The Little Locksmith
by KATHARINE BUTLER HATHAWAY
14
THERE were two things I noticed and marveled at in my new world in Castine. 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. It seemed to pour down a lavish golden invulnerable contentment on everything — on the 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 lingers 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.
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.
As I bent over to watch 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 a people and their country just arrived at a rich leisured period in their history when the people begin 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 humility and elation I felt that my own individual history 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 my house might be a magnet that would attract them all, and especially the seven 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 checkerboard, chessmen, dice and dominoes.
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.
15
Because I had been deprived of what is generally considered necessary for a happy life, I had used all my wits to circumvent my fate, to make something out of nothing. I believed I had discovered in this process a few valuable tricks to outwit fate with, tricks by which I myself had got hold of a most extraordinary joy. My particular kind of joy happened to come through the medium of writing. Because in the midst of the bewilderments of my youth it was that particular door in my mind which I had stumbled upon and escaped through into bliss, it was the writer’s medium which I had learned to know.
When I first discovered that door in my mind, I found also that I could not always open it when I wanted to, especially if I wanted to very badly indeed. But after a period of struggle and despair, I hit upon an abracadabra which almost never failed to open the door for me. Once safe inside, I worked like a spider, secretly and alone. The only tools I required were a pencil and a block of paper and solitude. Also, for its safety, this joy required a certain kind of understanding and protection on the part of others. This I had never really got, and I wanted a chance to demonstrate it, and to give it to people like me who needed it.
For although the happiness came out of me, like the thread out of a spider, its continued existence was dependent on protection from outside things. It was always in danger of being injured or altogether thwarted, because daily human life is not designed to recognize and guard this curious happiness. When in my case the life of the spirit was injured or thwarted or even threatened I suffered, it seemed, out of all reason. I felt as if a storm or an earthquake had struck my psyche. All of a sudden I felt destroyed, horribly defeated. My life seemed torn to pieces.
Usually this panic of frustration came from a temporary interruption of my working hours caused by personal demands on me which I could not refuse without betraying my own loving and responsible instincts as a human being. Perhaps the reason my family’s encroachments tortured me so much was that they were all so fond and loving, and yet they seemed to emphasize the absence in my life of the one personal demand canceling all others which usually comes into the life of a young person. I was trying to kill my sense of loss in that direction by giving myself to the life of the spirit. But I lived in the midst of an affectionate, charming family, and I am sure that there is no greater obstacle to a person who is just beginning to be a writer.
I think perhaps it is a religious war. I am sure that my solitary brooding and writing were a form of worship. I believed that romantic love, if I could have experienced it, would have been a form of worship. Since I was denied that form, I had found this lonelier way of expressing my feeling of passionate adoration toward the mystery of life. And just as a young person preparing himself for a religious life must train himself rigorously before he is able to pursue his meditations at regular hours and for any length of time without fatigue or inattention, I had to train myself in my chosen form of devotion before I was capable of giving myself up to it every day for longer and longer periods. Sometimes when I went into my room in the morning I went toward my table with loathing. I hated the little heap of pages, the pencils, the block of paper. They seemed like horrid medicine that was being forced on me.
I was very young when I began, and my youth rebelled against the unnatural solitude and inactivity and discipline of such a life. But I knew that for me there was no other way. It was only by that particular discipline that I could ever find any path for the feelings of rebellion and desire that tortured me so. I felt as if half of me were an eager, high-spirited army on prancing horses, all on fire to explore and conquer a rich and unknown land, but held in check on the border because there was no road by which it could enter. And half of me was a division of humble slaves put at work to build the road over which the army could ride. The pain and patience and slow precision needed to build the road were evenly balanced by the fiery impatience of the restive army.
