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In Sylvia Bailey's eyes the queer little place lacked all the elements which go to make a home; and, sitting there, in that airless, darkened dining-room, she wondered, not for the first time, why the Wachners chose to live in such a comfortless way. She glanced round her with distaste. Everything was not only cheap, but common and tawdry.
In the 'Chouans, and again in the 'Ténébreuse Affaire, he has complicated plots and counterplots entangled almost to confusion, but the reader "receives no impression of reality or life" even if these novels cannot be dismist as empty examples of "airless, elaborate mechanism."
It was all around him in the close, airless dark and in the deathly quiet light that came from the open doorway overhead. What was waiting for him there? His father, risen unimaginably loathsome from the grave? For he could never be in the dark without thinking of his father. Or something else?
At Khaila and Sief we had to be tied up, airless, in our tents, as if we left them open a minute when the crowd, tired of seeing nothing, had dispersed, and one person saw an opening, the whole multitude surged round again, pressing in, shouting and smelling so bad that we regretted our folly in having tried to get a little light and air.
A passionate scramble for food, beatings, tears, slumber, a swift transition from one childish ailment to another that kept her forever out of reach of the truant officer. She lay upon the floor in a little dark room, and through the window in the airless air-shaft, high up in one corner, she could see a three-cornered spot of light.
"But you look shipshape. Come, I'll show you your quarters." Immediately I discovered what I had suspected before; that on so small a schooner the mate took rank with the men rather than the afterguard. Cabin accommodations were of course very limited. My own lurked in the waist of the ship a tiny little airless hole. "Here's where Johnson stayed," proffered Selover.
The fire burns lower, the night wears on; outside an airless, misty moonlight hangs over park and field. Hark! was that a sound upstairs, in one of those silent empty rooms? The Squire half rises, one hand on his chair, his blanched face strained, listening. Again! Is it a footstep or simply a delusion of the ear?
There were mighty mountains of deep blue crystal looming high, and in the hollows and cracks of these crystal mountains lay silent, motionless seas of deep blue, unruffled by any breeze in this airless world. It was a world that lay frozen under a dim, dead sun. They continued over the broad sweep of the level, crystalline plain as the bleak rock disappeared behind them.
I also asked about rigging-screws in the yachting department, but learnt that they were not kept in stock; that Carey and Neilson's would certainly have them, and that their shop was in the Minories, in the far east, meaning a journey nearly as long as to Flensburg, and twice as tiresome. The last of those airless nights passed.
For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clues, receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless, elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling but insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art.
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