ON a day early in September I signed the deed, and on that great day I reached the island in my fate line and went ashore. My uneventful life began to split open, very quietly, with an invisible yet fateful movement like the opening of a seed. Sitting at a desk with a pen in my hand in Judge Patterson’s office on upper Main Street where the iron deer lurks in the shrubbery, in the town of Castine, on Penobscot Bay in the State of Maine, I felt as if I had already become an entirely new person. With the signing of that document I changed from being a trifling, detached summer boarder in that town into being one of its citizens with a house and land belonging to me. That change would have been a profound one in anybody’s life, but in mine it was epoch-making.
For I had become, prematurely—because I was much younger than the others, and absentmindedly because I had been walking in my sleep, inside my little shell of imitation grown-upness—one of the town’s summer boarders, a race of people whose lives are finished, and who therefore are treated by the real citizens with patient compassion, as though they were not quite normal or else victims of a disaster. The abnormality or the disaster that converts normal persons at some period of their lives into chronic summer boarders, and turns them into a mild sort of nuisance and responsibility which good-hearted normal people must look after in exchange for small sums of money, consists in their apparently having no homes of their own, no occupations, and, I hate to say it but I am afraid it is true, in their being people whom nobody anywhere overwhelmingly wants or needs. They are mostly ladies, not very prosperous, not very young.
The conscious demands which these frail useless beings make on the citizens are pathetically modest, and yet just because they are the kind of beings they are, so undesired and at the same time foolishly gay and eager, their presence during two months of the summer requires great patience and forbearance on the part of normal people. When the first cold September gale comes and blows them all away, like the leaves, you can almost hear a great sigh of relief from the citizens, and a sudden feeling of tranquil, homelike sensibleness and bareness settles down all over the town.
I had been one of the worst of these parasitical creatures, because although I too was rootless and had no personal responsibilities I did not have the grace to join the others in their romantic enthusiasm for the town that harbored us during the summer. They were always running about, conspicuously gushing and exclaiming how the views there were more beautiful or the air more invigorating or the walks very much nicer than in any other town where they had previously fluttered for a season. I am sure they hoped that the stolid citizens would hear them and feel properly rewarded.
I never could say these things or feel them, simply because I didn’t care for the place at all. As a summer boarder I was cold and unresponsive. I was entirely unmoved by the town’s much-talked-of appeal. Somebody had put the idea into my head that its climate might do me good, and I had come and sat in its sun and air passively waiting to be done good to. And of course I got as much out of it as any scornful and indifferent person ever gets out of anything. And naturally I always felt irritated whenever I heard the sentimental ravings of my fellow boarders concerning the particular beauty and special charm of that town. Unattached, rootless as they were, they seemed to be still moved by a youthful, pathetic instinct for attachment. They wanted, they tried so hard to belong there, while I did not perceive it even for a moment as a place I would ever take the trouble to belong to. Besides, attachment of any kind was the last thing I thought I wanted.
Therefore the change that came over me was as complete and sudden as a religious conversion. As soon as I had seen my house and land and had seized them in a powerful, willful, yet somnambulistic action, dimly yet overwhelmingly aware of what they were going to mean to me, my own instinct for attachment suddenly awoke and possessed me and became a furious ecstasy. I was like someone who, having never experienced anything more than a mild cynical flirtation, suddenly falls head over heels in love. And the town where this miracle happened to me became for me a miraculous town. Until then I had never opened my eyes there, it seemed. When I was converted I opened my eyes, and like every convert I felt as if nobody else had ever seen what I saw. I left every one of the special devotees far behind me in my extravagant admiration for the particular beauty and special charm of that town.
