LOVE laughs at locksmiths. The adage had a twisted and a rueful meaning for me. I thought that Love laughed at me because my body was shaped like the locksmith’s, but the answer I made was to unlock doors for everybody else while I myself remained a humble, submissive prisoner. My third wish for my house was that I might sometimes offer it for the use of lovers.
Having myself suffered from complete deprivation in this respect, I believed it was not right for anybody to be so deprived, and I wanted to do everything I could to prevent such suffering in other lives. I had not then learned that external circumstances are not the most potent causes of such deprivation. I did not learn until long afterward that a great part of my sense of imprisonment and consequent deprivation was caused by my own misunderstanding of the well-meant but harmful silence of my family concerning me. Many years later, when I broke the silence and reproached my mother for never talking to me when I was young as to how I was to deal with my predicament, she said that the famous Dr. Bradford who treated me had once spoken to her about the possibility of marriage for me, and he commanded her, “If she falls in love do not thwart her.” When she innocently repeated that sentence to me, twenty years too late, I could not speak, I was so amazed. Then I said, “I wish I had known he told you that. I would have felt differently.” She answered, ever so gently and remindingly, compassionately, “But you were not thwarted. There—there never was anybody—” I didn’t say anything more. Inside I was crying, clamoring, “Oh, Mother! the reason why there never was anybody was because I was so afraid. You did thwart me! You did thwart me! by never talking to me and never encouraging me to talk to you! If I had only known he said that! If I had only known he didn’t think it was impossible! You ought to have told me. You ought to have let me know. You have spoiled my life!”
When we were all young there was much gay talk and speculation concerning the current love affairs and the probably sentimental fate of my brothers and sister and their friends, but nobody ever said, “When Katharine gets married,” or, “Why hasn’t Kitty got a beau yet?” or, “We must get a beau for you, Kitty.” I lived inside my cage, close to the others, among them, touching them, laughing and talking with them; yet by an unspoken understanding it was taken for granted that I was not to have what was apparently considered the most thrilling and important experience in grown-up life. Nobody ever put this feeling into words. Nobody explained the reason why. They didn’t, of course. The reason was so obvious that no explanation was necessary. The reason was there in every mirror for me to see. But, given the reason, nobody ever attempted to console me, or to offer me any clue as to how I was to manage my life with this great thing missing. When I stood faced by an abnormal and peculiar difficulty my family who loved me and cherished me beyond any question gave me no help, no word. I used to think of going privately to see Dr. Bradford, to ask him what I was to think and do, but I could not endure the thought of presenting myself before anybody as an ignorant and pathetic person, and I did not go. I never was able to let anybody know that I was bewildered and afraid, and that a sneaking wistful hope kept springing up in a corner of my mind to tease and abash me, the hope that the Cinderella miracle might some day happen to me. In the dim background of that period I can now see my mother watching me and suffering for me, and hiding her suffering because she thought it might suggest painful thoughts to me that I had not yet had. She didn’t realize that her silence harmed me more than anything she could have said.
Because I knew nothing at all about the psychology or the physiology of sex I never connected my deprivation and the silence which surrounded it with the almost intolerable malaise that I felt continually when I was young. I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I only knew that my body never felt at rest, my mind never peaceful. I didn’t feel at home in human life. I observed that there was a simple mindless ease and contentment which appeared to be the normal condition of other people. Things happened to them, they were worried and distressed by their difficulties, but they were always at home. They talked, worked, worried, did errands and planned meals, and everything they did came natural to them as if, by an instinct I did not possess, they trusted and understood something that was behind it all. And when they were not worried or busy they could always sink at once into a pleasant relaxation of body and mind. They could listen to rain and be deliciously lulled. I would listen to the divine pouring of rain on a spring night and wonder, in silent terror, if nothing was ever going to soothe me, ever going to make me feel quiet and easy in the world. If the beautiful sound of the rain’s lullaby could not lull me, and my soft bed and my family’s love for me, I felt as if I must be incurable. I remember two particular times when something happened that made that feeling of despair cut into me so deep that it left a scar. The wound healed long ago, but the mark remains in my memory of those two things.
