HAVING seen and surmised this much of what life held for those who could receive it, I angrily rejected the insipid substitutes which I saw other people taking up with who were not physically barred as I was, and which were offered to me. When my mother wanted me to settle down into a docile life at home, taking an interest in the meetings of the Danvers Historical Society and playing my mandolin in the Mandolin Club of the village ladies, and making little excursions on the trolley car to the Salem Athenaeum where I would sit, soberly and precociously reading the Hibbert Journal and Littell’s Living Age, the prospect filled me with rage. I insisted on going away from home, I didn’t know where. If I could not have intimate personal experience equal to the strength of my desire, then my instinct made me seek some kind of distraction which would be strong enough to equal it. This I found for the time being when my mother sent me to live in Boston, as a pupil in a boarding school which occupied a tall brownstone house overlooking the Public Garden. I loved novelty and the novelty of these surroundings enchanted me, and before I realized what had happened the load was gone. I became happy and eager as soon as I was there. The city was full of a romantic feeling. I loved the rushing cataract of sound in the streets, of horses’ feet and cabs and motor horns and policemen’s whistles on a late winter afternoon, the sight of ladies and gentlemen stepping in and out of restaurants and theaters, the sense of movement and life, the surprises and the possibilities. I used to walk in the Public Garden and sit on a bench and watch the passers-by. For me, fresh from our country town, it was as exciting as the Rue de la Paix. Just to be there in the city, myself a part of the crowd, sharing with everyone else the brisk rhythm of the street, and that undercurrent of romantic expectant feeling in the air which made the city such a different place for me from the town of Danvers where the silence and emptiness of the streets was a deathly torpor. The city gave me the illusion for the first time in my life that I was mingling, participating. I used to look eagerly at one face after another in the quick-stepping throng on Boylston Street; I stopped to look at all the delightful things in the shop windows, and at the same time I learned carefully not to see my own reflection in those sheets of plate glass.
The atmosphere of the city also filled the interior of the brownstone house. I was happy in the school. The girls were mostly very simple-minded and kind-hearted and they did not intimidate me. With them as a not discouraging background, and under the eye of a gay, imaginative, sparkling headmistress who liked and admired me, I began to shine. I did not shine as a scholar, but I began just a little to shine as a potential artist and a social being. My forgotten childhood wit began to come bubbling out of me again, and my talent for writing was taken so seriously that I began to feel that I was fascinating and important. At the end of my first year at the school my English composition teacher, Lucia Briggs, who was the daughter of President Briggs of Radcliffe, otherwise famous as Dean of Harvard, somehow or other made certain mysterious arrangements so that I could be allowed to enter Radcliffe as a special student taking the course in composition given by Professor Charles Copeland.
I arrived at Radcliffe shy and countrified and naïve from Danvers and my unfashionable school, and yet from the moment when I first looked around at the other girls I loftily scorned all the other shy, dowdy, obscure girls like myself and picked out with no hesitation the most interesting and distinguished-looking young women in sight, whom I wished to have for my friends. Lucia Briggs, on depositing me at the Radcliffe gates, appointed Catharine Huntington as my senior, who would look after me, a freshman. Catharine Huntington was one of those I had already chosen for myself when I saw her standing on a platform making a speech as head of some dramatic or literary society. She was beautiful and distinguished and talented. And even then when she was so young she already showed the talent which was to affect all the rest of my life so much, as well as the lives of many other people. This was her talent to discern in an obscure person something rare and important and to make other people see it too—above all, to make the person in question feel it and be it.
She could hold an utterly unprepossessing person up in a certain light, like a collector showing a rare piece, and the person, in her hands, would suddenly receive a value and importance which made the people who watched the transformation wonder how they could have been so blind as never to have seen it before. She worked the magic of transformation as I had never seen it worked before. She worked it upon places and upon experiences, upon everything that she saw or knew about. There was no coercion, no conscious, egotistical insistence in her attitude. She went about it just the way a gardener does, working by instinct, almost absent-mindedly, almost unconsciously, as he goes about among his plants through the day, turning one around an inch or two, setting another out of the wind, putting this one in a damp place, and that one in the full heat of the sun, with every motion removing from his protégés the disadvantages which continually threaten them, and which only he has the patience and the understanding to see and deal with. There are very few gardeners among human beings, and consequently most of the more difficult human plants are all in wrong places, suffering drought, or heat, or dampness, when if only a noticing, intuitive hand could move among them they might all flourish as they were meant to do.