My town! I love it. The old possessive eagerness wells up in me now as it always does whenever the chance comes to tell about it, especially to some person who has never heard of it before. I remember, among many other times, how this happened on a homesick winter afternoon when I was leaning against a cold radiator in Creteil, a Paris suburb which lies molding in a deathly chill on the banks of the Marne. I was talking to the young Dutch painter, Kristians Tonny, when suddenly my love for that terribly distant town welled up in me, and as I tried to describe it to him I felt such a hard, desperate need for it that he was moved just listening to me, and being from a northern country too, he seemed to understand my feeling and he acted as if there were something tragic about me, a woman in exile. Sometimes even when I was sitting absorbed in my surroundings in one of the big smoky cafés in Paris it would come over me again. Then I would have to lean forward and try to describe it to anybody who happened to be with me. Then I would think with secret sympathy of the French explorers who first discovered the site of my town on the coast of the New World. Saint Castin himself might have sat moodily in a Paris café in the continual darkness and dampness of a Paris winter after his wanderings were over, and suddenly seen in his mind’s eye that brilliant coast and its luscious warm winter sun shining on snow-covered harbors and deep-blue rivers and on little purple wooded islands with rims of crumpled silver. He might have leaned forward like me in desperate homesickness and tried in vain to describe it to his companions.
I shall try again now, and probably I shall fail, as usual. The first thing about my town to me is its unique and romantic name, Castine—a name derived from the name of the discoverer Saint Castin. I cannot explain why, but the name is very important. My town could never have had the same atmosphere and the same character that it has if it were not for the sound of the name Castine. Brooksville, Winterport, Searsport, Sedgwick, Camden. Those are the names of other villages along the same coast. I like all those names, all those towns and villages. But surely there is a difference between those names and the name Castine.
The second thing about my town is its situation. That of course was what attracted and charmed Saint Castin and all the early voyagers and discoverers, and roused in them the will to possess it. First the distinguished and intelligent tribe of Indians called the Tarratines, then the seventeenth-century seigneurs, led by Saint Castin and accompanied by Jesuit priests, and then the Dutch traders, interested in furs and fish, and then the British officers and their men, and at last the Americans—all came and fought for it one after the other and left their legend and a good many of their bones behind them.
For Castine is built on a very splendid place, worth fighting for. It is on a high, wind-swept, green peninsula barricaded with granite cliffs and washed on one side by the Penobscot River where it widens into the Bay, and on the other by a winding tidal river. Nowadays Castine is reached by land over two long roads which follow the edges of the peninsula along the shore of its two rivers. One road comes from Bucksport and Orland, keeping close to the shores of the Penobscot River, and the other skirts the salt estuary whose name is the Bagaduce, from its head in the village of Penobscot, familiarly known as the Head of the Bay. Near the wide root of the peninsula a crossroad joins the two river roads, making what is called by Castine people the Twenty-Mile Square, and farther down they are joined again by a shorter crossroad where the peninsula has grown narrower approaching its tip, and that is the Ten-Mile Square. There are no other drives in Castine. The two river roads and the two crossroads are all there are. Going either way, you pass farms sloping down to the river, deep-rooted old houses with work going on around them and geraniums in the windows; you dip up and down over wonderful round roller-coaster hills; you pass little coves circled with fields; every now and then you see a small silvery-gray deserted house with its old lilac bush and apple orchard, and crossing the Ten-Mile Square you go through a piece of woods where in spring and summer you hear whippoorwills and hermit thrushes. Driving toward Castine you have a river either way you come, and either way you come you begin to feel a wildness and excitement in the sea-surrounded air that is stirring and indescribable.
The peninsula points south, and the sun rises over one river and sets over the other. My house stood on the eastern and more sheltered side, where the sun comes up over the dark beautiful Bagaduce River and the West Brooksville hills. My house stood near the top of the slope, quite high above the river.
