I WAS able to stare at him from my bed because I could turn my head from side to side. I had worn a bald spot as big as a quarter on the back of my head just from turning it to look at the people who were in the room with me, or turning it the other way to look out into the branches of the tulip tree that grew outside my window. For the doctor’s treatment consisted in my being strapped down very tight on a stretcher, on a very hard sloping bed, with my shoulders pressed against a hard pad. My head was kept from sinking down on my chest like the little locksmith’s by means of a leather halter attached to a rope which went through a pulley at the head of the bed. On the end of the rope hung a five-pound iron weight. This mechanism held me a prisoner for twenty-four hours a day, without the freedom to turn or twist my body or let my chin move out of its uptilted position in the leather halter, except to go from side to side. My back was supposed to be kept absolutely still.
I spent joyous days as most children do who are strapped into iron frames or pinned down on boards like specimen butterflies. The child who is denied his natural scope seems to develop a compensating activity on a microscopic scale. Everything small, everything near at hand, becomes magnified in its importance, and very dear and delightful to him. He gets untold pleasure out of things that ordinary people can hardly see at all.
Although my back was imprisoned, my hands and arms and mind were free. I held my pencil and pad of paper up in the air above my face, and I wrote microscopic letters and poems, and made little books of stories, and very tiny pictures. I sewed the smallest doll clothes anybody had ever seen, with the narrowest of hems and most delicious little ruffles. I painted with water colors and made paper dolls and dollhouse furniture out of paper. I loved paper, colored paper, fancy tissue, and crepe paper and ordinary white or brown paper too. The commonest substance in the world, it had for me an uncommon charm because of all the things it suggested to my mind that could be made out of it. I used to hold a piece of paper in my hands up above my face and let my eyes dwell on it in a sort of trance until, like the Japanese flowers, it would begin to bloom. Appearing on it, in my mind’s eye, some little object would take shape which to me seemed the most adorable little object in the world—a house, a box, a fan, or a screen. Then, having seen the image of it, I would put my scissors and paints and paste and fingers to work in order to bring that darling little object into being. It was surely the magic of transformation in this performance that made it so delightful, and almost awe-inspiring. Paper was the nearest thing to nothing in the way of material, and yet it was possible to make it into something that people would exclaim over and fall in love with—something that had a shape, something that opened and shut or stood up. It was something precious made out of nothing.
When my hands and arms grew tired from this close application I had my treasures to enjoy. These were numerous little objects that I loved. They were always near me, on the table beside my bed. There was my Revolutionary bullet, for instance, which one of my cousins had found in the cellar of an old house. I have no idea why I was so devoted to my bullet, except that it was interesting to feel of and to hold. It was round, and piercingly heavy in the palm of my hand in comparison to its small size, and it had a rough uneven surface, doubtless from having been turned out in haste by the rebels. To me, it had great character and importance. So much so, that with that completely idiotic disregard of appropriateness which children so often display I made a little embroidered velvet bag to keep it in, marked H. R. H. Bullet.
There was my gun-metal pencil, which somebody brought me from Paris. That, also, was most interesting to take hold of, because of its important-feeling weight in contrast to its size and compactness. It was like some valuable little instrument, rather than a mere pencil. It was a gun-metal cylinder with a brass ring in one end for a ribbon to go through, and it had three round imitation jewels, a ruby, a sapphire, and a pearl, in stubby gilt settings, which slid up and down in slits on its three sides. I pushed the ruby up the slit and out of the open end of the cylinder came a brass pencil that held a red lead. I pushed up the sapphire and the pencil with a blue lead appeared, or the pearl which held a black lead. Precious adorable thing, where are you gone, lost for so long?
Then I remember my Japanese rabbit. He was about one inch long, made of pottery, and covered with a warm gray glaze. He was hunched up into a little ball, his nose on the ground and his ears up against his back, the most compact and lovable little shape I ever saw. I liked rolling him around in the palm of my hand, then shutting my hand and hugging him tight. I would pretend he was only a pebble. When he was shut up in my hand he felt enough like one to fool anybody. Then I would open my fingers and give myself the surprise and joy of discovering that he was not a pebble at all, but a marvelous little rabbit. All over again as if I had never seen him before, I would study him and dote upon the perfect microscopic carving of his ears, eyes, nose, and whiskers.
