Rain (“The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”)
The image of rain is traced in the stories, especially in The Lady’s Maid’s Bell. When young Alice arrived to Brympton “it was a dull October day, with rain hanging close overhead”, adding to this the dog-cart was driving through woods, so a gloomy effect is produced. The author turns to the image of rain once more in The Lady’s Maid’s Bell to produce even gloomier effect. One day Alice met in the town a girl she knew, and she told her that something strange must have been going on in Brympton, as all the maids always leave the house. In the evening “the rain had begun again, and the drip, drip, drip seemed to be dropping into her brain.” Alice lay listening to it and thinking of what her friend had told her.
The eyes (“The eyes”)
The central image of the story The Eyes are the eyes, which follow Phil Frenham - the protagonist of the story. The eyes appear to him for the first time, when he was visiting his aunt. Phil woke up at night with a dreadful sensation of being gazed at. When he looked into the darkness of night, he saw “the eyes lingering at the foot of his bed”. The image of the eyes adds supernatural effect to the entire story “the orbits were sunk, and the thickred-lined lids hung over the eyesballs…one lid drooped a little lower than the other…and between these pulpy folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes, the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim about the pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish”. But it was not the very image of the eyes that made the protagonist sick, it was “their expression of vicious security”.