I used to look down and see the roofs of the fishermen’s houses below me shine and steam in the morning light against the waters of the Bagaduce. Above the opposite shore I could see the delicious lilting shape of the Brooksville hills and Cape Rozier. Those rounded hills were all covered with trees, solid ranks of spruce and fir, except in one place down close to the shore where I could see against the dark background a Maine vignette in white—a little church steeple, three little white houses, and a little steamboat landing, and their still reflection in the green water below the wooden piles. The little village and its reflection across the river had the tantalizing quality of a toy scene enclosed inside a glass ball. I could almost hold it in the palm of my hand, but I could never get inside. Two or three times I went the long way round by land because I wanted so much to get there just once and to see it life-size. But through some perverse stupidity on my part I never could find the road that led down to that mysterious little church and landing, and it never once came into my mind that I could have gone over there very easily by water. I used to come back home after a long afternoon drive in search of it and stare across the water again in fond desperation. Its size was never to be altered for me, it seemed. And so again at my house, as in my bedridden childhood, I had at my side, to stare at and adore, a toy whose whole mystery and charm consisted in its wonderful littleness.
Every morning at eight o’clock and again in the afternoon a certain ancient, small, and very feminine-looking steamer, the S.S. Goldenrod, affectionately called the Rod for short, used to glide across the peaceful river to stop at the little landing and pick up a bag of mail and a passenger or two, and perhaps some article of freight. I used to like to watch the Rod lying against the wharf over there. She seemed to like it, and she would linger fifteen minutes or so before she glided back across the smooth bosom of the river to our old yellow steamboat landing, where she took on the rest of her passengers and mail and freight for the bold trip she made every day clear across the wide Bay to Belfast. The Rod was a dowdy ridiculous old lady, creaking terribly in every joint, yet she always had her gloves on and her bonnet at a jaunty angle as she went careening across the Bay, bouncing ridiculously and showing her petticoats, or else primly gliding with an air of intense propriety and self-satisfaction, according to the wind.
The Goldenrod was not by any means the largest and most impressive ship that ever came in or out of Castine. Our harbor is very deep, so deep and spacious that a whole fleet of battleships can anchor there. But for some reason battleships and great private yachts were not, in my time, particularly interested in coming to visit us. On the Fourth of July once, I remember, a battleship came and lay in the harbor and gave us a gala celebration. And usually once or twice during every summer I used to be waked up by hearing an early morning shout of excitement ring through the house, exclaiming, “Look out the window! The Corsair has come in!” Then feeling a great thrill of snobbish joy I would run to the window to drink in the sight of that inhabitant of the great world of fashion and power, lying at anchor within the circle of the round Brooksville hills. But she never stayed. We had nothing to hold her, no resident multi-millionaires, no diplomatic society. At last even the Rockland steamer, the S.S. Pemaquid, affectionately called the Quid for short, gave up coming any more because her passengers grew fewer and fewer, and after that the Rod, and the sardine boats, and the Dennetts’ motorboats taking us across to the islands on picnics and painting excursions and faithfully rescuing us in thunderstorms, and the handful of small sailboats belonging to the summer colony, were all the craft we were used to seeing in our deep, beautiful, forgotten harbor.
The village was built, of course, around the harbor, and it climbs up over the slope of the steep hill that rises above the harbor. There are Dyer’s Lane, Green Street, Pleasant Street, and Main Street, four parallel streets which go up the hill. It is a long hard pull from the bottom of the hill to the top. You think you have reached the top when you come to the corner above the post office, but you are only half-way. You have to go on past the quiet and nearly empty, square, white Colonial houses and the mustard-colored and elegant Victorian houses of the aristrocracy after you cross Court Street under the elms. Past the two Miss Witherles, each alone in an ancestral house filled with a sea captain’s treasures, past Mrs. Hooke and Mrs. William Walker, past Judge Patterson, whose office in the ell, near where the iron deer stands, is a sunny room where the smell of old law books and of a hot Franklin stove made a rich, exciting atmosphere on the crisp fall morning when I signed my deed; past Miss Lucy Grey, a lonely and refined old graduate of Wellesley, past Dr. Babcock, past Dr. Philbrook, the homeopathic doctor, who made wonderful fish-chowder suppers for his friends; and finally at the top of the hill past the house of my friend Captain Patterson, who at eighty climbed that long hill with ease twice a day, coming home to dinner and to supper all the way up from Dennett’s Wharf. Here at Captain Patterson’s house Main Street ends and the golf links begin, where the summer colony’s Victorian clubhouse stands. Here you have come to the High Road, which runs along the topmost ridge and backbone of the peninsula, and here the cold, sea-smelling wind slams against you from across the links and from across the wide stretch of water that lies between Castine and Belfast. It is a town of extremes. On summer days the bottom of Main Street is often hot and sultry while at the top there is ice in the air.