I had a great many other Japanese things, too, thanks to Professor Morse. As I lay on my bed during my childhood I heard people talking about Japan a great deal, as if it were a newly discovered country. Professor Morse had just come back to Salem after living in Japan for many years, and I used to hear him excitedly telling my grandfather about all the things he had seen and learned there. I heard all the different grownups repeating to each other things he had told them about Japan and Japanese ways, telling about the prints and the pottery and the screens and the paper windows. More and more Japanese things kept coming into our house, and many of them came to me to use—such as rice paper, bamboo-handled paintbrushes, and bowls, and fragrant little wooden boxes. I held them in my hands, I felt them and smelled them. That fragrance! How it clung to each thing, as if it were the signature of Japan! I snuffed it in the pages of the folding books that were made of crepe paper as soft and crushable as thick silk; it was in the prints of terrible warriors and pale-faced women, and on the little pottery figures and the chopsticks; and most of all, perhaps, that sharp fragrance filled all the smooth surfaces and every crack and corner of the softly shutting little wooden boxes.
Instead of the bright colors we were accustomed to, the colors the Japanese used were subtle tones of gray and brown. These mouselike colors were as surprising as a sudden hush in a place where everybody has been shouting. They were very humble colors, the ones we ignored and despised in our own paintboxes; and that they should be chosen as favorites, as they apparently were by the Japanese people, gave them a new mysterious importance, like a code language, in which a great deal of extra meaning is packed into plain ordinary words. In fact, this delight in modesty and humbleness, so foreign to us, which marked all Japanese things, seemed to hold a secret, a hidden message that we could not fully understand. I was not the kind of a child who ever paid any attention to grown-up learned talk. So Professor Morse’s elucidation of the Japanese culture and view of life expressed by these objects went in one ear and out the other. Indeed, I was so much opposed to any troublesome mental effort that I doubt if it even came in one ear. But all my other senses were busy receiving with voluptuous joy the new experiences these objects gave me.
Because I was not able to explore and find for myself all the touching and tasting and feeling adventures that well children do as they dart on foot in every direction, I was quick to catch and cling tight to every interesting thing that came within reach of my bed, like the cannibalistic flowers that catch their food as it goes floating by. So I am grateful that Professor Morse brought treasures from Japan to our neighborhood in Salem in the nineties while I was lying there very eager and still, and that my parents in their turn brought some of the treasures to my bed for me to hold and smell until they became almost a part of me.
Besides all my treasures, of course I had certain books always near me. I had my Boutet de Monvel books which I could live in for hours, staring for a long, long time at each illustrated page, soaking up into my brain and fingers for my own future use Boutet de Monvel’s way of drawing certain things. I had books of pictures for gazing at and books of stories for reading, each one a different world I lived in—Little Women, The Counterpane Fairy, Heidi, Cranford, Alice, The Cuckoo Clock, The Child’s Garden of Verses, Lorna Doone, Don Quixote. I read also the diary of Marie Bashkirtsev, Rab and His Friends, and Marjorie Fleming, Dickens’ and Sir Walter Scott’s novels, and Shakespeare. I had the St. Nicholas Magazine which came every month, causing wild eagerness and excitement and utter satisfaction in me and my brothers. We all contributed to the St. Nicholas League, and saw our verses and drawings printed, and won gold and silver badges. There were European children in the League, as well as Americans, and through the Letter Box I began a correspondence with a Swiss girl older than myself, Yvonne Jequier. I had admired her drawings in the League because they were so expert and had a different air from the ones made by American children. Her first letter in reply to mine awed me because it was written with a gracious courteousness that sounded more like a grown-up person than a child. I read it over and over, very flattered at being addressed in such a style, and thrilled by her sweetness and good humor in carefully answering each question I had asked her about her life in the Alps, and making sympathetic and interested comments on everything that I had told her about myself. And most flattering of all, she enclosed one of her own drawings.
