the top of our family house in Sussex,
[13] hearing the wind rage round like a lion, howling at the doors and beating upon the
[14] windows but powerless to reach me. I lay back and slipped into that pleasant, trance-like
[15] state somewhere between sleeping and waking, recalling the past and all its emotions
[16] and impressions vividly, until I felt I was a small boy again.

[17] Then from somewhere, out of that howling darkness, a cry came to my ears, catapulting
[18] me back into the present and banishing all tranquillity.

[19] I listened hard. Nothing. The tumult of the wind, like a banshee, and the banging and
[20] rattling of the window in its old, ill-fitting frame. Then yes, again, a cry, that familiar cry
[21] of desperation and anguish, a cry for help from a child somewhere out on the marsh.

[22] There was no child. I knew that. How could there be? Yet how could I lie here and ignore
[23] even the crying of some long-dead ghost?

[24] ‘Rest in peace,’ I thought, but this poor one did not, could not.

[25] After a few moments I got up. I would go down into the kitchen and make myself a
[26] drink, stir up the fire a little and sit beside it trying, trying to shut out that calling voice
[27] for which I could do nothing, and no one had been able to do anything for… how many
[28] years?

[29] As I went out onto the landing, Spider the dog following me at once, two things
[30] happened together. I had the impression of someone who had just that very second
[31] before gone past me on their way from the top of the stairs to one of the other rooms,
[32] and, as a tremendous blast of wind hit the house so that it all but seemed to rock at the
[33] impact, the lights went out. I had not bothered to pick up my torch from the bedside
[34] table and now I stood in the pitch blackness, unsure for a moment of my bearings.

[35] And the person who had gone by, and who was now in this house with me? I had seen
[36] no one, felt nothing. There had been no movement, no brush of a sleeve against mine,
[37] no disturbance of the air, I had not even heard a footstep. I had simply the absolutely
[38] certain sense of someone just having passed close to me and gone away down the
[39] corridor. Down the short narrow corridor that led to the nursery whose door had been so
[40] firmly locked and then, inexplicably, opened.

[41] For a moment, I actually began to conjecture¹ that there was indeed someone − another
[42] human being − living here in this house, a person who hid themselves away in that
[43] mysterious nursery and came out at night to fetch food and drink and to take the air.
[44] Perhaps it was the woman in black? Had Mrs Drablow harboured some reclusive old
[45] sister or retainer, had she left behind her a mad friend that no one had known about?
[46] My brain span all manner of wild, incoherent fantasies as I tried desperately to provide a
[47] rational explanation for the presence I had been so aware of. But then they ceased.
[48] There was no living occupant of Eel Marsh House other than myself and Samuel Daily’s
[49] dog. Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed
[50] me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not ‘real’. No. But what was
[51] ‘real’? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.

[52] The first thing I must have was a light and I groped my way back across to my bed,
[53] reached over it and got my hand to the torch at last, took a step back, stumbled over
[54] the dog who was at my heels and dropped the torch. It went spinning away across the
[55] floor and fell somewhere by the window with a crash and the faint sound of breaking
[56] glass. I cursed but managed, by crawling about on my hands and knees, to find it again
[57] and to press the switch. No light came on. The torch had broken.

[58] For a moment I was as near to weeping tears of despair and fear, frustration and
[59] tension, as I had ever been since my childhood. But instead of crying I drummed my
[60] fists upon the floorboards, in a burst of violent rage, until they throbbed.

[61] It was Spider who brought me to my senses by scratching a little at my arm and then by
[62] licking the hand I stretched out to her. We sat on the floor together and I hugged her
[63] warm body to me, glad of her, thoroughly ashamed of myself, calmer and relieved, while
[64] the wind boomed and roared without, and again and again I heard that child’s terrible
[65] cry borne on the gusts towards me.

Notes

• 1 conjecture: an opinion formed on the basis of incomplete information

Vocabulary for reading

• A banshee is a spirit whose wailing is traditionally associated with death.
• Casements are windows attached by hinges; a retainer is a long-serving attendant.

This is prose fiction. Susan Hill is the writer; Arthur Kipps is the character who narrates the experience. The repeated first-person pronoun places every sound, memory and apparent presence inside Arthur's field of awareness.

Calling Arthur simply unreliable is too blunt. He does not obviously try to deceive us: he reports his uncertainty, failed explanations and shame. A more exact judgement is that his viewpoint is restricted and increasingly destabilised. His honesty may make the experience credible, while his limitation makes it impossible to confirm from outside.

The literal movement is simple enough to hold in mind:

That arc prevents two common errors. It stops a response from retelling every event, because each event is attached to a change in awareness. It also stops analysis from remaining at the opening: the ending tests whether Arthur's earlier reassurance has survived.

Setting, memory and isolation

Hill does not make the weather frightening by attaching one fixed effect to a device. She lets Arthur build competing versions of the house.

• ship at sea makes a domestic building seem mobile, battered and unable to shelter him securely.
• The later lighthouse comparison lets Arthur imagine endurance, steadiness and survival.

Both are similes, but naming the technique does little by itself. The important movement is from danger to self-reassurance: Arthur uses figurative language as a way of reasoning with his fear. Because both comparisons describe the same house, the reader sees that his sense of safety depends on which story he can persuade himself to believe.

The storm can also be read as pathetic fallacy: its violence and the house's exposure echo Arthur's alarm, so the outer weather seems to express his inner fear. Yet the gale remains an independent physical force that batters the house; Hill keeps material danger and psychological fear entangled rather than reducing the weather to a symbol.

The setting also carries two kinds of isolation. The house is geographically quite alone and exposed, separated from help by the marsh. At the same time, the first-person viewpoint isolates Arthur inside an experience no other person can confirm.

Why the childhood memory matters

Arthur's memory of warm and snug safety is not background decoration. It interrupts the storm sequence with a brief flashback and changes his emotional position:

1. the remembered family house offers warmth, enclosure and protection;
2. Arthur becomes absorbed enough to feel like a child again;
3. the child's cry violently returns him to the present;
4. later, his near-tears and need for Spider's warmth make that childlike state consequential.

The memory therefore permits more than one reasonable reading. It genuinely calms him, yet it also lowers his defences and sharpens the contrast with Eel Marsh House. Most importantly, it allows childhood to move from a source of safety to part of the threat: the protected nursery of memory is answered by an unexplained child and a disturbing nursery in the present.

Turn topic words into complete ideas:

The isolated house, threatening weather and uncertain presence are features often associated with Gothic writing. The label helps only when it leads to precise analysis: here the weather supplies real physical danger while its almost living sounds make Arthur unsure where ordinary explanation ends.

Sound, uncertainty and the turning point

The passage is frightening before Arthur sees anything. Hill builds an acoustic setting in which weather makes human and animal sounds: it moans, whistles and roars, and Arthur compares its tumult to a banshee. These choices do not prove a supernatural presence. They make the storm sound enough like a living or ghostly being that the child's cry can belong to more than one possible world.