On the edge of the links you will see a series of grassy windswept mounds with a flat top and square corners, like very large graves. Those green mounds are all that is left of Fort George, built by the British when they took the peninsula during the Revolution. The boys of the present generation still know how to crawl down into the dungeon under the fort where the American drummer boy was held a prisoner all alone and kept on drumming as long as the life was in him. The drummer boy was only fourteen years old, they say, and he drummed for three days and nights until he died of hunger and thirst and exhaustion, or as some say until he was killed and eaten by enormous rats. Every year in the last week of August when the moon is full, as it was at the time he perished, you can hear him drumming again for three nights underground. By the middle of August the people of Castine begin to mention him in their conversation. “It’s almost time for the drummer boy,” they say, as if they were saying “It’s almost time for the corn to be ripe.” Intellectual ladies in the summer colony discuss him from a scholarly point of view and compare notes on who has heard him other years and exactly where and at what hour. My tall, pretty cousin Miriam heard him one summer about fifteen years ago when she was sitting in the moonlight at an evening picnic beside Moore’s Rock. She has believed in him ever since. And I remember one night when I was staying at the Brophy Cottage boardinghouse Mary Goodwin flew in there breathless and wide-eyed. She had run all the way through a short cut from the High Road between some alder bushes, hearing the drummer boy just over her shoulder with every step she took. And my niece Harriet still remembers at twenty just how the drummer boy sounds because she heard him when she was only four. Her nursemaid, a Castine girl, took her on one of those three haunted August afternoons to sit by the fort on purpose to hear him, and Harriet after sixteen years declares with sober conviction that she heard him. A serious pitying look comes into her face as she tells me how weird and frightening that sound was. I suppose there is no other sound that could be mistaken for a drumbeat under the earth. I wish that I could say that I have heard it too, but I believe in it because of the way Harriet looks when she remembers it, and because of the way Mary looked when she burst into the Brophy Cottage parlor.
The townspeople, the native citizens, believe in him of course, but he is an old story to them, and I don’t think they often think about him except at the brief time in their lives when they are young and flighty. Then the interest which some of them take in him is not exactly academic. On those three moonlight nights a handful of the craziest boys and girls of the town make him an excuse to sit up all night on the fort. They amuse themselves by daring each other to go down into the dungeon, and they roam over the links together laughing and talking in the bright moonlight, and every few yards one of them will suddenly stop and jerk all the others back. They stand still and listen and make believe they hear him. Sometimes in the midst of their irreverent horseplay one of them does hear him. Then the girls scream and laugh hysterically and start to run away from the deep shadow of the moonlit fort, and the boys catch them and won’t let them go. It is rather a wild game, in which their fear of the supernatural and their rowdy amorousness play upon each other and heighten each other as the moonlit night hours pass, and sometimes a child is born the following spring to very young and irresponsible parents who could claim the drummer boy as a sort of godfather.