I would sit down at my table with this conflict raging in me. I could use my will to get myself to the table and to keep myself sitting there, but I soon learned that I could not use my will to get myself any farther along. The next thing I learned was that I must lay aside my will. I must depend on the patient, humble slaves. I taught myself to sit perfectly still, in passive acquiescent obedience, waiting for whatever was to come. I began to realize at last the important truth that I, or any other writer or artist, must always remain a humble servant and never assume the part of arrogant master. The prancing army was not I — I was only the one who patiently built the road over which it might ride. As soon as I grasped this my turbulence and my egotistical despair and my will subsided. I learned to be inexhaustibly patient, utterly submissive. At last, after I was able to arrive at this state almost every day, making my mind empty and receptive, my reward would be granted to me. Beginning gradually and imperceptibly the way sleep comes, something would begin to happen on the paper in front of me. The people in my story would begin to move. The place they were in, the rooms, the house, would come alive before me, opening like a flower, mysterious, ravishing. I listened and watched with swiftly mounting excitement and fascination until suddenly the door had opened and I was inside.
My own identity was a chafing prison that I escaped from during my magic hours; and even after the hours were gone each day, my sense of being free still lingered. My heart went out to the whole world and I became one with it in a flood of joy and understanding. I had never been at home on the earth the way other people were, but now, it seemed, I had found a cure for my homelessness.
Alas! this happiness was only a magic spell and it could be broken in an instant, like most magic spells. The cruelest thing about the breaking of the spell in those early days was the fact that it was my mother, with her great tenderness and love for me, who broke it. She did it so gently, so unintentionally, it was a pitiful thing. She did it only by the way she treated me when I came out of my seclusion at the end of the morning. The humble searching solicitude in her blue eyes, her unconcealed pity and adoration fixed so intently on me, seemed to drag me back against my will into the body of the cherished invalid child. She had missed me while I was shut in my room, and she longed to have me talk to her and tell her what I had been thinking and writing. She could probably see in my face that I had been transported and refreshed in some strange, happy realm, and she imagined that I could take her hand and lead her into it and let her see what I had been seeing. She wanted to share in every experience I had. Because I was so delicate and because I was deformed, she believed that I would never leave her behind, even in my imagination, as normal children have to leave their mothers.
I was completely absorbed in learning how to take care of this new thing working in me — not to shelter or protect it as the little invalid had been sheltered and protected, but to make it work hard, to exercise and train it and give it room to grow. In doing this I seemed to grow strong too. When my mother encountered me after my morning’s solitude an eclipse had occurred. This new creative, ruthless, impersonal being had moved entirely across the cherished child’s orbit and made it disappear. These two could not exist inside the same body at the same time. Therefore it was impossible at that moment for me to respond to my mother in the way she longed to have me respond. And I could never explain to her what I was feeling about us both. Tired and discouraged at last, she would suddenly drop her effort and say in quiet despair: —
“You don’t love me! I can’t make you happy — it’s no use. I don’t understand you.”
That sudden direct cry, which came so rarely from her and meant so much, loosened me and brought a gush of aching helpless words out of me.
“It isn’t anything to do with not loving you,” I cried. “I love you more than you can possibly understand. You’ve got to believe it or I shall die.”
“But you are not happy with me, I can’t seem to make you happy,” she said very gravely.
“I don’t want you to make me happy! I am happy.”
“You don’t seem so. I’m afraid I can’t see it,” she would reply from somewhere far away from me, suffering in a kind of human sadness and loneliness which I had never experienced and did not understand.
“It’s something you can’t see. Nobody can see it, but it is true. It is wonderful!”
“Why can’t you tell me about it then, let me share it with you, if you love me so much?”
When she came to that unanswerable question, I would fling myself at her and take her in my arms, struggling to tell her with my caresses what I could never explain in words. She submitted passively. She didn’t like my kind of caresses. They were too violent and therefore untrustworthy. Such behavior as mine, first harshly shutting her away from me, and then ardently wooing her, appealing to her in desperation for her mercy and understanding, had no relation to her conception of love. Hers was the kind of love which seems to me a form of genius. It is so deep and continuous that it makes no unnecessary sound or gesture. Like many New Englanders, she regarded intense personal emotion as such a precious, sacred thing that it must be kept locked and hidden inside the breast.
If I had had success my devotion would have been a very different matter. I should not have needed to be obstinate. I should have been praised and my working hours would have been eagerly and proudly protected. There would have been a genial feeling of elation and importance all round me. But year after year went by and I published almost nothing, and I earned no money, and in spite of it I continued to insist on my hours of work and solitude. I took my routine as seriously as if I had been Flaubert. Sometimes it frightened me. It came over me with a wave almost of horror that, after all, I was not Flaubert, and that there must be something queer and crazy the matter with me, which made me need this perpetual act of devotion so badly.