Catharine Huntington was one of those rare persons, a gardener among human beings, and I began to feel a new warmth and charm shed upon me by her enhancing vision as soon as she was asked to look after me—just as if somebody had picked me up from a dank corner that had been all wrong for me and put me out in the sun. She disregarded, or didn’t see at all, my delicate health or semi-invalidism. She spoke about my beauty, and I couldn’t believe my ears. She admired my long thin hands. She treated me like a person who was rare and valuable and distinguished in some way. She treated me also as if I were a person of force, of exciting destiny out in the world, never for a moment like one who should be immured and kept inactive. She created and presented to me not only myself, a self that was new to me, but also a new world where people lived in a kind of Henry Jamesian atmosphere of thought and perception. She took me to stay at the old shabby country house in Lexington where she lived with her mother and two of her five brothers. I had no desire ever to go home again, and I accepted Mrs. Huntington’s invitation to live there through the winter and go back and forth with Catharine to our classes in Cambridge.
It is not quite true to say that the atmosphere of the house was Henry Jamesian, because it was purely Huntingtonian, and it did not need any help from Henry James to be what it was. Sometimes in the evening Catharine would read Henry James aloud to me, but I was always more enchanted when instead of reading she would begin to tell me her own stories. Sitting on the edge of the harsh, narrow little bed she slept in, for she always disregarded physical comfort as of no importance, she would slowly brush her curling golden hair with a stiff English hairbrush while she told me about her five brothers and their lives, and about her friends and relatives in England, and especially about her favorite brother Constant, who lived in London and had given her the hairbrush from a London shop and her long string of real amber beads, and with whom she had lived for a year before coming to college. She told me about going to tea at Windsor, and at Eton, about visits in Amberley, and she told me how she had been given a party in London by Thackeray’s daughter who was a friend of Constant. Little by little, when the story-telling mood came over her, she told me all of her great elaborate family history, about her aunts and her great-aunts, her grandfather the bishop, and her great-uncle Father Huntington, and about the old house in Hadley, and the beach cottage at Ogunquit. She would repeat to me some crucial conversation in her family of years and years ago, which had altered the course of lives. She told me about her young and wayward great-grandfather on her mother’s side and the tragedy of his young Creole wife from Martinique, whom he didn’t love and who was kept locked up by her mother-in-law in the attic of their old house in Salem. She told me about loves and hates, quarrels, estrangements, amazing marriages. And all the people in her stories had one distinguishing quality in common, which made them, either by blood or marriage, Huntingtons—a romantic race of people different from other people. As she told me her stories, she spoke in a minor key yet always with a kind of exquisite flourish and toss which showed me that although they, the Huntingtons, appeared to be required to endure more than the ordinary amount of personal tragedy, their spirit had never been defeated.
Even when she was narrating in her most sorrowful, minor key there was often a kind of unconscious playfulness and originality in her use of words, as there is when a child innocently uses language in a way of his own; and when this happened in the middle of a tragic story the effect was sometimes irresistibly funny, and I would burst out laughing. Instead of being offended and making me feel that I had ruined the sober splendor of her story, she would suddenly notice how funny she had been and she would laugh at herself, with peals of laughter. Her capacity for a shift of mood was one of the most amusing and charming of her qualities, and one of those quick breezes of humor did not alter the value of what had gone before. Everything about her was all of one piece. Still, her dominant mood was one of twilight melancholy, and she nearly always brought her nightly stories to an end with a Huntingtonian flourish, composed of a murmur and a sigh, and with her eyes downcast in sad meditation, she would shake her head slowly in the midst of its cloud of beautifully brushed hair, and fall into silence, forgetting me, and I would go wandering away to my own bedroom under the same kind of delicious spell as if I had just heard read aloud another chapter in the most fascinating novel I had ever found.
She and her brother Constant had both said they would never marry, and that she would go back eventually to London and live with him. None of the young men she met at the Cambridge and Boston dances ever compared with elegant, charming Constant in her eyes, and she wasn’t in the least interested in talking or dancing with them. She often said that it was much more amusing to be with another girl, and this was not strange considering the kind of rare creatures who had strayed into Radcliffe at that moment from the outside world. Caroline Dudley, Eleanor Clement, Catharine herself, and a few others composed the small constellation of the elect at Radcliffe in my day, and they all had like Catharine a more or less cosmopolitan background which was exotic and sophisticated beyond anything I had ever known before.