Beyond Fort George and the links are the Witherle Woods, and beyond the woods are the cliffs, eighty feet high. When you come out of the woods and out onto the top of the cliffs it is like the sudden opening of a door. The wind hits you and stiffens against you with its full force and you stand and stare and marvel at the expanse of blue. It is here on the western side of the peninsula that the great Penobscot River joins the Bay, winding spaciously between high wooded shores. It is on this wind-beaten tip of the peninsula, called Dyce’s Head, where a little whitewashed lighthouse rises into the sunlight out of dark fir trees and the clang of the bell buoy is always and forever in your ears, that the summer people have their cottages. Their shingled roofs are soaked in fog and spray, and their glass-enclosed porches are pounded by an enormous wind that is almost never still. The wind gives its character to Dyce’s Head on its days of absence nearly as much as by its almost continual presence. When it veers around or drops entirely you feel what seems like a supernatural quietness taking its place. I remember how on those rare windless days I used to lie in a grassy hollow on top of the cliffs in front of the Goodwins’ cottage and soak myself in the sun, and smell the sweetness that the hot, still air brings out of the surrounding fir balsam trees. On those days the waves used to move very gently against the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs, and the bell buoy gave a slow drowsy clang, not wild and hysterical as on other days. Lying on top of the Goodwins’ cliffs was like lying on a shelf hung between the sea and the sky.
This was all I knew of Castine in the beginning—the cliffs, and the Brophy Cottage boardinghouse, and an occasional drive around the Ten-Mile Square. I was a passive and unawakened and virginal summer boarder with no attachment to anything. My eyes had never yet dwelt with faithful tenderness upon the little village on the opposite shore of the Bagaduce, and my mind had never yet imagined any such devotion to that place as was later to enrich my life. But even in my period of black ignorance I knew enough to adore the Goodwins’ cliffs. Sometimes at night, the time when it is most frightening and most wonderful to lie there in the darkness between the sea and the sky, I think I began to be dimly aware of the genius loci which inhabits Castine.
This genius loci is linked with the drummer boy, but it is much more general and all-pervasive than he is—it is a wonderful and mysterious something in the air of Castine. It is always there, but every year toward the height and fullness of summer, at the time of the drummer boy, this something seems to reach its height and fullness too. It comes at the time of year when driving at night you pass those rustling dark jungles of ripe corn which in late August seem to have sprung up overnight in the fields along the Ten-Mile Square, and when the Aurora Borealis begins to appear, like a ghostly army waving spears all over the north sky. This genius loci is a strong unseen presence, which if we were ancient Greeks would surely be given the name of a god and be honored by us with an altar in the Witherle Woods; because it is an influence which takes quite simple, everyday human beings out of themselves and astonishes them during that short, exciting season, with the sudden acquisition of many charming personal qualities they never had before. In those last sultry days and nights in August, every year, the Witherle Woods, the Goodwins’ cliffs, the shores and the fields of the Ten-Mile Square, and some of the nearer islands of Castine, are filled by a powerful invisible something which makes that peninsula more alive and more stimulating than ordinary places are. The result is a kind of intoxication among the people who happen to be there. The native-born, like the crazy boys and girls who roam the links to listen to the drummer boy, yield to it instinctively without any great change in their habits; but it is interesting to see how under its influence the behavior of hitherto conventional, cautious summer visitors can be completely disrupted and can give way to a mood of unprecedented personal allurement and joyous abandon, which they generally lose again after those two or three weeks are over. It is lovely to see in otherwise brittle and conventional people and their lives this short interval of boldness and gaiety and this incandescent glow as if some ancient primitive aphrodisiac charm were working on them. In fact, it is difficult, seeing such things happen there which never could have happened in any ordinary place, not to be struck with the idea that one of the very old pagan spirits must still cling to this place, as faithful as the drummer boy and more ancient, left over since long before the French and the Jesuit fathers came, when the Indians and their gods had it all to themselves.
When I first came there I didn’t know about the havoc that the genius loci of Castine was capable of causing. I only knew that the real summer people who owned houses there and had come year after year for many years seemed to feel and understand something more concerning their favorite town than could actually be seen. There was some kind of a hidden fascination about it which the real initiates were aware of as nobody else was. And it was a secret thing. They couldn’t speak of it, or even try to explain it to anyone else who hadn’t consciously felt it too. It was uncommunicable. The poor unattached summer boarders innocently fluttered and gushed in their devotion to it, but more than that of its potent action they never could have guessed or dreamed of. All that I myself knew in the beginning was that in the woods around the Goodwins’ house and in the wind that blew around their cliffs there was something specially exciting and wonderful.