So I reached the age of thirty-four, with all my imaginary life and experience recorded in little heaps of unpublished manuscript, with no actual or worldly experience to my name and in an almost nun-like state of innocence. Nothing to show for myself at the age of thirty-four &emdash; “I who had been born with so many appetites!” It was a frightening thing. Yet I stubbornly refused to let time frighten me. I had got a harvest to reap from those years, even if it was an invisible one. I had learned to fasten my life to an abstract thing, and in doing this I had learned devotion. I had learned to let impatience and despair slide off me — these few simple yet difficult things.
Now I had found my house, and the idea began to dawn on me that I could make it into a divine place where the writer’s way of living would be the normal one. The understanding and protection of those special needs would be established as everyday necessities here in my house, in the midst of a delicious country life. I had read George Sand’s letters to Flaubert written from Nohant where she was living with her son Maurice and her grandchildren, combining her hours of work with her sensitive enjoyment of country life, and with the pleasures which she and the children shared together — their games and marionette shows, their swimming and sailing. It was a life of strength and joy and accomplishment. The writer was mistress of the house and her work marched on. Her work was the central function of the house, taken for granted like eating meat and vegetables and drinking red wine. It was inconceivable that she should, like me, ever feel apologetic toward anyone for being a writer, or should ever have to explain and adapt her working habits in order to make them intelligible and acceptable to others. It was also inconceivable that she should ever need to use a childish defiance in order to protect her right to do her work and to be wholly and freely herself. I wanted to create such calm security and happiness not only for myself. I was thinking too of other people unknown to me who were tormented by the same need and unable to satisfy it. I wished my house could be a refuge for such humble, anonymous, groping ones — not only a refuge, but a place of rebirth, a starting point for great destinations.
16
My second wish was to make it an aunt’s house. For when I had reached my quiet, resigned thirties I liked aunthood the best of all the relationships that were open to me. Even Flaubert had a niece, and at the time when I bought my house I had two nephews and five nieces.
Most children treated me as if I belonged to their world rather than to the grown-up world, and I was flattered by this great compliment. It was partly because of my small size. I had never grown any taller than a ten-year-old child, and therefore children could never believe that I really was a grownup. At regular intervals my nieces and nephews would ask me again if I was ever going to grow any taller, if I was really and truly a grownup, and if I would ever be able to marry anybody. Ranie and Kitty and Ann, the three little sisters in a row who were my sister Lurana’s children, were the ones who used to talk to me the most intimately about everything almost from the moment they were born. They were always wondering and talking most fantastically about such things as marrying and dying and God. They were not high-brow little girls. They all three quite lackadaisically took it for granted that they would become movie stars a little later on, but in spite of this frivolous aim they spent most of their own private time much less frivolously than most grownups do.
When these three asked me questions about myself and the shape of my body they spoke of it with a kind of awe, as if they thought there was something wonderful about it — as if my difference made me more rare and precious than ordinary, properly made people. Yet in spite of this attitude they always spoke about it with a very careful tenderness as if they were afraid they might hurt me; and wdienever they talked about me and my deformity they would surround me and close in around me as if they wanted to protect me from something outside. For of course they had heard grown-up people and other children, of the kind who echo grown-up people’s ideas, speak of me in a very different way. They knew that the general grown-up idea was decidedly not that something rare and wonderful had happened to me. But children, if they are let alone, have their own very strong and independent sense of values.
The conversations between us concerning my deformity always occurred when we were alone, never before any parents or other grownups. The children’s naturalness, graced with so much love and imagination and delicacy, was a wonderful and a new experience to me. They unlocked a lifelong barrier in me, and so they made me feel more at home and more at ease in their world than I had ever felt in the world of grownups, where this problem had been excluded from every conversation or, if by some awkward accident it did protrude above the surface, was met with dreadful embarrassment and a quick changing of the subject. This evasion was to me mysterious and terrible and baffling. I understand that my mother could never speak of it, and I understand that my brothers and my sister could not speak of it. And I understand that perhaps I could not have borne it if they had spoken of it when we were growing up. But the children, when they arrived on the scene, created a new dimension in which they and I could speak of it easily.
