THUS begins the story of my house, with my erratic choice of one so different from the kind I had been thinking I must and certainly would have. It was like an amazingly unsuitable marriage, and as in the case of all unsuitable marriages there was a reason back of it, or it would never have happened. Before I go on with the adventures that followed immediately I must tell what that reason was. Since the story of my house is a story of the liberation of a human being, I must tell what it was that had made me a prisoner, and that made the simple act of buying a house so significant and exciting to me.
As far back as I can remember I have been fascinated by the marvelous transformations which take place when a very simple sort of magic is applied to things. Even the most everyday transformation of something undesirable into something desirable has, to me, a tremendous magic power back of it, and it is a power which I believe in using more deliberately and often than most people do. Everyone marvels at such transformations when they come by accident, but it never seems to occur to anyone to make them happen at will. I am shocked by the ignorance and wastefulness with which persons who should know better throw away the things they do not like. They throw away experiences, people, marriages, situations, all sorts of things because they do not like them. If you throw away a thing it is gone. Where you had something you have nothing. Your hands are empty, they have nothing to work on. Whereas, almost all those things which get thrown away are capable of being worked over by a little simple magic into just the opposite of what they were. So that in the place of something you detested you have something you can adore. And you have had the most thrilling kind of experience, because nothing is more thrilling than working the magic of transformation. The reason this kind of work seems to fall into the classification of magic is because it is so easy. It is not work at all. It is, simply, magic.
This trick of changing one thing into another thing is very well-known to us in fairy tales. We are almost born knowing about it, as if it were an instinctive part of us. Because we know it so well we are always on pins and needles when the hero or heroine forgets it in the thick of disaster, strangely forgets that he or she has the talisman which was given to be used in need—in just this very moment. Then when all seems lost—suddenly out of the pocket it comes, remembered in the nick of time, as you knew it would be, and behold! evil is changed into good, danger into safety, poverty to riches. The magic of transformation! Dearest of all these changes because it is the most intimate of them all is the change from physical ugliness to beauty. First there is the cruel imprisonment of the prince or princess in an ugly shape, and then the merciful counterpart of that cruelty, when the despised creature suddenly arises in his true shape, flawless and serene. In fairy stories the hero or heroine never fails to remember the magic solution before it is too late. But most human beings never remember at all that in almost every bad situation there is the possibility of a transformation by which the undesirable may be changed into the desirable.
This is the story of such transformations, both large and small, and now in the beginning I will tell the nature of the predicament which first made this kind of magic dear to me—the predicament and the magic together which made necessary and possible at last my visit to the almond-shaped island which lay in the palm of my right hand. For of course, without a predicament, there is no need of magic.
When I was five years old I was changed from a rushing, laughing child into a bedridden, meditative one. As the years passed, my mother explained to me just what had happened, and why I had to lie so still. She told me how lucky I was that my parents were able to have me taken care of by a famous doctor. Because, without the treatment I was having, I would have had to grow up into a—well, I would have had to be, when I grew up, like the little locksmith who used to come to our house once in a while to fix locks. I knew the little locksmith, and after this, when he came, I stared at him with a very strange intimate feeling. He never looked back at me. His eyes were always down at what he was doing, and he apparently did not want to talk with or look at anybody. He was very fascinating indeed. He was not big enough to be considered a man, yet he was not a child. In the back his coat hung down from an enormous sort of peak, where the cloth was worn and shiny, between his shoulders, and he walked with a sort of bobbing motion. In front his chin was almost down on his chest, his hands were long, narrow, and delicate, and his fingers were much cleverer than most people’s fingers. There was something about him, something that was indescribably alluring to a child. Because he was more like a gnome than a human being he naturally seemed to belong to our world more than to the grown-up world. Yet he seemed to refuse to belong to our world or anybody else’s. He acted as if he lived all alone in a very private world of his own.
Somehow I knew that there was a special word that the grownups called a person shaped like the little locksmith, and I knew that to ordinary healthy grownups it was a terrible word. And the strange thing was that I, Katharine, the Butlers’ darling little girl, had barely escaped that uncanny shape and that terrible word. Because I was being taken care of by a famous doctor nobody would ever guess, when I grew up, that I might have been just like the little locksmith. Staring wonderingly at him, I knew it. I knew that compared with him I was wonderfully lucky and safe. Yet deep within me I had a feeling that underneath my luck and safeness the real truth was that I really belonged with him, even if it was never going to show. I was secretly linked with him, and I felt a strong, childish, amorous pity and desire toward him, so that there was even a queer erotic charm for me about his gray shabby clothes, the strange awful peak in his back, and his cross, unapproachable sadness which made him not look at other people, not even at me lying on my bed and staring sideways at him.