We went down the river in our canoe, my brother Warren and I, one afternoon in early spring, when the first thing happened. Canoeing was one of my brother’s favorite recreations and he used to like to have me go with him. After he had paddled for a little while that day he drove the canoe against the soft bank and we got out and sat on the soft ground. It was the first warm day in April, the first time we had sat out of doors and smelled again the curious sharp smell of the spring earth and felt the sun so warm. I ought to have been able to enjoy it. I ought to have felt an immediate response to it in my bones and flesh and nerves and mind, the way every other human being in the world, I believed, except me could do. But even with the sweet sun on my face and with my fingers touching that fragrant earth I was still tormented. The powerful anesthetic of Nature could not work on me and make me forget my chronic malady. It only made it more painful than usual.
I sat up, stiff and shy, near my brother. I watched him. I could see how he was responding. To him the spring sun on his body was like a magnetic and beloved hand that had come back after being gone for a very long time away from him. He smiled lazily. He undid his collar, unbuttoned his shirt, and lolled at length on the moist ground. When he turned to look at me he blinked his eyelashes with a lazy, enjoying smile as the sun’s humorous fingers played over his face. He was a happy animal, in harmony with the earth and at home there. His smile showed me that he was in the secret. Oh, why, why couldn’t I be in the secret too? I could only watch him and sedulously pretend that I too felt at home. As usual I tried to conceal my despair. My queer suffering meant that I was an unitiated outsider in human life and it made me ashamed and I would have done anything I could to pretend not to be. I stretched out on the ground, pretending to be easy and relaxed, while I was perpetually wondering if I should ever in all my life find anything to do with the huge, tormenting, pushing load of passion that was in my chest.
My brother spoke to me, almost in a whisper.
“Look!” he said. I followed his glance. A big turtle was lying on the bank quite close to us, just beyond my brother. He was staring at it, and he motioned to me to move nearer so that I could see. I crept around close to the turtle, and stretched out on my stomach and leaned on my elbows. The turtle lay with her hind part at the edge of a smooth hole in the earth. She had dug the hole and shaped it to suit her purpose. It was a small opening like a tunnel that led down into a round shallow room below. A little heap of earth lay beside the hole. She had made her preparations and now she waited, utterly still. We waited, with our bodies still, scarcely breathing, and our eyes intent. Presently an egg dropped down the tunnel. Then we saw her stretch a hind foot slowly out and reach down into the little cave and place the egg just as she wished it to lie. There followed a long interval during which we all were still. With no haste, no motion, no struggle, with only a deep, deep stillness and tranquillity she waited. Then she dropped another egg into the earth. Again her skillful hind foot came out from under her shell and reached down and rolled the egg into place.
I envied the mother turtle. It was an envy that hurt me so much that I have never forgotten it. Unlike me, she was submitting mindlessly, in tremendous leisure, to the great tranquil scheme that contained her and governed her. I couldn’t imagine any happiness to match it. We lay and watched her for perhaps two hours, until the last egg had fallen into the hole. Then we saw the knowing hind foot reach out and with delicate skill brush the loose earth back into the hole until it was all filled and covered over; and then we watched her pat the surface and make it all smooth and firm exactly as if nothing had happened there. When she had finished at last she drew her foot under her shell again and lay still. I thought that if I could feel ever, even for a few seconds, a satisfaction like hers, I could endure my life.
My brother watched and commented on the turtle’s act with the objectivity of a naturalist. I knew that I did it all wrong. Other people did not relate to themselves the things they saw. The opposite happened—the things they saw carried them away from themselves. My brother’s attention could move upon or away from himself flexibly and easily. He could throw himself on the ground and let his mind swing lazily while his senses responded in their fullness to his surroundings. The next moment, if his attention was caught elsewhere, his mind could suddenly be alert and focused on something altogether outside himself. All of my family, except me, possessed the instinct for learning, in books or outside of them, and they got a pleasure unknown to me in acquiring any sort of knowledge—in observing, collecting, comparing, discussing. I was a lost and idiot soul among them because I was mired in my own secret quicksand. I was apathetic and stupid where they were ardent, and I knew that here again I was missing one of the things which made them feel at home on the earth. I envied them their intellectual pleasure, yet I despised it at the same time, because it seemed to me as if their complacent objectivity were an excuse for ignoring deep intimate things, which became terrible when they were ignored. I wanted, though, to be like them because they seemed so much happier and more peaceful than I was. But I was very stupid and slow and I had not learned how to do as they did. Since my eyes were as keen as theirs, when I used them, I saw the turtle as vividly as my brother did, but because while my eyes rested on it, during that April afternoon, I made it carry on its back the entire load of what I was feeling during those hours—the accumulated emotion of all my uneasy days and nights—it became for me a symbol, impossible to forget.
