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And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm.
Sometimes, when the narrator and their partner hear that the ghostly couple has found their treasure, they go to see them, trying to discover what the spirits have found. They find only an empty house with open doors. The sentence suggests that the house is large and that no one, aside from the narrator and their partner, lives there. The wood pigeons suggest that the house is in an area with trees, and the threshing machine suggests that the farm the couple lives on or near grows some kind of grain. The bucolic world surrounding the house enhances and emphasizes the qualities of its peacefully haunted interior.
The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
Looking to catch a glimpse of the elusive ghostly couple, the narrator goes upstairs and finds only apples in the loft. This detail suggests that the setting may include an apple orchard since most people would not need a loft to store apples. The garden is what Americans would call a lawn, an inference supported by the book in the grass. The stillness of the garden also suggests that the setting is a quiet place where the narrator and their partner can read undisturbed, except by the sounds of the searching ghosts. The story’s setting is a house in the country, a setting that draws attention to life rather than to horror or death at all.
He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs.
Hundreds of years ago, when the woman of the ghostly couple dies, the man leaves the house and her to travel the world. When he returns, he finds the house “beneath the Downs.” This phrase helps readers know the actual location at which the story is set. The South Downs are a range of hills that stretch across Sussex County, in the southeast part of England. Virginia Woolf and other members of her artistic circle often traveled to Sussex as a retreat from the bustle of London. Woolf eventually settled there with her husband Leonard.
