AS soon as I set foot on my land I would stand still and look all around. I would drift a little way and then go motionless as a rock, staring like an idiot. And I would like to tell about some of the things that impressed me first. One of my new treasures which attracted my attention in the beginning was the brick path along the front of the house. It was an old brick path laid in the grass leading in from the road to my front door—a door which had a fanlight above it in whose thin old glass the light of the sea was reflected. I had been brought up in a city famous for its Georgian architecture, where fanlights and brick garden paths are found even in the slums. I had been brought up never to pass any beautiful specimen of our architecture without noticing it and admiring it. And yet our family happened never to have owned or lived in one of those Georgian houses. I could not believe at first that I myself now possessed a fanlight and a brick path, and not even in the slums or the too familiar and respectable streets of Salem, but surrounded by the enhancing light and air of a town where I was alone and free.
My predecessor had evidently not valued his brick path and he had ignored it for so long that the grass had reached over it from both sides until only the middle bricks were visible. I got Mr. Austen Bowden, the gardener, to come and cut the turf away and uncover all the bricks again. They were pink and purple and blue, and in my opinion they were extremely beautiful. Mr. Bowden found and uncovered also another branch of the path which went beyond the front door to the far corner of the dooryard. This branch had been buried not only under the grass but under the rugosa rose bushes that spread over it from the bed in front of the south sitting-room windows. After the whole path had been uncovered and restored I used to walk to the far end of it and I felt as if I were walking on a captain’s walk, because at the far end the land dropped away and the path seemed to jut out high above the harbor. I used to stand there feeling like a proud captain high on my brick path and stare humbly at the wonderful things in front of me, at the great fortune that had come to me, the dark islands and the turquoise water and the lilting motion of the Brooksville hills.
Those things were all strange and new to me that first autumn, so that I did not see them as a whole but separately. I could not see them with the same eyes as I did afterward when I had looked at them so many times that at last they became fused in an inevitable whole. The curious magic of repetition molded them together at last until they made something complete in itself, like a phrase of music, in which not a note could have been changed without destroying its meaning and its power over me.
After I had stared my fill from the path I would walk around onto the terrace behind the house. There I found another lovely door and a smooth granite doorstep to admire and to sit on. I would twist around to look up at the door while I sat on the stone. It was an old heavy one—its panels made a beautifully proportioned cross. There were fluted pilasters on each side and across the top four bubbly panes of glass. It opened out of a little square entry between the kitchen and the south sitting room.
Sitting on the comfortable warm stone I looked down across my field. Along the southern boundary a row of balm of Gilead trees made a thin screen through which I could see the roofs and chimneys of the houses down on Water Street, against the blue river. At the eastern end of the screen my land turned a corner and went in a long strip down to the water front where it ended on the beach among the fishermen’s shacks. Even out in the water I owned property. My wreck was out there. If you rowed out at low tide you could look down through the water and see it, I was told. It was a historical wreck, the British transport St. Helena which had been sunk in 1778 by American guns firing on her from Nautilus Island opposite. I was told about it first by a man named Frank Grindle whom I had hired to paint the outside of the house. Mr. Douglas told me he was very quick and wouldn’t charge as much as some of the other painters. He had an eager, nervous face, and he was a great talker. When he came down off his ladder he used to stop and talk with me, and one day he told me I owned a wreck. He said he’d often been out in his dory and reached down and got pieces of wood off her, old oak that had been so long in the water that it was as hard as a rock and black as ebony after it was carved into something and oiled and polished. Several people owned carved chairs and other things that had been made out of it. One day when he came to work he brought me one of his pieces of my wreck. He promised he would take me out in his dory at what he called the next low dreen of tide so that I might look down and see the half-buried vessel for myself.
I liked Frank Grindle because when he first began to talk to me his eyes shone with witty amusement at the idea of my being the proprietor of the St. Helena, and because he seemed to know it would amuse me too. He used to talk very fast and eagerly about other things besides—all kinds of things—and while he was talking his eyes would dwell on me with an attentive, indulgent, smiling look, somewhat as if I were a child. He told me things about himself. He told me he had been around the world, working on what he always called palace yachts, one time with a Vanderbilt and again with an Astor. That was where he learned manners, he said, and he spoke disparagingly of the bad manners he thought I would probably notice in most of the other men in town who had never been out in the world and had never learned, he said, the proper way to address a lady. He told me that after he came home from sea he got to drinking so he was drunk and a disgrace all the time, and how he had cured himself by going into the Maine woods as a lumberman and how he had hurt his thumb in the woods and amputated it himself because there was no doctor there. Very proudly he made me look at the stump so I could see what a neat job he had done. With a grin he even told me male things which would ordinarily have made me feel very shy and embarrassed. But he had a different attitude toward me from any man I had known before. There was something essentially courteous about him which I do not think he had had to learn from the Vanderbilts or the Astors, something which made everything he said or did seem natural and good. I had not yet learned that everybody in that amazing, liberated town took it for granted that every adult, married or not, was a fully experienced human being in love, even if they were not so experienced in education or manners, which require special advantages.