But they were not the kind of haughty girls I loved to watch in theater audiences and restaurants and whose glance at me I later dreaded and feared. Although the Radcliffe cosmopolitans were at ease anywhere, and their clothes had the fragrance of Paris about them, they were potential artists and rebels and therefore in rebellion against any conventional career that might be expected of them by their families. They were also in mild rebellion against the immature social life of the college. They were like a small company of grown-up people shut up for a little while in the midst of adolescents. It always seemed as if they must have wandered in there by accident, in a moment of absent-mindedness, and would soon wander out again. Yet in spite of their vagueness and aloofness toward the mass of basketball-playing girls, jolly and handsome, who strode over the campus, these others were the only ones who shared with the Harvard professors in the Radcliffe classrooms a certain secret; for they shared a grown-up understanding of the real purpose of the college, its intellectual purpose. Because of this secret there existed between them and the professors a rapport which was not even dreamed of by the girls who had come to Radcliffe in order to be typical college girls. This little company of the elect represented in that little world a similar dissenting minority in the outside world; they represented the artists, the aesthetes, the elegant Bohemians.
And this strange thing happened. Not only Catharine Huntington but the others of that circle treated me as if there were something wonderful and rare about me. It was not simply that they perceived a person of talent hidden inside a misshapen body and inside a great shyness, but they amazed me by actually liking my appearance. They again praised my long thin hands and my face. They looked at me with the fresh unconventional eye of artists and they spoke about me to each other before me with the impersonal authority of artists—as if I were someone in whom everybody with any eyes at all would see the things to admire that they saw. They encouraged my passion for beautiful clothes, which I had always considered an incongruous passion that it would be best to keep under control. They amazed me, they took it for granted that I should think of myself as a romantic figure.
In spite of their feminine, romantic personalities and their love of clothes they did not seem in the least absorbed in the thought of men and of marriage, like the girls I had known in Danvers. Catharine Huntington frequently expressed her disbelief in marriage, and her dislike of the effect of marriage upon people. Caroline Dudley shocked the wholesome Radcliffe girls by using the word “mistress” lightly. Those cosmopolitans unconsciously put in their place for me, and indeed completely demolished as far as I was concerned, the Danvers girls whose wonderful silliness had made me feel so desolate and worthless. Here were girls with beautiful bodies and faces and a background of fashionable, sophisticated society, girls to whom almost any experience would seem to be open, and they talked all the time about pictures and poems, about Yeats and the Abbey Theater, and they laughed at marriage and believed it was something to be avoided if possible.
In that new exciting atmosphere I never suffered any more from the horrible feeling that I was dying of starvation—a suffering which had been distilled to its pure essence by those two excursions down the Ipswich River. I wrote poems which were published in the Radcliffe literary magazine, and because of the impression they made among my friends I indulged in a lovely feeling of exaggerated self-importance and a swiftly mounting elation concerning that mysterious thing, my future.
But at the end of three years I had to go back to Danvers. I didn’t wish to become one of the perennial special students we all laughed at, those dowdy, sad-looking, middle-aged, and elderly ladies who seemed to be spending their otherwise empty lives taking course after course at Radcliffe. When my friends left I was ready to go. Catharine, being a poor clergyman’s daughter, had to earn her living and she went to Connecticut to teach in a boarding school. For Constant had married, after all, the beautiful Gladys Parrish, and Catharine, unrebelliously because she believed in a nunlike life, prepared to live the life of a kind melancholy daughter. Caroline Dudley left Radcliffe in the middle of a year because she was impatient to go to New York and do things. Eleanor Clement, who had been like me a special student, left Radcliffe because she too had more interesting things to do. She kept house for her father in a most fascinating semi-Bohemian style; and since a beautiful and striking poem of hers had been published in the London Nation it seemed the moment for her to sit down at her writing table instead of taking courses at Radcliffe. Her talent being such a truly distinguished one, it seemed certain that she would write many more poems and stories and would make a fine name for herself. I also wanted to begin. I had written a poem which was published in Atlantic Monthly, and also a story called “In No Strange Land,” which had brought me a letter of praise from Mr. Sedgwick, and which Professor Copeland had read to his class, saying, “I sniff a future for that young woman.”