I SIGNED the deed just as the summer season ended and my boardinghouse was about to close. I went immediately to call on my new unknown neighbor. I told her I had just bought the house next door to hers, and I asked her if she could let me have a room in her house for a few weeks while I was having repairs and changes made. After a little gentle nervousness and hesitation she consented and said she thought her married daughter, Lorna Clement, who lived across the road would be willing to give me meals.
I looked with eager and interested eyes upon my new neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Douglas. I would have liked them whatever they had been, because they were the first neighbors of my own that I had ever had. They were not my family’s neighbors, but my own, Katharine’s, just as the house was my own personal enterprise. In the ardor and novelty and freshness of my joy I felt that our relationship would be something unlike what anybody else had ever achieved toward neighbors. I had an enormous faith in my own way of doing everything, now that I had begun at last. I had an idea that I could make something rare and wonderful out of whatever material I was to find. And I knew the moment I saw the Douglases that I had been lucky in the material.
Mr. Douglas had bright-blue eyes and a ringing, welcoming, cordial voice, which pealed forth in song from the Unitarian church choir every Sunday morning. He had an elegance and style of manner which for some reason usually seems incongruous in a countryman. But it was not a city elegance. He called Mrs. Douglas “Wife” when he spoke to her, just like a woodcutter in a Grimm’s fairy tale, who lives in a cottage on the edge of a forest. Most conveniently for me, however, Mr. Douglas was a farmer who sold milk and vegetables. Mrs. Douglas welcomed me with an affectionate look which was also a little vague and absent-minded. She was one of those rare, slender, middle-aged ladies in whose face and way of moving and talking you can see more clearly the very feminine young girl of the past than you can see the fifty- or sixty-year-old woman who is supposed to have taken her place. She had not acquired the thick disfiguring shell within which most of the boys and girls of a generation ago are so cleverly concealed that you can hardly believe they ever existed. With Mrs. Douglas the shell was so thin that you could look right through it and see, only slightly blurred, the soft, innocently engaging absent-minded girl. I felt drawn to her as if she had been an unprotected wistful person, although she had the protection of a devoted family and certainly did not need me. But I felt that nobody, not her family and surely not me nor any stranger, could ever get close to her, because the thing in her which made her seem young and in need of protection also made her seem far away and inaccessible. Lorna told me afterward that her mother had lost a child, her youngest, and had never recovered from the loss. When I learned that, I knew it must be the reason why she seemed the way she did. She had refused to leave the period in her life when she still had the little boy, I thought. She had stayed behind with him and therefore remained essentially young and unchanged herself, while all the rest of the family had gone on into the future and grown older.
When she and Mr. Douglas talked to me, discussing my house, and I told them my plans and asked them to tell me about carpenters and painters they knew, I was delighted to hear in their voices the inflection which I had learned to recognize as one of the unique characteristics of Castine. Their voices kept going up and down, up and down, indulgent, humorous, and persuasive, no matter what the subject of the conversation might be. The effect of this inflection is that even in the most casual remark the inhabitants of Castine always seem to be insisting gently and humorously that they want to comfort you for everything and want to excuse you for all your faults. “There, there, everything is all right, don’t you be frightened or upset about anything,” say the men’s voices, as well as the women’s voices, no matter what they are saying. I was crazy about that sound. It was just what I had been needing all my life to hear. I think of it as one of the physical elements of Castine, like the Castine air, which the inhabitants are so used to breathing that if they have to go away they discover to their surprise that they cannot breathe well in other places. In the same way they become so spoiled by the sound of reassurance in every local voice that when they go to cities they are painfully surprised by what seems like inhuman harshness or at best a very strange indifference toward them in their casual encounters with people. Even swearing sounds benevolent and loving in Castine. The men seem to put an almost feminine note of humorous, indulgent caressing into their curses, which are certainly richer and more abundant in their talk than any I ever heard before. This interesting characteristic, I thought, could only be found among people who know human nature intimately and have decided to laugh and excuse it all. I soon learned to use the accent myself in an amateur fashion and without the background of experience it implied.
On the morning when I came over to stay at Mrs. Douglas’s house, bringing all my things with me from the boardinghouse, she got me settled in my room and then she took me across the road to her daughter’s to introduce me. We had reached Lorna’s porch steps when Lorna came out of her door. She was ardent and young-looking in her early thirties. Taller than I, of course, and two or three steps above me, she leaned over to shake hands and she spoke to me in a merry excited voice that sounded like a blackbird or a robin, it was so rich and round. As she leaned over me I was aware of a sudden strong rush of feeling coming from her toward me, of compassion and sweetness. I felt that she gave me her loyal friendship then and there, wholly and without any hesitation. This amazed me, especially the compassion. As I have said already, I had a chronic sense of my own well-being and good fortune. It never occurred to me, except when I was forcibly reminded of it by something outside myself, that there was anything about me which could make anyone feel sorry for me. On that day especially I felt so lucky, so rich and enviable, that I could only regard objectively her strange compassionate warmth toward me, deciding that she possessed the kind of heart which needs to embrace and pity the whole world.
