ALTHOUGH I was in sole command of everything concerning the purchase of the house and the changes I was making in it, I realized that in the matter of its furniture I would have to defer to my mother. We had a houseful of furniture in the Salem storage warehouse, including a number of American antiques which my mother had lovingly collected. It would clearly be a kind act to rescue all these from the tomb and bring them to a house where they could come alive again in rooms which would make them look more beautiful than ever before.
My mother consented to this plan, and a huge mover’s van drove into Castine in the dead of night near the end of October, and stood at the foot of my brick path while the men unloaded the things and carried them in. I had dressed hurriedly and gone over from Lorna’s, where I was sleeping. The movers were strange nocturnal beings and they insisted on unloading at once. They needed me to stay by the front door and tell them where to put each piece of furniture as it came along the path.
It was about two o’clock when they began to take the tarpaulin off their load and untie the ropes that held it. The night was mild and cloudy, with vague moonlight among the clouds. As I stood waiting, and felt the soft night wind blow against me, I looked up at the sky and all around wonderingly to find out how my domain would seem to me at that unknown hour. I felt something like Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd, whose occupation of shepherd sometimes gave him a chance to study the aspect of things out of doors when all the rest of the countryside was fast asleep.
At first I found it peaceful and amusing. I could see the tall dark truck towering up into the horse-chestnut tree with mysterious figures and flashlights moving over it. The scene might easily have been that of some nocturnal adventure out of Hardy, with me for the Hardyesque observer. I remembered that the emergency which usually kept Gabriel Oak awake and watchful under the night sky was the suffering of one of his ewes at lambing time. And when my quiet watchfulness was interrupted by the sudden rushing toward me of a large dark object, accompanied by the heavy breathing of the men on each side of it, and I recognized my mother’s mahogany sideboard looming up in front of me, I felt as if I were acting as a sort of midwife too—like Gabriel Oak, assisting at one of Nature’s strange and awful acts of disruption.
I watched them come along the path, one after another, the intimate and familiar objects which had surrounded me and all of us during our childhood and youth, and, unlike Gabriel, I felt guilty and scared. Because this, as far as I saw, was not Nature, it was only me. What had I done? Something monstrous, I thought. What a piece of egotism and effrontery, I said to myself fearfully, as I saw again after their five-year banishment from our sight my mother’s dearest, most intimate possessions, my father’s books, the engravings my mother and father had bought in Germany, the three Heppelwhite chairs from Baltimore that my mother had always loved so, the long, mahogany sofa, the sideboard, and all the trunks filled with more treasures. I recognized the little, old-fashioned trunk which had belonged to my mother’s mother, whom we children never knew, although her grave, beautiful face was familiar to us in daguerreotypes. Her little trunk with its rounded top held, I knew, the silk dresses with great full skirts which looked so rich and heavy in the daguerreotypes and were now so tender from the passage of time that they almost turned to powder if we touched them. It held her soft linen handkerchiefs, her cream-soft underclothes and nightgowns, every piece edged with intricate hand-worked embroidery in designs of birds and flowers. I recognized too the little old-fashioned trunk with foreign labels on it that had gone to Berlin with my mother for her marriage there. Inside that one, I knew, were my mother’s satin wedding shoes and her tiny, absurd wedding corset, and the heavy silk stockings with clocks on them, bought in Paris for her trousseau. I saw, as they passed by me in open baskets and boxes, our collection of children’s books, our old toys and games, even the colored paper mats we wove in kindergarten, our earliest drawings. There in the middle of the night I caught a glimpse of a butterfly painted by Warren when he was four or five, an apple sewed in cardboard with red wool by Lurana—these childish things had been kept and treasured by my mother, and they now survived the present upheaval with the almost unbearable, irrelevant intimacy of personal things washed ashore after a shipwreck. When I saw all these sacred objects being so unceremoniously handed out of the mountainous truck beside the horse-chestnut tree and rushed along the brick path into a strange house in this far-off unknown place which was wholly unrelated to our past life and to the other members of the family, and all of it being done in docile obedience to my wild adventurousness, my force and desire, I was aghast at myself.
