The Little Locksmith
by KATHARINE BUTLER HATHAWAY
17
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.
When we were all young there was much gay talk and speculation concerning the current love affairs and the probable 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?” 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 important experience in grown-up life. Nobody ever put this feeling into words. Nobody explained the reason why. The reason was so obvious that no explanation was necessary. The reason was there in every mirror for me to see.
Sometimes a worm will sew a stitch in a young leaf, and even though the leaf may partly unfold, and partly grow and live, it will always be a crumpled and imperfect leaf. My body, like the leaf, represented that mysterious element of imperfection in nature which allows the worm to maim the leaf; I represented the flaw which exists side by side with a design which appears to be flawless. Because the worm had sewed a stitch in me and made me forever crumpled, I belonged to the fantastic company of the queer, the maimed, the unfit. It was understood that I could not play a part in the ordained dance of love, in obedience to the design. I was obliged, therefore, in a certain sense, to skip in my life all the years and all the force and strength which other women gave to love and to the bearing of children — to become, while I was still young and joyous, the equivalent of an old woman, a detached, sexless, meditative observer.
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, nor my soft bed and my family’s love for me, I felt that I must be incurable. I remember two particular times when something 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 liked to have me go with him. After he had paddled for a little while that day he drove the canoe against the 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. 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 uninitiated outsider in human life; 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.
The other thing 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 in a secret room of boughs beside the river.
Then they had gone, leaving behind them the evidence which told their story as simply as the words of an old English ballad would have told the same kind of 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 ballad-like 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 fullpage 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. 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 in their amorous escapade.
In these two marvelous scenes I could feel a huge governing force in action, 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.
18
Having seen and surmised this much of what life held for those who could receive it, I angrily rejected the insipid substitutes 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, 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.
I found relief for the time being when my mother sent me to live in Boston, as a pupil at 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 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 shopwindows, and at the same time I learned carefully not to see my own reflection in those sheets of plate glass.
At the end of my first year at the school, my teacher in English literature and composition, Lucia Briggs, who was the daughter of President Briggs of Radcliffe, otherwise famous as Dean Briggs of Harvard, somehow 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 Townsend 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 girls in sight, whom I wished to have for my friends. Lucia Briggs, on depositing me at the Radcliffe gates, appointed Catharine Huntington as the 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 to some other girls, 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 which was 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 those who were watching 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.
And this strange thing happened. Not only Catharine Huntington but the others of her 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: they amazed me by actually liking my appearance. They 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 could 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.
19
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.
I went back to Danvers and sat down at my table with a block of paper and a pencil in front of me. I wanted to begin. I had written a poem which was published in the 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.”
But I had received too much praise. I had no idea of the patience and humility required of the kind of writer who sits down at his table every day. I did not know how to do it, and I suffered an agony of chagrin and frustration. Then a kind of cosmic loneliness began to descend on me every evening, and it became so queer that it was like a sickness.
The horror that had darkened my childhood came back and closed in around my mind again, and it spread swiftly until it swamped me. My physical surroundings seemed unsubstantial to me. The only things that seemed real were the unthinkable mysteries of space and time, and all through the day and the night the thought of those two question marks would flash through my mind like bolts of lightning until they shriveled and destroyed everything around me that was near and human. I began to be afraid to go out of the house; soon I was afraid of seeing my friends, even my family, just as in my childhood I felt myself sinking in a hopeless quicksand of pure terror. My happiness and great hopes were gone, mired and ruined with me, and I knew I could not live without them.
I tried to bury myself in my bed. I refused to get up or speak or look at anybody except my mother, who used to hold me in her arms. My mother engaged a nurse to take care of me, and our old crusty bachelor doctor came and sat in my room, helpless and silent, every day. I astonished myself by crying, even in front of our doctor — I who had always been so controlled and so fiercely unwilling to be pathetic and pitiable, I who had never cried even when I was alone, because of my mother’s example of stoicism. My mother was all warm and tender toward me, and now she anxiously urged me and encouraged me to cry. She seemed to want me to let loose all my tears at last, as though she understood better than I did what was the matter with me and wanted me to cry.
But since crying didn’t cure me, a new doctor came from Boston to see me, and he leaned over my bed like a soothsayer and he said crucial words to me. He spoke to me like a general urging his men into action; he challenged me to be brave enough to disregard and so disarm the terrors which, if I let them frighten me, would eventually paralyze my body and my mind.
That doctor’s military treatment resuscitated me, and under its power I got up trembling and pale and went to Atlantic City, as he had ordered, with my mother. But for a long time, two years at least, the terror closed round me again at intervals, and the doctor’s military treatment lost part ol its cficctivencss. I could never forget his challenge, and it prevented me from ever burying myself in my bed again, but his order to me that l was to ignore the inward fear and suffering, although it helped me, did not cure me. Sometimes when I was walking along a Salem street the sense of mysterious unearthly dread would suddenly take hold of me, and bring panic and loneliness and a feeling of imminent disintegration. I felt as if, exposed there on the street, my face were going to fall apart in a wild scream of horror, and my body collapse from sheer fright on the sidewalk; and with this coming over me I knew I should be unable to speak to any acquaintance who might appear at that moment, with the normal easy smile and the terribly bright, cheerful remarks that people usually make to each other on the street.
