The house stood in a level, oblong piece of land cut out of a large field by posts and wire, and separated from the road by a cheap but rustic fence. There were two other buildings of the same species within two hundred yards, all looking across the same road between elm trees to a ploughed field, many hedges, a rise of orchard land, and some heavy wooded hills at the horizon. For the sake of the houses the elms on their side had been felled and taken away. Breaking-down, temporary fowl-houses were littered about two of the gardens, which someone had begun to dig once upon a time, and even to plant and sow; but there was not a living tree in either of them.
The soil was light. There was no higher ground in the near neighbourhood, and it had therefore been chosen as the site of a square water-tank, imperfectly sequestered among elms close to the house. To the south the view was gentle and perfect, especially when the blossom snow hung in the orchards and the sky was milky soft above the dark woods of the horizon. At the lower edge of these woods stood a white house that was always mysterious, even though it was often seen from a gateway not a hundred yards distant. The Downs flowed to the north. Eastward and westward the last undulations of the Downs could be seen beyond orchards and elms.
The village clustered round a triangular green half a mile away, and in the woods on the slope from the Red Brick House down to the Green, several bigger houses half hid themselves, looking toward the far Downs and the orchard rise. Many other folds of the land held cottages in groups, farm-houses and their spreading dependencies, conical oast-houses, single or sociable, and not a few churches; yet from the Red Brick House only the White House at the wood’s edge was visible when the leaves were on the elms of the hedges, on the orchards, and on the oak and beech of the copses and greater woods.
All other houses that I have known, beautiful, plain, dear, hateful, or dull, have been somehow subdued and made spiritual houses in course of time and of memory. The Red Brick House is the only unconquerable one. To this day it remains a body, and dead. Its fires are black grates that burnt coal. Its walls are wall-paper in strips at a certain price. Its garden is still mere hard ground to be dug (and to grow chiefly the inexorable couch-grass). I saw a beautiful spring come into the world from that house: spring passed down the elms on the opposite side of the road, led one morning by a wry-neck screaming loud in the tops of the trees. Pewits came to the ploughed field beyond, and tossed in the sunny wind, as I would have done in such days of March, had I been a bird. Beautiful autumn, beautiful spring, beautiful summer, triumphed round about that building. Many days can I remember from those seasons, a February day, for example--a pale morning after a night of lashing rain, a pale, still morning. The puddles, the ruts of the cartways, the smooth surface of the winding roads, glistened in the brown, ploughed world. The Downs were clear and dark and hard under a silver-clouded blue sky, and far beyond them were the upper ridges of small mountainous clouds of a yellowish and sunlit white. Very sombre were the woods. Each thing was dark or bright; all was fresh and cold. Suddenly a bee twanged through the air to a snowdrop on the south side of the Red Brick House. Inside the house a subtle devil was refusing to let a soul enter into its walls--a subtle but a bodiless and soulless devil, negative and denying. During the nine years since it was built eight families had sojourned in the house, and had not given it a soul; nor had the several intervals of vacancy given it a ghost.