I felt stricken because of what I had done now to my mother. She had yielded to me so passively and quite blindly in this disposal of her possessions. She had never even seen this house. She had always loved and revered things, her things. She had also loved the house she bought in Danvers, the house where we all had grown up among these now familiar things. Whenever in the past I tried to explain that even though I was not married I must go away from Danvers she had always spoken of her house and her things as an obstacle to any plan I suggested. She always made some protest to my need to leave her, and presented a number of valid, realistic objections for me to dispose of first, if I could. I kept saying sulkily, people are more important than things; lives are more important than houses. I had no ability to express my point of view and make it sound right. Because I was stubborn, though so unconvincing, she tried to appease me, by reluctantly closing the house one or two winters, thinking that after a year or two I would be content to come back and live there. Appeasement failed and at last she sold the house and put her precious things in the warehouse—an event which filled every other child of the family with nostalgic sadness, although they all were married and had homes and things of their own. Only I was ruthless and unmoved by it.
Now it seemed like the meekness or the weakness of despair and exhaustion that had made her take all her things out of the warehouse again and send them to me without a word of protest, without a single objection. She had surrendered to me, I felt, as a weary parent surrenders to a hopelessly spoiled child. I felt stricken, because this yielding seemed to tell me that at last she had washed her hands of her treasures, and she had washed her hands of me—her treasure. I was, or I had been, her treasure, I knew. She had said once, “I love you better than I love my own life. If anything should happen to you I would die.” When these words spurted out of her, almost against her will — difficult, painful words — I felt humble in the presence of great feeling. And I loved her fiercely too, but mine also had to be a maternal, strong, protecting love. I couldn’t accept the role of the passive, clinging child. To be the object of pure classic feeling such as hers and so strong, at the time when I was longing to be free, made me embarrassed and sulky. I had edged away farther and farther, evasive and guilty. Now I was standing beside my own front door all alone. My mother had yielded to me in everything, and I felt the queer defrauded loneliness that suddenly comes upon a person who has been overindulged and is thereby set apart from ordinary people and cheated of his natural and normal place in the world. This feeling made me very much afraid for a minute, standing alone in front of my house, in the midst of my monstrous act.
Then I remembered that I couldn’t let fear decide things for me, when there was no reasonable ground for being afraid. Every step I had taken during the last few years, even those which seemed most indecisive and fearful, appeared now to have been leading me to that door. Each of those previous steps had been accompanied and all but stopped by the same sense of shame and apology as I felt now, an often groundless fear of injuring someone else, or of interfering with other peoples’ plans and desires. But, in opposition to the fearful misgivings, there had always been something else, quite different, working in me—the thing I first began to be conscious of when I decided to buy the house and which I then began to think of as my magic or as my little voice, and in which I believed just enough more than I believed in fear and diffidence to choose it instead of fear. Earlier in my life there had sometimes been on the side of magic only the smallest possible margin over fear, and many times it was the other way; but with almost every vital decision I had chosen magic, and every time I chose it the magic in me grew, so that the next time it was a little stronger and more willful than before.
So I told myself, standing in front of my house, it wasn’t a monstrous act, it wasn’t effrontery and egotism which had brought me there. I had started out long ago with a predicament to solve and in order to solve it I had gone forth on a lonely voyage of discovery—not as other people go forth openly in plain sight into the world of experience to do well or badly, but I had gone out unseen, in the little boat of my imagination, seeking in solitude and by reflection more knowledge and understanding of human experience, hoping that they might give me the wide horizon my eyes longed to behold, and that they might give me also the feeling that in my solitary boat I was voyaging through real seas, like the others. Now, in my search, magic had intervened. My little voice had guided me and in obedience to it I had come to an unknown, unexpected island. When I beheld it suddenly there in front of me, I fell in love with it, and in excitement and joyous surprise I threw away my faithful little boat and climbed ashore. I had reached at last the period of adorable, actual experience into which my quiet life was going to explode—that fascinating, little, volcanic island, almond-shaped, which lay across the fate line in the palm of my right hand.
“Sarn,” Blue Hill, Maine
1935-1942