PRESENTLY, as winter approached, it grew too cold for me to sit outside on the doorstep and too cold for the men to work any longer inside the house.
During the long Indian summer while I had been sitting on the doorstep, building something in my imagination which I innocently believed was the future of my house, the workmen, by their loud, enthusiastic hammering and sawing, had accomplished things which I found very refreshing to my senses each time I aroused myself from my thoughts and abstractions and walked into the house and I could see and touch what the men had done, and we could talk about it together. I could smell the dramatic smell of new plaster and new wood in the midst of the autumn smell of Castine. When the cold weather came and stopped their work Mr. Gardner, the mason, had finished building the brick fireplace in the west sitting room in the same spot where the original one had been taken out, and Mr. Dek Littlefield, the carpenter, had put back the carved mantelpiece which used to be over it. The former owner had long ago removed this mantelpiece, finding it distasteful, as well as another from one of the bedrooms; but by some strange good sense, instead of breaking them up and putting them in the kitchen stove he had laid them carefully down on the attic floor and saved them for the last fifteen years, probably in the shrewd hope that if he waited long enough he would surely encounter a buyer just as foolish about such things as I had turned out to be.
In the act of putting things back in their places in my house I found an intense curious pleasure, especially in the room where the carved mantelpiece went, because there it did so much. There it seemed like an act of grace. As soon as the mantelpiece came back where it belonged, a certain feeling seemed to flow back into the room. It became a cherished place. It became gentle and alive.
This was, evidently, the best room. It had a wainscot all around its walls, made of one board so wide that the men said it must have been cut from some huge primeval tree at the time the house was built, in the year 1800. Along the top of the wainscot an unknown hand had carved the rope design. The same rope motive ran along the cornice at the top of the room, and it was also carved on the mantelpiece. So, when the mantelpiece was put back it completed the unity and design which had been intended in the beginning.
The architectural adornment of my house was very simple. It was not especially impressive compared with the elaborate carvings I was used to seeing in the famous Salem houses. But this shy country elegance in a house which stood alone among hayfields on a Maine peninsula appealed to me. Because of its remoteness and simplicity this elegance seemed to me even more worth admiring than the richer elegance of the famous houses. Part of my pleasure in taking possession of such a house was the sweet triumph of saving something whose creation in that remote village must have been almost a spiritual achievement, and of seeing it emerge and live again, unperturbed by the previous owner’s ignorance which had come so near to obliterating it entirely. This was a great chance for me to try to work the so easy and so little-used magic of transformation.
The first thing I tried to do that autumn was to obliterate in their turn most of the crimes the previous owner had committed. I had the men soak off his terrible wallpapers, and pull out his terrible chandeliers. But there was one of his crimes which I allowed to remain. It was a large plate-glass window which he had let into one side of the room where the rope carving was. I meant to change it later, but after I began to live in the house I discovered that, although it was architecturally a sin, I used to love to lean at that window and find myself almost out of doors, looking down at the deep-blue-green grass tumbling around the trunks of the apple trees. In late spring when the two old apple trees were covered with their white bloom they seemed to come right into the house, through the big window. So I grew fond of it and let it stay. That graceful room, full of sunshine, on the southwest corner, was the room destined to become the one most used and most loved of the entire house. Wonderful, strange things happened to me and were said to me there, which I never could have believed were possible at the time when I was so eagerly preparing it. When I look back at myself, I appear to be wrapped in the earnest innocence which almost every person appears to be wrapped in if you can sometimes look back upon him from a later period which was then to him the unknown future. Because I know now what was going to happen to me, my past self looks incredibly naïve and unconscious, going about her preparations.
And now to go back to what I was doing then so earnestly. We had accomplished before the cold weather came several other interesting things besides the fireplace and the mantelpiece. Mr. Littlefield had moved the cellar stairs from underneath the front hall to underneath the kitchen, so that where the cellar stairs landing had been we made a most convenient little retiring room, with a washbowl, electric light and mirror, tucked in neatly under the slanting ceiling made by the front stairs. I was still not supposed to climb stairs any oftener than necessary, and I felt pleased by the easy adaptability of my large romantic house to my physical limitations. I relished the working out of these practical details. I tried to work them out with the neat precision of a good game of solitaire, and I got just the same kind of fun and excitement from it as from playing a magnified game of solitaire and making it come out.