I asked Lorna if Frank Grindle’s stories were true. For in spite of his candor there was something extravagant and unbelievable about him. She declared that strange as they did sound they were true. He had been a terrible drunkard and since he cured himself he had never drunk again. He was a great reader as well as a talker, she said. He took four or five books a week out of the library. He liked books about science. Everybody in town believed that if he had had an education he would have been somebody. I could believe that too. There was something magnetic in his eagerness. With education he might have had a very different kind of life. I felt guilty toward him because of my own advantages, and because he was a gifted man who lacked advantages and was scarcely conscious of it, content to live out his life with his gifts undeveloped in a kind of childish obscurity.
Frank Grindle played a part in the beginning of my life there, and he played a part very near the end. After I had lived in my house several summers he told me one day how glad he always was to see the lights in my windows the first night I came back in the spring. He liked a pink lamp shade which he could see from his house at the bottom of the field. It made a rosy light, he said, and it was nice to see it after the house had stood up there dark and empty all winter. One spring morning, the next to the last year that I came back there, as I was driving along the road from Bucksport toward Castine, I was anticipating my arrival and, among all the other familiar things deliciously reawakening in my mind as I came nearer and nearer, I was thinking of how Frank Grindle would probably be pleased to see the rosy lamp that night. The first piece of news I heard as I stepped out of my car was that he had been killed an hour before. He had always been too impatient, too quick, people said, and didn’t take time enough to make his staging solid, and that morning he had just gone up on it to paint the eaves of the Castine Inn when the staging gave way and he was killed the instant he struck the ground.
The thought of him has interrupted my attempt to describe my house and land. For when I think of the first autumn, and remember myself sitting on the terrace doorstep meditating about the St. Helena, I cannot help remembering Frank Grindle too, and how he spoke and smiled. He was so alive that he is even now more vivid to me than any of the other men who worked for me at the same time—men who are still living and whom I see occasionally, still going about their business, getting a little oldish, a little grayish, and putting on spectacles when they work. That first autumn his ladder was always somewhere up against the house and he was slapping thick, white paint onto the clapboards, while I sat at a lower altitude on the terrace doorstep, enjoying the warm sense of unspoken friendship and protection surrounding me.
From the terrace my exploring gaze as it traveled slowly round my boundaries moved eastward from the strip of beach, which was scarcely visible through the balm of Gileads and the little houses between, among them Frank Grindle’s, and then came slowly up the eastern slope where I saw filling the whole horizon on my left the old leaning willows that marked the northeastern boundary.
I have always loved willows, because they are the only trees who have wantonly escaped from the classic idea of a tree; because instead of growing straight up into the air they lean sideways at all sorts of sad and desperate angles, their branches jutting out of them anywhere, like soft green spray, instead of being placed symmetrically on each side of the trunk, and because sometimes even four or five trunks grow fanwise out of one root. This waywardness in their structure gives willows a look of wild romantic abandon, as though they were changelings and held the spirits of people who have been crossed in love. I like them, too, because they can be so old, all tumble-down and rotten and apparently dead, and yet when April comes there will rise out of those black, crumbling ruins the most tender and youthful green wands, holding new leaves high in the air in great, round, soft, billowy bouquets, more expressive of spring than any other tree. Because of this wonderful mingling of agedness and tender youth willows seem to belong to a race of trees apart, one that is ancient and magic and lorn. I felt very rich and lucky indeed as I stared at my own row of willows arching down the slope. Their shapes made a wonderful decorated border against the eastern sky, of whirls and scallops and festoons, which my eyes were never to grow tired of tracing.
Just in front of the willows stood a little weather-beaten building, which I always made sure to include in each of my roaming, exploring, appreciative glances round my place. My glance not only included it without fail but always stopped for a moment or longer to give a special secret caressing thought to it, and a promise for the future. I had not forgotten that when the idea of buying a house first struck me I had believed that I wanted to buy a thimble, and nothing but a thimble—that is, a small weather-beaten outbuilding or cluster of outbuildings which I would transform into something fascinating on a doll-size scale. Afterward, when to my surprise I had bought a large and very real house on a grand scale, again to my surprise I discovered that I had also bought a thimble, without even knowing it. For, along with my house, land, brick path, fanlight, willows, and historical wreck—along with all these magnificent, incredible treasures—a thimble had been thrown in free. And a perfect thimble.