Earlier in my career I had had a critical experience which for a little while had threatened to make me feel that children were my worst enemies. When I made my first appearance in the perpendicular world, at fifteen years of age, after spending most of my life in a secluded and horizontal situation, I began to walk out alone in the streets of our town for the first time, and I found then that whenever I had to pass three or four children together on the sidewalk, if I happened to be alone they would shout at me, and call me by the terrible name which I had heard long ago describing the little locksmith. Sometimes they even ran after me, shouting and jeering. This was something I didn’t know how to face, and it seemed as if I couldn’t bear it.
For a while those encounters in the street filled me with a cold dread of all unknown children. My natural friends seemed to have become my natural enemies. I felt horribly exposed whenever I walked out of the house. And I got a sort of mariner’s habit of scanning the horizon for my enemies and changing my course in plenty of time to avoid meeting them, especially the little idle groups of three or four which were always the most menacing.
One day I suddenly realized that I had become so self-conscious and afraid of all strange children that, like animals, they knew I was afraid, so that even the mildest and most amiable of them were automatically prompted to derision by my own shrinking and dread. As soon as this dawned upon me I began to try to charm them like a lion-trainer.
By main force I began to lift the focus of my own attention, and consequently theirs too, off myself and place it gently but firmly upon them instead. When they glanced up as I approached along the sidewalk they found me looking with interest into their own faces, as if I had noticed something quite astonishing and amusing in them. It they stared back without smiling, I still managed to compel myself to look into their faces invitingly while I still pretended to be unperturbed and lightly amused.
This method worked on them, and it worked on me. For I discovered that it was ridiculously easy to bend their soft and pliable attention back upon themselves, and then to make them unconsciously begin to feel a pleasant warmth being shed upon them, something even desirable and fascinating. At first it was only by a most desperate effort of imagination that I managed to summon up this ray of love and deep interest and direct it upon my enemies, but as soon as I saw that it worked my technique improved and the charm worked better all the time, until it suddenly merged into naturalness and was no longer a charm but the expression of real feeling. After that there was no fear or distrust left in me, and no child ever shouted at me again — or, if any did, I didn’t hear or know it.
After that, wherever I went, in subways or trains, or jolting through our county on the trolley cars of that period, I would always become fascinated by some child or other who was sitting near me. Often there would be a haggard workman sitting opposite me, wearing black greasy clothes, and with him his wife, equally haggard and worn, with no sign left on either of their faces of the freshness of their youth. And nestling between them there would be a child as beautiful as a little rose. The child would be tired and half-asleep and dressed in poor, cheap clothes; but its drooping, dreaming face, its soft eyelids and heavy lashes and its miraculous fairness, its little chin and neck and voluptuous unconscious hands falling over its father’s or mother’s shabby sleeve, could touch me with an overwhelming feeling of the beauty and pathos of life. Wherever I went, after this time, I always noticed them everywhere — children who roused such feeling in me. I know that I used to stare at them in a kind of trance. They seemed to me the only beautiful human beings, scattered about like flowers in the midst of ugly, corrupted grown people. They seemed to me like unearthly things, belonging to a world of perfection and innocence like William Blake’s world. Unlike the race of grown-up people, children, it seemed to me, could never under any circumstances be ordinary or commonplace.
Therefore, when the new generation made its debut in our family in the person of my elder brother’s Tony with his wide-apart blue eyes and his little solemn questing spirit, I for one welcomed him with almost painful awe and tenderness. I felt that my new status of maiden aunt was the thing I had been waiting for, and the thing that would satisfy me. Of all human relationships, aunthood seemed to be the one I was born for.
No, not born for. Nobody is really born to be a maiden aunt. In order to develop into a good maiden aunt I think you have to begin life like anybody else, born for a fine destiny full of hope and passion. Then you must have encountered some physical injury, heartbreak, or fatal misunderstanding which made it seem necessary to withdraw your hope and hide your passion and stand aside in the wings and watch the others who have been given real parts in the play.
These discarded people make the best, the only true and valuable maiden aunts. Their unspent love and the compensating talent which they so often possess, whether they develop it or not, can do certain things for children which no good mother ought to be able to do, since it happens that a good aunt makes a very bad mother, and a good mother could not possibly be a good mother if she had the wild, erratic qualities which belong to the good maiden aunt.
