THERE were two other things I noticed and marveled at in my new world. One of these was the sun and the other was the air. I had never seen a world so gilded and so richly bathed and blessed by such a benign sun as that world was by that sun. The sun seemed to pour down a lavish, golden, invulnerable contentment on everything, on people, houses, animals, fields—and a sweetness like the sweetness of passion. The sun had so much room to shine in there. It had the whole sky to shine in, and it had miles and miles of hills and woods, it had islands and rocks and boats to glisten on and soak into like oil. And it was thanks to the matchless air of that peninsula that such a flood of sunshine never became a burden. It always seemed exactly right, golden and voluptuous yet without weight. It was as if the air there were so buoyant that it always lifted up part of the weight of the sun’s heat and kept it from ever falling too heavily on our shoulders. It was indescribable air. It made every day seem like a gala day. We never woke up to an ordinary humdrum morning.
I noticed these two things, the air and the sun, at my own house more than I had ever noticed them at the other end of the town. I imagined that the reason for this was that my house responded to sun and air more than most houses do. Sometimes it felt like a boat at anchor. There is that curious quality about all the little noises on a boat which makes them sound unmistakably boaty. The tapping of a rope against canvas, the squeak of a pulley, a voice or a footstep heard on a boat are different from the same sounds heard on land. They are magnified and yet softened by the sea air. All such little noises around my house struck me as having that same soft boaty sound. A clothespin dropped on the doorstep had it, and the rustle of a curtain in an open window sounded like a sail fluttering. When the window sill burned my fingers on a hot morning it was just as if I had touched the gunwale of a dory that had been lying in the sun for hours.
They were so compelling, the divine air and the brilliant sun on my doorstep and all around me as far as I could see, that I stopped thinking. They made thinking seem ridiculous. The thing that would have been the most natural thing to do was to change into a plant or a fruit tree, and I almost felt myself changing. There was no other way to express my thanks for all this, except to burst into leaves and flowers.
Until I might be able to achieve such expression the fullness of my joy was sometimes too painful to bear, simply because it was too big to be contained inside my chest. Then in order to dissipate it I would get up and move around. I would go inside the house and watch Mr. Gardner and his helper building the new fireplace in the southwest sitting room where my predecessor had torn it out, because he was not a fireplace man. It would have relieved me a little if I could have seen something that disappointed me; but even when I discovered, too late to change it, that one side of the new fireplace was not quite straight I couldn’t really mind. Imperfection and perfection were both included in the universe and I had good reason to make friends with imperfection. Besides it was impossible for me to be displeased with Mr. Gardner. He was such a gentle soft-spoken man and he was proud of his trade of masonry. His wife’s sister was a nursemaid in my brother’s family in Salem. Jonny and Harriet had spent a summer with their nurse at Mr. Gardner’s house and had concocted, at the ages of three and four, a large boat in his back yard. He used to act protectively toward me too, like Frank Grindle.
After I had stood and watched him I would cross the wide hall and admire the graceful staircase, and from there I would go into the west sitting room and through the passage into the big country dining room whose woodwork and cupboard and mantelpiece were painted a countrified mustard yellow that I liked very much. I would roam through the huge kitchen and the pantries and then up the back stairs, with many long pauses and imaginings in the large square bedrooms, and I would gloat over the interesting queer long narrow bathroom whose window looked down over the harbor. After that I would climb up into the attic where there were four more bedrooms and a wide hall with one dormer window from which I could see farther down the bay than from any other place in the house. From the windows of the east rooms in the attic on clear days I would stare at the pale-blue bubble that they had told me was Mount Desert, and at the azure cone for which the town of Blue Hill is named. Since there was not a chair and not even a box to sit down on in any room of the house I would presently roam down the attic stairs again and open the paneled door that led from the shadowy back hall to the lightness and gaiety and elegance of the front hall, the fanlight, and the wide, graceful, easy stairs. Feeling assuaged and calmed from my little exercise, I would go down the lovely shallow stairs and out onto the front doorstep to sit again until my satisfaction had accumulated once more to an uncomfortable size.
On the front doorstep I used to quiet my soaring spirits by leaning over to watch the crickets walking on the bricks. I found there was another right of way not mentioned in the deed. The largest, handsomest, glossiest crickets I had ever seen were traveling up and down on the newly uncovered pink and purple bricks. It was the season and the weather that crickets love. I knew that they were one of the best possible signs of good luck to a house, and when one of them walked in over the doorsill and through the front door to utter a loud resounding chirp in the hall I knew that all would be well. In appreciation of this omen I decided, as though I were a royal personage, that I would have a cricket embroidered on all the linen that was to be used in the house.