It was no mere ramshackle old shed, but a solid well-proportioned little building, containing one room with six windows and two doors, and a loft above the room. I was told by my neighbors that it had originally been a creamhouse. Later it had been used as a henhouse, but for a long time it had not been used at all. Inside, when I first looked in, was as uninviting as an ex-henhouse is likely to be. The half-open loft appeared to be stuffed with old boards and dust and cobwebs, but the dark beams were sound and the lower floor was firm and strong. After it had been thoroughly washed and scrubbed a good many times I discovered that the floor of the thimble was particularly beautiful, made as it was of very wide, old boards, curiously rich in color, mottled and stained from use and age until they had become a deep purplish brown, blending into purplish gray and dark brown.
After I had the rickety loft torn down and cleared away, the room was almost square and open to the peaked roof. I had the walls whitewashed and put in a Franklin stove, a low bench, a wicker settee, and an old stand-up desk painted blue which I found on the premises. After the loft was gone the light which came in from a square window in the western gable of the loft and the light from the four other windows made the old creamhouse all I could possibly have dreamed of in a thimble.
It is the beautiful purplish boards in the floors which I remember now with a peculiar vividness and intimacy of feeling, because I used so often later on to stare at and admire them in vacant spellbound pauses while I was writing in the thimble, lying on a low wicker settee only a few inches higher than the floor. For during the summers of my life there I became the inhabitant of the thimble for several hours each day. It was my close-fitting, protecting shell which held only me alone; I was the little, soft, amorphous, silent one who lived inside it, like a snail, and almost grew to be a part of it during those hours. When I was writing I tended to become my original shell-less, impressionable, unguarded self, the unworldly child of God who exists inside of every person, more or less imprisoned; and it was therefore necessary to acquire a shell such as my thimble for protection during those hours when one took off the protection of the outer self. Toward a sanctuary of this kind, or I suppose toward any sanctuary which shelters the spirit and allows it to be free, a love develops which has a quality of deep and intimate gratitude. This grateful love can only be felt toward a room or a house in which one spends many hours alone, for just as soon as a dwelling is shared by two or more people that intimacy is impaired. Even the best and closest human relationship will at times drive the spirit into a corner where it sits, a bewildered and forlorn captive.
When I was in my thimble, and in this impressionable state, I used to be aware of other living but nonhuman inhabitants who shared my shell with me. They were silent as I was, or their voices were too small to hear. Against those deep-purplish boards one morning I watched in shocked horror the convulsions of a chalk-white butterfly being carefully strangled by a spider, after it had flown into the web and caught its wings. I watched the spider clasp the butterfly until it shook in the orgasm of death, and its wings drooped and did not move again. The spider kept on handling it, turning it over and over on his thread until it had ceased to have any resemblance to a butterfly and was only a narrow little bundle left hanging in the web; and then the spider skated off passing by on his way another little dried package, the corpse of an earlier victim, and then disappeared under a columbine leaf outside the open door.
Almost every morning in summer when I opened the thimble door I heard a buzzing sound and found bees inside the yellow tin lantern which hung from the ceiling, and I had to struggle with them to show them the way out to freedom. The lantern was a present from my cousins, the Robsons; and when Henry Beston came on a visit at my house the first summer he made a great ceremonial business of hanging it up for me in my thimble. He went to the Dennett Brothers’ ship chandlery on Dennett’s wharf and bought some rope and a brass cleat and a pulley, and he rigged the lantern up in a highly nautical style, so that it would hang from the beam in the middle of the room and I could raise or lower it by the rope attached to the pulley. It happened that the top of the lantern had a fluted edge which made several small entrances into its interior that nobody would ever have noticed except the amorous bees who evidently notice all such entrances. For all the bees who came near the thimble on summer days mistook the lantern for a flower and they crawled through the attractive little openings and then could not find their way out again. Almost every morning when I arrived I heard their angry, impatient rumbling and I quickly lowered the lantern and opened its hinged door and urged them to realize quickly that they were free. Sometimes even on sharp fall mornings, when I came and had to build a fire in the stove before I could begin to work, there were bees in the lantern and they were cold, lying still in the bottom around the candle socket as if they were dead. As the room warmed up from the fire inside and the sun on the roof they would begin to waken, and after they had got their bearings they would sail out into the mellowing autumn day.
There was one more of these nonhuman persons who came into my thimble. A hummingbird darted in one day and flew up into the peaked roof, high above the windows and the open door by which he had come in. He flew back and forth, and back and forth, in what appeared to be a kind of frenzy of terror. I opened every window and both doors, hoping to show him that he too was free to go. He was flying high above my reach and I watched helplessly. It seemed a pity that he couldn’t see what was so simple. Finally I left him, thinking that he might do better if he were alone. When I came back several hours later he was gone. At last he had made the great discovery that what he had imagined was a prison was really open wide.
