SO I began to peer among lilac bushes and old apple trees as I went along country roads looking for my house. I thought I knew the sort of house I wanted and that would be suitable for me. It would be dark and weather-beaten on the outside and have small curved windowpanes and a mossy roof. I didn’t go to any real-estate dealers because I knew they would try to force the wrong thing on me and make me horribly uncomfortable. I knew that when the destined moment came I should find my house. But it must be let alone, I thought, to happen by itself like a friendship or a love affair.
Nevertheless, I was sure that I saw it in my mind’s eye very much as it would turn out to be. Unquestionably, for me, a very small childish spinster, it should be small, something mignonne and doll-like. I had thought of an old Cape Cod cottage with a trumpet vine, or a cluster of outbuildings on some old Topsfield or Ipswich farm—a creamhouse, cobbler’s shop, and woodshed all fastened together by narrow passages and made into something fascinating and doll-size. I had once seen a house like that which its owner called The Thimbles because each building was no bigger than a thimble. After that, thimble was the word used by me and my family to describe the thing that was supposed to be suitable for me, for my size and my needs, and it was understood and approved by everybody that sooner or later I should find and buy myself a thimble. Therefore when I noticed the FOR SALE sign on a very large high square house on Penobscot Bay overlooking the Bagaduce River and the islands and the Cape Rozier hills, and when just out of casual curiosity I stepped inside to look at it, I was awestruck by the force of destiny. I didn’t recognize this huge house at all. I had never seen it in my mind’s eye. But I knew that whether I liked it or not this at last was my house. It frightened me very much. And filled me with astonishing joy, quite out of keeping with my size and my spinsterhood.
The owner’s wife showed us over it and said she didn’t know what price her husband was asking for it. My sister-in-law laughed scornfully at the idea of an unattached person like me in rather fragile health buying that enormous place. It would have been more suitable for her with her family of children. We all laughed heartily at the idea as we went roaming just for fun through those high square rooms. But I laughed with a secret terror and a secret exultation because I knew that I had met my fate. I did not tell them what I knew, however, and we stepped out of the house to all appearances as casually as we had stepped in. We thanked the woman and did not leave our names.
In spite of the fact that we did not leave our names, the pompous owner of the house came the next day to see me at my boarding-place. His wife, he said, had heard my companions call me Kitty while we were going through the house, and he had inquired everywhere until he found out who Kitty was and where she was staying. It happened that my brother and sister-in-law had gone home that morning and I was staying on alone until the end of the season. I was very thankful that they had gone when Fate called in person. It is much better that Fate should cleave its way without any futile protests except from the victim. It should be a clean-cut rendezvous à deux.
When the man told me the price of his house I thought he must be feeble-minded. But as he talked I saw that he felt contempt and hatred for the house and was not capable of understanding that it could have beauty or value for anyone. He had been trying for a long time, in his contemptuous way, to get rid of it. It had come into his possession through a business deal, and he and his wife had lived in it against their natures. They wanted a convenient little bungalow. They didn’t like fireplaces. “I am not a fireplace man,” he said, and his phrase fascinated me and puzzled me as I half listened to him. My heart was beating very fast as I turned his unbelievable price over in my mind and for a few seconds I did not speak. He went on talking persuasively, evidently thinking my silence meant that his price had frightened me. “Why, the horse-chestnut tree alone is worth a thousand dollars. You couldn’t buy it for that,” he said. My awareness of destiny on the day before had seemed fantastic to me merely on the ground that such a fine old house would be hopelessly out of the reach of a person like me, whose great ambition had been to buy only a little weather-beaten shed. Now the obstacle of money was miraculously swept away. The price was even much less than the money that I had to spend. I could not only buy the house but have enough money left over to make all the necessary changes.
When this man who was not a fireplace man was gone I knew that I must make a decision. I had never had any responsibility nor any business experience. I had never been out in the world at all, as they say. During the next few days I was in such a frightful torment that I wished I had never seen the house. It would have been so much easier to go on dreaming of a poetic little doll house. Reality is unbelievably terrifying after one has done nothing but dream.
In the daytime I saw the house as it had struck me so forcibly the first time—that is, as a promise of a new era for me, the starting point for a happier and more creative life than I had ever known. But in the middle of the night everything was reversed and I shook in my bed. It gave me a feeling of pure panic. Then I was ashamed of myself for even considering such a wild foolhardy thing. In the night the house changed into a monster that was teasing me only to lead me into some sort of fiasco from which my family would have to rescue me. I was constantly comparing the value and authenticity of this night fear with my morning confidence.
Then when my mind seemed as thick as mud, stupefied by indecision, out of it like daredevil jonquils and crocuses would spring fragile shoots of joy connected with some detail I had thought of in imagining the future life of the house. It was the same exultant joy that I always used to feel when I was beginning to write a poem. My wrists ached with the delicious ache of creative desire.
So the prospect of buying that house gave me first one and then another of those two contradictory feelings. I discovered that my decision was only a question of whether I preferred to be governed by fear or by a creative feeling, and although I was very frightened I knew I could not choose fear. The panic terrors that came in the night might scare me half to death, but I would never let them decide things for me. Then and there I invented this rule for myself to be applied to every decision I might have to make in the future. I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness, and other things being equal I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side. I think it must be a rule something like this that makes jonquils and crocuses come pushing through cold mud.
I went to a party where there was a fortuneteller reading palms. “You are going to take on a new responsibility very soon,” she told me. “The result will be that your life will become much more interesting than it has been, and your health much better.” This prophecy thrilled me through and through, like the first spoken declaration of a love which one has been only intuitively aware of until then. Still I hesitated, still deliciously hanging to the edge of the chasm. Perhaps I enjoyed that delicious agony while it lasted. It could only last a few days.
Then one evening, obsessed and indecisive still, and deeply excited, I was driving with someone, and I asked to go around the road where the house stood. I wanted to see how it looked at night. It was the last house on a dark little road that looped one end of the town. It faced a field with one end toward the road. A great horse-chestnut tree stood at the entrance where a brick path led from the road to the front door. Beyond and behind the house its fields fell away down to the tiny lighted windows and peaked roofs of Water Street, and to the harbor with its dark islands beyond. We came to the turn of the road that evening, and I saw my house facing me across the field. A yellow beam of light was shining from the fanlight over the door. That yellow beam was shining through the long white skirts of a fog, a heavy coast-of-Maine fog, the fresh dripping fog of those fir-scented islands and cold tidal rivers. For some reason, that moment was the decisive one. When I saw my benign, handsome old house that August night, wrapped in a thick Maine fog, I knew I could not wait another day.