After we had finished the successful little creation under the front stairs we made a new landing for the cellar stairs out of an extra kitchen closet, with a place at one side for mops and brooms. Next I bought new twelve-paned windows for the entire house, for my predecessor had removed the original old twelve-paned ones and had put in the three-paned kind. As everyone knows who ever looks at houses, there is something inexplicable about those three-paned windows, in that they can make any house look as if the life going on inside it were a life of unspeakable boredom and dreariness and despair. Change them for twelve-paned windows and immediately your house becomes cheerful and enticing, relieved of that strange pall. Yet all over New England, when the large-paned windows were introduced, indulgent husbands bought them to please their wives because they were so much easier to wash, and the charming many-paned windows were discarded. Even at the late date when I arrived in Castine somebody was as happy and proud to get the windows I discarded as I was to be rid of them, and I sold them all for nearly as much as I paid for the new ones. I was much pleased with myself for this sign of the business acumen which was so highly valued in my family and toward which I had always felt rebellious and scornful. I found it was exciting, like having my game of solitaire come out again.
I made still another exchange with my predecessor in which both of us exulted because each believed the other was a fool to be so glad to get a worthless object. I got back the old front door of my house which he had taken out and replaced with a fancy golden oak door from Sears and Roebuck. He thought the original door was not fine enough for his residence, and he put it into his place of business. When I asked him to exchange back again with me he did it with alacrity and teasing triumph. The thing I liked best about the old original door was the way its panels, set with narrow, handmade moldings, made a great serene sign of the cross—two short panels at the top and two tall ones below. It was a beautifully proportioned cross, ample and calm, covering the whole doorway. I liked the old door, also, because it was so heavy and solid; its weight made it swing slowly on its hinges, and when it shut it made a deep soft thud. That affirmative, protecting sound is one of the many things which were good and comforting in my house, and which are sweet to remember long afterward.
As soon as this treasure had been hung again on its hinges I spoke to Frank Grindle about scraping it to get off the years’ accumulation of dry blistered paint which disfigured its surface. I could see in my mind’s eye how wonderful the panels and the moldings would look after they had been all scraped clean, sandpapered, rubbed smooth, polished, and freshly painted—how the door would glow and shine under the fanlight, between the fluted pilasters. I waited very eagerly to see this process begin. Then I came upon Frank Grindle at work on the door, and my eagerness changed to dismay as I watched him, and saw how he dug into the wood and gouged the delicate moldings. He was working with his characteristic, rough, nervous speed, and he didn’t realize what harm he was doing. He always seemed pleased when I came where he was working, and he began to beam and talk to me. But I couldn’t listen because I was watching every sharp zigzag of the tool in his hand, and I winced as I saw it split off precious edges of molding and make irreparable grooves in the panels. He had been wonderful at slapping paint onto clapboards all over the outside of the house and getting it done quickly, but I saw that he was not the man for my door.
I was always extremely polite to everybody who worked for me, or at least, I believe I was, because I couldn’t help being, and if any criticism was required I didn’t know how to express it, because of the politeness and admiration I had established. And of course I especially liked and admired Frank Grindle so much that I couldn’t bear to criticize him. So I made some kind of faltering suggestion to him about his being a little gentler with the door, but I said it so weakly and apologetically that he didn’t even hear me and he raced ahead, while I suffered. I almost persuaded myself, in order to bear it, that I was mistaken, and that he was doing the scraping as any painter would do it, that the old wood was rotten and bound to give way. But I knew better and I couldn’t forgive myself for my weakness in letting him go on at all, and somehow in the end I managed to find some miserable indirect way of taking him away from the door before he had quite finished the scraping job, which I then gave to Joel Perkins to do.
Lorna had told me about Joel Perkins as the man for inside painting and for papering. He was an expert, everyone said. His father had been one of the finest painters and paperers of his generation in Castine, and he had trained Joel. The Goodwins had told me he was very clever at mixing paint and could match any color perfectly. He came to see me and I found him youngish middle-aged, saturnine, and cynical looking, and very silent, with green eyes and heavy black hair which fell over his forehead.