I began to have all kinds of flowery ideas. As I bent over and watched the crickets I felt a kind of medieval delight toward them, like the delight which must have been felt by the makers of tapestries and moved them to weave into the corners of their great scenes the smallest insects and birds, field flowers and trees in bud, and graceful little animals. The treasure that had come into my hands waked in me a new warmth of perception and love toward everything I saw. It stirred the need to give adornment and value to every detail of the life to be lived there. As in a medieval embroidery I wanted everything to be included, I wanted the humorous and the romantic, the marvelous and the quaint, the grand and the humble, the wild and the gentle, all to be brought together there in a hymn of praise. I and my estate were in microcosm like people and their country just arrived at a rich, leisured period in their history when the people began to express their happiness by adorning their daily lives in a thousand ways, bringing forth a period in their history during which the decorative arts flourish. In every country there seems to be at least one such period of worship and thanks, a time so happy that everything the hands of its people touch becomes a work of art.
In humility and elation I felt that I had arrived at such a period, and that I was an instrument being used to bring such a period into the history of my family. For I hoped that this house might be a magnet that would attract them all and especially the six children who represented in our family then the new generation. I wanted my house to be used as a cradle for such great magnetic things as art and writing and science—indeed, for the shelter and nourishment of the human spirit in any of those many different yet interchangeable forms in which it delights to manifest itself. I wanted my house filled to overflowing with all the necessary materials to awaken and sustain the rich life of the imagination and the intellect; I wanted it filled with paints and pencils and drawing paper, canvas and crayons, heaps of beautiful books piled up everywhere, reproductions of drawings, art magazines and literary reviews, maps, musical instruments and books of music, a microscope, a compass, and a great globe of the world, a telescope, and books about astronomy, about geology, about shells, insects, and birds, and I wanted all kinds of games, packs of cards, a checker board, chessmen, dice and dominoes.
And I wanted to think of a name for my house, to be embroidered underneath the cricket. I hoped I could think of a name which would attach itself to the house by a natural affinity and would be forever connected with it in everybody’s mind. Whatever the name might turn out to be I thought of its acquiring such associations through summer after summer that it would become a unique, beloved name in our family, just as the name Stowe had been loved and adored by us in our childhood. I found the letter about crickets in White’s Natural History of Selborne, and I was enchanted with their Latin name, Grylla. Grylla Farm, I thought, tentatively—Grylla House; Grylla was rather a funny-sounding word, but it might become a nice one, I thought, if it were used and made familiar. But I needed to try it for a little while to find out if it was right, and in the meantime because in all the long exuberant letters that I wrote on my knee from the doorstep to my family and friends I burst into ecstasies so many times about the crickets and the brick path, they were amused at me and one of them made up the pseudo-Welsh name Cricket-y-brick, which they adopted and always used because they thought it was cute and sounded like me.
But I didn’t want a cute name for my sober, grand, romantic house, the house which I thought of as an expression of my rebellion against cuteness. I wanted room here to be something else than the cunning little De La Mare character, room to find out what I really was, and room to be whatever I really was. I had boldly seized a piece of the earth to grow on, and had instantly taken root. Everything I looked at fed my will to do now the things I had always quietly believed in but had never done. In this divine situation I could begin at last. I could begin to live.
And so a kind of mystic marriage, an impregnation, took place between me and that piece of land and the buildings that stood on it. And it was a happy marriage. From the moment when I first stepped onto those premises until the last moment when I left them I felt a presence there, a strong, loving spirit that was always brooding over me, welcoming me and encouraging me. I knew from the feeling of it that that place had been at some time or other blessed in some mysterious way, and was particularly cherished and guarded by the gods. I felt an influence on me there that was beyond explanation, as if the rays of all my good stars had met above the roof, thanks to some almost unheard-of mathematical harmony; and that they made an invisible graph, or diagram, a kind of cat’s cradle or snow-crystal design of good fortune, and were being held there, caught in perpetual balance. Certain places are fond of certain people, and I am sure that place was fond of me. But I wasn’t the only person who felt its benign influence. Nearly everybody who came there felt it too. There was something about my place, a kind of unusual glow and a warmth over it, which seemed at moments to give us the feeling of an almost immortal happiness. I have never had that feeling in any other place.
I didn’t realize all that at first. I knew from the beginning that the house was my friend and my ally, and after I had sat on the doorstep during those first long Indian summer days I began to know that it was going to be my Magna Carta. And I began to make bold plans, in obedience to the mysterious will which had brought me there. Having obeyed it once, I now felt the desire for action really waking and moving about in me.
And since the story I have to tell is the story of the working out of those bold plans I will have to pause now long enough to tell what the plans were, and why they expressed things which had waited and been shut up in me so long. There was a certain naïveté about my plans, and therefore they did not work out as I expected, which is all the more reason for telling what they were in the beginning, because in their working out they became almost unrecognizable.