My thimble, I adored it! I planted morning-glory vines that grew up on strings over the outside. I used to look up from my work and see blue or purple silk morning-glories trembling against the edge of a window in the sun. Sometimes I used to feel and hear a brisk little wind suddenly seize the thimble in its clutch, and knock the vines against the outside walls; then the capricious little Castine wind would go away as suddenly as it had come and leave the thimble and its inhabitants in our usual stillness.
From my terrace doorstep, like the three sections of a Japanese screen, I saw on my left the willows and the thimble, in the middle the balm of Gileads and the fishermen’s houses and the Bay and the islands, and over on my right I saw my neighbors’ place, the Douglas house and barn and orchard and henhouse and manure heap. It was not a picturesque group of farm buildings. They were not old enough. The long clapboarded blank wall of the barn was a depressing object and it blocked out a large piece of the southwest horizon. But I liked it. I didn’t want to insist that everything in sight should be beautiful. I liked my neighbors’ place. The sun poured down all day long on this southern slope of ours, and I was glad that at least one of us worked on it and made it fruitful. I liked the sounds that came from the Douglas place, the sunny cry of a rooster in the morning and the hens clucking and the rattle of the milk cans. I liked the moment in the late afternoon when Mr. Douglas brought his cows home from pasture. His three Jersey cows wore sweet-sounding bells each of a different note, and as they came along the road toward the house at four o’clock every afternoon their bells would suddenly come within earshot. As the three cows came nearer, swinging slowly along from side to side, the three bells grew louder and mingled unevenly in a kind of haphazard melody that was rich and sweet in the stillness. It reached its sudden crescendo when they came into sight and crossed the road, and then as quickly it was extinguished as one by one they disappeared into the barn. It would have been beautiful to hear their bells at daybreak when they went out and away up the road, but I never heard them then because I was always deep asleep at that hour.
Because my neighbors’ day began and ended so much earlier than mine our two cycles of consciousness did not coincide at many points. And they were too busy to pay any attention to me. I got a nod and an affectionate smile from Mrs. Douglas and a cheerful shout from him and a friendly wave of the hand, if his hands were not too full, whenever we happened to see each other from our respective domains. They were perpetually busy. I would see her stepping with her quick little footsteps in and out of her henyard, and I would see him swinging a pitchfork or carrying squashes in from the autumn garden or bringing in his full milk pails at night. I knew I did not need to fear that I would ever be intruded upon or disturbed by neighbors whose life consisted of such an endless round of work as theirs.
I felt proud of my neighbors because of the way their life contrasted with the life of the summer people. They had useful feet and legs that carried them around all day, their hands knew how to deal with fundamental things, with the ground and seeds and tools and animals. I knew that if I had had summer cottagers next door our overstimulated brains and our useless hands and feet would have contrived to build up between us an elaborate awareness of each other from which there would be no rest. When I saw the Douglases going about their business, looking so refreshingly unaware of themselves and of me, I knew that I could go about my business with the same freedom as they did for all they would ever notice or care. With them for neighbors I had hit upon a combination which to me has always seemed too good to be true, the combination of personal freedom and physical coziness. For while I rejoiced in feeling so wonderfully free and unnoticed on my doorstep I also felt relaxed and comfortable because if I wanted them they were near, so competent and friendly. There can even be something wonderful in the smell of a manure pile when it is carried on the crystal air of the North Atlantic seacoast. When the wind brought a whiff of that rich country smell to me from the Douglas barnyard on those autumn days it gave me a feeling of utter satisfaction concerning my neighbors.
Our joint solitude, the Douglases’ and mine, was interrupted now and then throughout the day by the moving profile of someone going up or down the right of way. Before I signed the deed Judge Patterson had told me about this footpath along the edge of my land. It was mentioned in the deed and he wanted to be sure that I understood that people using it were not trespassing but going where they had a right to go. Sometimes I would see an anxious-looking little girl slipping hurriedly along the path, leading a smaller child by the hand; or a boy alone wearing a hunting cap and carrying a gun. Sometimes a man with a massive chest and shoulders, who, they told me, was Ed Brigham, went swinging down the path at noon on his way home to dinner. I enjoyed seeing those quiet passers-by. They almost never looked around, but kept their eyes down on the path or straight ahead. When they appeared usually one at a time, and curved along the little arc of the hillside and then disappeared again, they seemed like symbolical figures, each representing a certain human quality, one the unconscious pathos of a motherly little girl and another a boy’s secret lusty adventurousness. They all used their legal right to pass across my land with such diffidence and modesty that their intent profiles seemed only to give accent to the solitude that lay around me.