Besides, my attention was quickly all taken up with her, not myself. I knew the minute I looked at her that she was wonderful. I thought she had one of the loveliest faces I had ever seen. I told her I liked her short hair, which only rather sophisticated women had begun to wear then. She laughed with great amusement at my liking it and told me she had cut it herself that very morning because her husband wanted her to. She added vehemently that she thought it looked awful and she was dreadfully ashamed of it. I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. I was delighted with the distinguished look the straight cut gave to her already distinguished face. I noted with pleasure and pride that my neighbors the Douglases and Clements all had beautifully modeled faces. Lorna’s face might have belonged to a member of some cultivated aristocratic family in the best period of its intellectual and spiritual flowering. Her housedress and apron and her plain unassuming air filled me with wonder at the contrasts to be met with in the world.
As soon as her mother left us Lorna and I immediately began to tell each other all about ourselves like two schoolgirls. We began then the endless conversation which went on for weeks and months and years. I sat down on the woodbox in the kitchen so as to be near her and talk to her while she was moving around doing her work. My choice of the woodbox instead of the nice little rocking chair she offered struck her as being very droll and amusing. She laughed again just as she had laughed when I admired her haircut. Whenever I had a chance to perch on something higher than an ordinary chair I always did, instinctively, without thinking about what I was doing. For when I sat on an ordinary chair it reduced my face and eyes to a level much lower than that of the normal person sitting in a chair. This situation is curiously outraging to the normal sense of physical self-esteem—it gives a grown-up person a childish and inadequate feeling which I had always felt obliged to cancel by making a laborious display of a gay triumphant personality. It is much easier to sit on something higher and feel adult and debonair without so much effort. It happened that Lorna’s woodbox was just the kind of seat I liked and could feel gay on. In the happy confiding mood in which our friendship began, something about the enthusiastic manner in which I took possession of the woodbox and told Lorna that I liked it much better than a chair, without bothering to explain to her the reason or even to think about it, seemed to her delightfully capricious and amusing; and from that day on she always indulgently offered me the woodbox and I always sat on it while we talked in her kitchen. When she had finished her work we used to go into her little sitting room and sit in front of the Franklin stove, while we went on with our never-ending speculations about life and told each other old wives’ tales about people we had known.
In the beginning our point of departure was the subject of my house. I had begun to interview carpenters and painters, and I was curious to know something about the different ones I met. Lorna always had some strange, funny, or pitiful thing to tell me about the life or temperament of each one of them. Then in her eagerness to have me get acquainted with my town she would go on to tell me life histories of various other Castine characters who came into her mind because of their queerness or their tragedy or their comicalness. Then after that, as our absorbing conversations progressed day after day that first autumn, she went on to tell me about her own family, about her three brothers and her one sister and their lives. I loved to listen to her. Sometimes when she talked about people there was a suppressed intensity of feeling in her voice. Often she couldn’t seem to keep pity out of it or indignation. Most of all she couldn’t suppress something that seemed to trouble her continually, and that was the question of why such terrible things had to happen to people’s lives.
The thing that struck me as I listened to her was the loneliness of her mind. Nobody else around her thought about things the way she did, with deep passionate concern. And the curious tremor in her rich, strong voice when she talked intimately to me made me suspect that this was the first time she had ever spoken her thoughts aloud to anyone. When it was my turn I told her about my own family and friends and their lives. My effort to describe them to her made them all come vividly and dramatically into my mind, set off against the background of the little kitchen, and I grew very elated when I saw them all in my mind’s eye, arriving there the following summer in a grand bustle of eagerness to see and admire my house, and to enter with me the great new era in our lives which I believed was to be started there. I could see them walking on the brick path, or sitting on the terrace around a tea table, and glancing up, saying, “Is that Mount Desert that we see over there? And where is Ile au Haut from here?” They all looked so delightful and so interesting to me in my mind’s eye that I longed to show them to Lorna and to have her know them. I tried to describe them in such a way that they would look as interesting to her as they did to me. I told her about my artistic and literary friends, and in describing to her their characters and experiences and wanderings I felt as if I were describing something as brilliant and romantic and mad as the court life in some exotic foreign country. This was partly because she was such a wonderful listener, for she put as much intentness and ardor into hearing my stories as she did into telling me her own.