He took charge of the door and said nothing, but his saturnine silence and his quietly observant glance at the damage done told me all I needed to know about his craftsmanship. There was something profoundly reassuring in Joel Perkins’s attitude toward the door—in the intimate awareness which his hands and eyes created between himself and the thing he was working on. Watching him, I could feel an almost unlimited faith in the restoring power of a little rag of sandpaper in his fingers, rubbing back and forth over the wood. I didn’t perceive in him any love of his craft or any kind of warm feeling toward it. He was too cynical for anything like that—what he had was an inherited aptitude for it and a sort of cold-blooded pride in it which he had acquired from his experience and skill.
I felt very queer between these two men, Frank Grindle and Joel Perkins. Frank Grindle had a sensitive, eager, mental awareness of another person as an individual, and yet he hadn’t a bit of the kind of limited, specialized, focused awareness Joel Perkins had, and consequently he had almost ruined my door without even realizing it. I was grievously torn by this situation, because I was unable to compromise with my own standard of workmanship, especially as it affected any part of my project of transformation; and yet I was unwilling to do harm to my friendship with a rare person by pointing out any fault in his work.
But I needn’t have felt so troubled. Frank Grindle couldn’t do any one thing long at a time. I think some dreadful nightmare was in his unconscious, always pursuing him, and he continually escaped it with his nervous speed going on to the next thing. His gay, arch face and his really sweet benign smile hid some invisible, desperate tightrope walk he was doing above an invisible abyss. So it made him too nervous to be just a painter all the time, like Joel. He was sometimes a painter, and sometimes a fisherman, always darting back and forth between two trades. As I remember, the scallop-fishing season opened the first of October, and while he was still working on my door he was in a hurry to get out into the Bay in his boat. With his usual verve and eagerness he had been telling me all about scallop fishing, how the men went out with draggers on their boats and gathered the deep-sea scallops and shipped them “to the westward”—as Castine people say when they mean Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He described to me how the scallops are able to move and skim along very fast over the sea floor. He asked if I had ever seen a real, big, deep-sea scallop. I said I hadn’t, and a few days later he brought an enormous one for me, alive, inside its classic, pilgrim’s shell. This beautiful, ancient symbol, taken cold and dripping out of the waters of my own bay! Lorna opened it and cooked it for me, and I never tasted anything sweeter. The giver seemed very much pleased that I liked it so much, and I kept the two matching shells for a long time afterward.
In the meantime Joel finished the door and painted it a rich green-blue. And apparently there was no hard feeling between him and Frank Grindle. He mixed paint while I watched until he got the exact color I had in my mind’s eye. After he did the door he painted all the blinds the same green-blue. So the door was finished and its beauty shone forth just as I had hoped it would, and the blinds were all dry and rehung on their hinges when the cold weather came and stopped the work. Everything we had started to do that fall was finished, and all that remained to be done before the house could be lived in was the painting of the woodwork inside the house, and the papering. And these would have to wait for the spring.
It had seemed as if that marvelous creative autumn might last forever. The sweet still air and the shrill piping of crickets and the hazy blue of the harbor seemed fixed and eternal. Then one morning we woke up to find a cold wind blowing—a wind that had an unfamiliar knife-edge in it, something we had forgotten existed. With that sudden searching cold, all the softness and the haze and the mellowness were gone. Lorna had a fire crackling in both her stoves, in kitchen and parlor. The snapping sound and fragrance of the fires on that first cold morning made the idea of winter seem very delicious, and exciting. The first wintry weather lasted several days. The men came and collected their tools out of my house and said good-by to me. I hated to have that part of my experience come to an end. This, my first independent venture into the external world of reality, had been the happiest period I had ever known.
With what must have seemed to the Castine workmen an even more amazing worldly precociousness and independence than I had yet shown, I asked them all to present their bills to me, and as soon as they did I paid them, writing out the largest cheques I had ever written in my life. And it was not only the Castine people who treated me, that autumn, like a very bright child, but my mother and Warren did the same, for I received from them surprised and gratified letters in which they commended me for what they considered my able handling of the purchase and alteration of my house. By some fortunate circumstances, neither of them was free to come and help me. And I continued my enterprise in almost complete independence.