I thought that even people who didn’t know me would notice me and would be startled by the strange look that I felt must be on my face. They would think I was crazy, as perhaps I was. I felt cruelly exposed. I thought, “They ought not to let me go out alone in such a condition. They ought to keep me where nobody can see me in this piteous state.” But the doctor had insisted that I must do just this: I must go out in the street alone and risk the coming of this panic, and conquer it. I was willing and glad to obey anybody who spoke to me with such authority as he had, and so I forced myself to go on walking even when I felt as if I were on the brink of hell, and sweat poured out of me and my mind was whirling in confusion.
20
Then one day I found somewhere, on a page I have since forgotten, three words which had greater power than even the doctor’s words. When I began to feel the horror coming on, I said to myself, “God within me. God within me. God within me.” While I was saying those three words I felt and I knew that I was no longer alone. All of a sudden, because of those three words, I could walk along the street without fear. Saying “God within me” brought me an inrush of quietness and sweetness, a feeling inside me of dignity and wholeness which was not I at all, but something greater than I was, against which the horrors were powerless. Just by saying over and over, and believing as I said it, “God within me, God within me,” I could send entirely out of myself the quick-spreading toxic fear and the disintegration it created.
It was wonderful to recover self-possession in the midst of disintegration, but the ability to walk calmly along a street in Salem was not enough to satisfy a person with such fierce desires and ambitions as I had had before this breakdown came. The horrors attacked me at home, not only on the street, and I could not spend my whole time saying “God within me.” “God within me” was like a hand which took my hand and prevented me from falling. But I had to do more than not fall down. If I was going to live, I must go somewhere. I must proceed.
And I discovered at that point another essential thing which showed me where to go. I discovered one of the things I had known in my childhood and had forgotten in my confusion. It was that I had eyes not only for crying, or for staring in blind fear, but for seeing. I discovered also that the visible world is inexhaustible. My eyes need never starve.
After I had discovered my eyes, I taught myself to remember them whenever the horrors struck me. No matter what might be happening to me, no matter how crazy and frightened I might feel, there was always the great visible world before me, and I could look at it. When a moment of terror came, I could look at a chair, or at a table, or at a door, and by deliberately and faithfully looking at it, and really seeing it with my whole attention, with the intense and humble and selfless concentration of an artist, of a child, of a van Gogh, I could realize and see the chair, or the table, or whatever the object happened to be that was in front of me, and it became for me in that moment an object of love, full of mystery and meaning, because the entire visible world became, when I really looked at it, lovable, mysterious, and significant. An ecstasy filled my hand, and I began to work.
And so I found out where I was to go. For by setting myself to work with the aim of translating my wonderful delight and realization of things into words and sentences, I could deliberately cultivate the delight and prolong its visitations until it became the element within which I lived, safe at last, happy and invulnerable. With my eyes and my hand I could save myself, by the grace of God, every time the powers of Evil attacked me inside the darkness of my head. I had substituted the invulnerable passion of art for vulnerable human passion.
21
Then at last the time bomb went off which transported me to Castine, made me mistress of a house in which my three great wishes of love, art, and aunthood were to be fulfilled, and launched me on my great dream of what I was going to do. After buying the house and paying for the repairs, I planned so that I should have enough money left over to give the house a few rich touches.
By using restraint in most things I intended to be joyfully unrestrained in a few. I tried to weigh and balance each improvement in its relation to the whole, in order to make each expenditure count its utmost and make my limited sum of money go as far as possible. This was my favorite way of doing things. I could never work with great spirit in any material unless I knew that the amount of it was limited. I bad to be hedged in by a boundary of either space or material in order to awaken the feeling of creative excitement.
I kept faithfully turning back and forth from drunken exultation in the unlimited possibilities of my new treasure to sober concentration on the limits represented in my bankbook. This duality, self-imposed, gave me a wonderful feeling of exquisite equilibrium, like walking perfectly calmly in mid-air. It was not the same magic as making something out of nothing: this was a new magic on a larger scale. But even so, one had to remember that it was magic, and that equilibrium was involved and therefore one had to step carefully.
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 should 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 truck 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. I stood waiting, and felt the soft night wind blow against me, and I looked up at the sky and all around me to find out how my domain would look and seem to me at that hour. 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 solitary observer.
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 whole childhood and youth, and I felt guilty and scared, because this, as far as I saw, was not nature: it was only I. 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 darling Hepplewhite chairs from Baltimore that my mother had always loved so, the long mahogany Empire sofa, the sideboard, and all the trunks filled with more treasures.
There in the middle of the night I caught a glimpse of a buttercup painted by Warren when he was four or five, an apple sewed in cardboard with red wool by Lurana in kindergarten— 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 trifles 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.
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 appeared now to have been leading me to that door. Each of those previous steps had been accompanied by an often groundless fear of injuring someone else or of interfering with other people’s 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 “my little voice,” and in which I believed just enough more than I believed in fear and diffidence so that I had chosen it instead of fear. 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 the fear.
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. Other people could 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 climbed ashore and pushed away my faithful little boat. 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.
(The End)