When I told her how eager I was to have her know my friends and my family and to have them know her I could not help showing a little of my private opinion as to the impression she would make on them. It gave me pleasure to anticipate what I thought would be a novel and exciting experience for her, that of being recognized and appreciated for the person she really was, a person of unusual qualities and beauty. I knew that friends of mine like Catharine Huntington and Eleanor Clement would meet her without that barrier which she was accustomed to feel between herself and people from the city. But when I tried to say anything to her about how much my friends would admire her and like to know her she recoiled as if I had said something grotesque.
“What would they want to know a thing like me for?” she would say. “No! I’ll come and see you when you’re alone, but not when there’s company. Why, I wouldn’t know what to say to people like that. What could I say that they’d want to hear? Just a plain humdrum thing like me—I haven’t got an idea in my head.”
“But just be natural,” I would plead, “the way you are with me. That is what they like best and they’re always hunting for it. They will think you are beautiful, too, the same as I do … because you are, really.”
“Oh, my goodness me! Me beautiful—!”
Her laughter would peal forth again. Her laughter startled me because it suddenly made me realize how rarely I had ever heard boisterous laughter that made a beautiful sound. Hers was like a handful of bells, shaken vigorously, once, twice, three times or more, making a delicious hypnotizing cascade of sound. There was nothing to do for a minute but listen and delight in it. There was no use to argue.
She was always stubbornly humorous whenever I tried to make her understand how rare she was. She refused to be impressed by anything I said about her. She would not budge one inch from her idea of the kind of person she was and what she was good for. I had to yield to her baffling laughter and try not to bother any more about what she might be missing and what all the others were missing who didn’t know her and never would, with her consent.
At noon and at suppertime her husband came home. His name was Alvah. He was an unreflective, boyish person, a tall, big, blue-eyed young carpenter in blue overalls. As soon as he came home he would lean over the washbasin in the kitchen washing his hands and face. Sometimes he would turn his head away from the mirror where he was combing his hair to tell us something funny he had heard, with a whimsical little boy’s smile, or to laugh at one of our stories.
They had never had a boarder before, and I was afraid at first that Alvah, although he had consented to doing it, might not enjoy having their privacy invaded. In spite of his boyishness and amiability, a certain dignity and aloofness came over him at times which frightened me. Sometimes I caught a look of rather cold shrewdness in his blue eyes as if he were sizing me up. So I found myself trying humbly to make him like me by being the little clown. I discovered it pleased him to hear ridiculous things about the summer people. I could always make him laugh by telling about Mary, and quoting her and describing some of the absurd, childish, rebellious jokes she had played on people. In the beginning it seemed to me that Alvah laughed immoderately at these stories as if he saw more in them than I did, and I felt a horrified suspicion that I was paying my way by making other people and perhaps Mary ridiculous in a way I had not intended. I suddenly thought I could hear my private little stories being passed around with loud guffaws among Alvah and his cronies. But I decided that this, if true, was only fair. None of the innocent absurdities concerning the summer people which I could hand over to the townspeople to enjoy could ever equal the number of funny stories about the townspeople, already collected and treasured and passed around by the bright, literary summer people who had been slyly at it for years.
This unexpected rapport provided our mealtimes with really great hilarity and gave us a feeling of warm joyous sympathy toward each other. I would tell some idiotic little story about a summer person, and in return they would tell me a story making one of the village people ridiculous, which had for me the same extra content of absurdity that mine had for them. The fact that we were all so generously exchanging and betraying our friends right and left made us all three laugh until we cried. Alvah must have been six feet tall, or more, and his laughter was in proportion to his size. The first terrific explosions seemed as if they would split the woodwork and break the walls; then as he gasped and groaned I used to be almost afraid to look at him. Lorna’s blackbirdlike throat poured out a laughing aria, and as for me the tears streamed down and I ached and was frightened.
When Alvah with a final sigh of exhaustion said good-by to us after dinner and went back to work, or in the evening to his Lodge meetings, Lorna and I would turn again to our old wives’ tales. Neither of us ever grew tired or indifferent to anything the other had to say, whether it was funny or contemplative. When we were alone we usually fell instinctively into the sober, wondering mood which seemed to be the natural climate of us both. When people share that particular attitude they never tire of each other. And as this attitude is one which is usually hidden, locked up inside year upon end for lack of anyone who shares it, such people are usually lonely people who never get over the miracle of having found somebody, if they ever do, who shares it.
But sooner or later in the midst of our conversations, if it were still daylight, I would feel an overwhelming desire to go to my house. Lorna always watched me go with ardent sympathy. She liked the way I felt about my house, and she never minded having our conversations interrupted for its sake. I was like a person who is in love, and Lorna understood and let me go my way, as a good friend always will. A sudden feeling would come over me and I just had to go. My eagerness to know my house was even greater than my eagerness to know my neighbors. After all, that was why I was there.