For companions near at hand I had my brothers, Fergus and Warren, just older than I, and my little sister, Lurana, who was very cute to draw, and docile about posing for me. We were all made of the same stuff. The boys and I were a league, ourselves—especially Warren and I. I can never forget, for instance, the day when Warren showed me that there was more than one way to draw feet. I was like the Egyptians, I had not advanced beyond the practice of always making the feet exactly alike. I made them pointed flat away from each other. Suddenly Warren crept up to me and showed me a great secret about drawing feet, which burst upon me like the dawn of a new scientific truth. After that I always did them the new way—one foot pointing straight toward me and the other pointing daintily sideways—until another great day came when I noticed and imitated the wonderful feet in Boutet de Monvel’s drawings. Another event of importance was the time when I made the stupendous discovery that brown and purple look the same by gaslight. One evening I was coloring a paper doll, and I asked to be allowed to finish it even though the gas had been lighted and it was time for me to stop. It was all done except the hair. I was allowed to finish it, and I painted the hair brown. The next morning I looked at my paper doll, and found that her hair was purple. The boys and I were thunderstruck by this discovery, and it reverberated among us for years. After that, whenever we kept on painting after the lights were lit, we looked up and solemnly cautioned each other about brown and purple, like railroad engineers warning each other about foggy conditions and faulty signals.
Sometimes other children came to play with us, but they were all rather dim. They came into my room and stood around heavily and watched what we were doing. But they didn’t have gumption or imagination enough to join us in the things we liked to do. All they could understand were games like tag and hide-and-seek, and if my brothers were absorbed in more subtle occupations up in my room these visitors would have to stand around and wait. And when finally the boys rose up and went galloping through the house or out of doors to play active games, and my little sister went rushing after them, I never felt a pang as might have been expected, nor any sense of being left behind. I must have known that I could always call them back by writing a new poem or drawing a new picture, and they would come eagerly to see it. There was no need for me to feel sad because we all so wholeheartedly took it for granted that no other amusement was really interesting compared with drawing or writing or making something. It seemed as if I were the lucky one because I could do these things all day long and never be interrupted by having somebody tell me to pick up my clothes or start for school. I was exempt from all the drudgery the others had to go through every day, and my room was like a busy studio—the natural center of the house for the others. And when they were not there I was never lonely because I always had my nurse to talk to and order about.
When strange children came into the room there would sometimes be one among them who took a ghoulish pleasure in staring at my halter and rope and whispering about it to the child next to him. Even without looking up, my brothers and I knew when this happened and it filled us with fury, with disgust and contempt for the child’s stupidity in not knowing what was important and what was not important. The first time it happened it produced a very surprising sensation in me about myself, which was like tasting a queer new taste that I didn’t know existed. Something repulsive had come into my room, something that surely had nothing to do with me. Yet the strange part of it was that the child’s staring eyes said that it had everything to do with me, they said that the repulsive thing was myself and my halter and rope. As soon as I recovered from the first shock of it I knew that the child’s eyes lied. I had been told that my name, Katharine, meant crystal, clear—from a Greek word, katharsis. And I felt inside myself, as part of me, a crystal quality, a sort of happiness that was like a spring always bubbling fresh and new. No matter if I tried I could never, inside myself, feel anything except happy and sparkling. It was constitutionally impossible for me to feel that any part of me was repulsive. So when that presence came into my room again, and always with certain children, I knew it was something which was really a part of them more than a part of me. But I could not help tasting again that queer astonished sensation about myself whenever they stared at me in that particular way of theirs which made something loathsome and fascinating out of me and the paraphernalia of my cure.
This same feeling of my own intrinsic separateness was always with me, too, when certain grown-up callers insisted on coming burblingly upstairs “to see poor little Katharine.” I could always hear them coming and I knew just what to expect. I didn’t need to be very subtle to realize from their puffing exclamations of pity and their heavily tactful asides that these visitors imagined that I was unfortunate. Under their breath I heard the gruesome word “afflicted.” Such people bored me beyond words. They didn’t seem like real living people. I knew they were not interested in me at all as Katharine, only as “poor little Katharine.” They never paid any attention to what I was drawing or making, they were blind to all the interesting treasures around me. They were not real people, surely, but just large meaningless objects that had got into my room by mistake and were very much in the way there. Ignoring everything under their noses which would have interested them if they had been alive, they could only seem to see the one thing in the room which was not interesting and not important except that it was doing me good, my halter and rope. And they would stand staring and asking questions and boring me with their stupid pity until my mother or my nurse finally led them away. The only impression, luckily, that was left on me by these visitors was disgust for their ignorance and a fresher satisfaction in my own affairs.