The other thing that happened also happened on the river, one summer day. It was a companion piece. My brother took me down the river saying he had found something the day before, when he went down alone, that he wanted me to see. It was something fascinating that he thought I could write a story about, he said. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. He guided the canoe down the river in the midst of the blazing sunny marshes and fields, among dragonflies and big arrowroot leaves, and into the shady woods below the fields. He stopped beside a grove of pine trees and we got out of the canoe. He led me up over the steep riverbank and we came into a place that was like a room. The branches of a giant pine tree made the ceiling. The smaller trees of the grove crowding round it made the walls. It was a spacious, dim, cool room with a red floor of pine needles. On one side we saw a fireplace built of field stones laid in a ring, recently blackened by fire, and a blackened kettle lying among charred sticks where the fire had been. On the other side we saw a low wide bed, made of pine boughs. We also saw two rain-draggled garments, one lying on the bed and the other hanging over one of the branches of the tree. They were fancy-dress costumes—the costumes of Pierrot and Columbine.
My brother and I stared into the deserted room. It was like something in a short story by Thomas Hardy. We imagined a boy and girl at a gay country dance in one of the near-by villages, in Boxford, Middletown, or Topsfield, the villages whose farms and woods and marshes lie on each side of the river. A boy and girl, suddenly in love at a dance, too enthralled to go home after the dance was over and take off their fancy dress and go back to the ordinary humdrum of existence, had had the beautiful simplicity and daring to follow an impulse that was like a poem and led them to do this extraordinary thing. They had lived together for a night and perhaps longer in a secret room of boughs beside the river. Then they had gone, leaving behind them the evidence that told their story as simply as the words of an old English ballad would have told the same kind of a story, in the same spirit, merry and bold. While we looked we talked about it as if it were a mysterious fragment of manuscript we had found, conjecturing as to how it should be completed, the lost parts filled in, by our literary imaginations. I responded to my brother’s fascinating discovery as I knew he expected me to do, seizing with an artist’s delight the problem he had presented to me. But inside myself I felt something quite different. This was not a ballad, nor an idyllic, balladlike story by Thomas Hardy or by me. It was real. That was what moved me. It had happened only the night before last, and it made all our literary fancies seem prim and ridiculous. Something wonderful and real had happened in that room, and I wished, with a heart full of rebellion and desire, that I had been that daring, joyous girl.
Those two scenes, the turtle laying her eggs and the deserted room, are like two full-page illustrations in color, illustrating the book of my youth. The text is gone, the words forgotten, but those two pictures on the river remain as vivid in my mind’s eye as if I were holding the book in my hands. I can stare at them the same way I did when the book was new, and I can feel the same way I felt then—not only the detached literary thrill I was supposed to feel and had learned to assume on every occasion, but something which was much more alive and urgent then, something which struck into me, intimate and personal. Just like an imaginative child who stares at the colored illustrations in his storybook and recognizes in them with explicitness and certainty things he has seen nowhere else before but has known intimately in his most secret dreams, I stared, in a speechless, motionless trance of recognition, and I became the mother turtle busy with the act of creation, I became the boy and girl swept up on their amorous escapade. In these two marvelous scenes I could sense a huge governing force in action. All three of those other enviable ones were in league with a divine will, they were in the secret, and because they were yielding to that mystery and obeying it, they were all going forward in a rhythmic dance. I longed to be seized by that mysterious will, and be contained by it, too, and made obedient and humble to it. Watching them, I could hear and feel the great rhythm of life almost touching me too—almost but not quite. Through force of imagination and desire I could imagine myself taking part in that great dance, but I knew from the evidence of my family’s silence and from the evidence of the mirror that I was inside a cage where I must stay all my life, and I could never, I thought, partake of those moments of deepest happiness which were designed for everyone to partake of. They were designed for me especially, I believed, because in those two scenes they called me with such unbearable sweetness. They called me the way the Pied Piper of Hamelin called the children, but I could not go. I was the lame child who could not follow. So I stared at them without speaking.