Everybody knows that a good mother gives her children a feeling of trust and stability. She is their earth. She is the one they can count on for the things that matter most of all. She is their food and their bed and the extra blanket when it grows cold in the night; she is their warmth and their health and their shelter; she is the one they want to be near when they cry. She is the only person in the whole world or in a whole lifetime who can be these things to her children. There is no substitute for her. Somehow even her clothes feel different to her children’s hands from anybody else’s clothes. Only to touch her skirt or her collar or her sleeve makes a troubled child feel better. And often when a child wants her, this is all that a mother has time to give. She is always moving. She has so many things to do. She can’t sit down in a chair and talk nonsense right in the middle of a busy day. Sometimes a child has a great urge to talk what its mother calls nonsense. Sometimes even a child’s worry about death and about the beginning and the end of the universe seems like nonsense to the busy mother when she knows by taking one quick animal sniff of him that there is nothing wrong with him.
This is where the good maiden aunt comes in. The aunt should have no binding domestic occupation. She should have nothing that could be called a domestic tie except the habit of being a carefree visitor in the houses where her nieces and nephews live. Or she may have the occupation of possessing a house of her own which is devoted primarily to receiving visits from her nephews and nieces and where there is somebody else to attend to all domestic matters.
The good maiden aunt is the one who is as free and nonsensical (and sad, at times) as the children are themselves, and who will never tire of paying attention to anything they may do or say. She is the one grown-up person in their acquaintance who will never look at a clock and tell them to hurry up because it is time for them to get ready. She would rather let them be two hours late to a dressmaker and three hours late to school than ever say this to them. Yet their mother could not possibly be like that, and the children could not bear it if she were. The good aunt has the same uncorrupted cosmic sense of leisure that the children have, and together they carry on conversations and enterprises which haven’t any end.
The only occupation a good aunt may have apart from the children is something irregular — like being a painter or a storywriter or an astronomer. Children can heartily sympathize with and approve of an aunt’s doing this kind of work, because they can see some sense in it themselves, and they can often be a great help to her in it. But even if the aunt never does any work seriously enough to become known in the outside world, she must have come near enough to being an artist or an astronomer or a dancer to know how it feels to want to be one. For some reason this kind of aunt, especially if she never really does anything herself, but remembers all her life the feeling of having wanted to, is almost sure to have at least one niece or nephew who shows signs of feeling the same thing. When this happens, all the buried passion and unused strength of the lost artist in the aunt gathers itself up in her in one fierce purpose to help the waking artist or scholar or scientist in the child.
This is the kind of aunt I rather hoped that I might be. I wanted to join the long line of the famous aunts of history — those individuals, sparkling and free, who left such treasures behind them: Jane Austen, Kate Greenaway, Louisa Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Robert Louis Stevenson’s chief of our aunts, and Samuel Butler’s Aunt Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh — aunts whose excellence in the role of aunthood is so richly shown in their lives and letters.
Between the year of Tony’s birth and the year when I found my house, six other new members of our family had made their appearance on the earth. They were my brother Warren’s and my sister’s children. They were Jonathan Glover, Harriet Hathaway, and Elizabeth Keats, and my sister’s little Ranie, Ann, and her baby Katharine, my namesake, who was the youngest newcomer at the time when I bought my house.
With this increasing number of nephews and nieces it was natural that I wanted to increase the scope of my aunthood. I wanted to put it in the right setting, on a grand scale. This called for a house of my own in the country. And so I dreamed my second wish for the life of my house, and it was a wish for the kind of eternal magic which a child sees and feels about a beloved place where he goes to visit in summer — a magic that will stay in his heart all his life long and be a touchstone for all his life’s experience. The place for which he is likely to feel this is a place that is not home, although it is as familiar and easy as home. It will have a strangeness and a wonder about it that home can never have. It is a place of poignant return and poignant farewell. It is a place enthralled that waits and sleeps all winter long and is awakened again at the beginning of summer when the first eager footsteps go running over its threshold.
I wanted my house to create a tradition in the lives and memories of the new generation.
(To be concluded)