The Little Locksmith

VOLUME 170

NUMBER 4

OCTOBER, 1942

85 th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by KATHARINE BUTLER HATHAWAY

I HAVE an island in the palm of my right hand. It is quite large and shaped like an almond. To make this island, the fate-line splits in two in the middle, then comes together again up toward the Mount of Jupiter. I don’t know what an island means in palmistry. No two people ever interpret it alike. But it looks to me, and that is enough for me, as if it meant that a quiet, respectable fate were suddenly going to explode in the middle of life into something entirely new and strange, and then be folded together again and go on as quietly as it began.

When I was young I was so sure of the marvelous way my life was going to unfold that I never wasted my time looking for signs and portents. But something went wrong. The future I expected didn’t come, and so I began to be superstitious and sometimes took a furtive look at the palm of my hand when I was alone. And there I found the curious and possibly hopeful island. If the subject of fortune-telling came up in a roomful of people, I put on a cool, superior air as I watched the others, and pretended to be reluctant and skeptical when my turn came — while inwardly I was no more reluctant and skeptical than other ambitious, willful people are if their lives are being held at a standstill. As foolishly and fiercely as I had believed in myself, so foolishly and fiercely I came to believe in gypsies, astrologers, card-readers, crystal-gazers, or anyone else that would give me any hope. And as each year dropped off my life, I felt an almost unbearable longing to know what great thing was going to happen to me when I reached that amazing island in my palm.

I was coming very close to my island when I reached the quiet, refined age of just past thirty. And by that time I had lost all interest in the little mark in my hand as a promise of adventure or change for me. By that time change was the thing I wanted least of all. I had suffered an unbearable thirst and hunger for experience, and I had been caught and held by my predicament in such a way that I could not seek what I needed and it could not come to me. Therefore, at last, I turned my back on myself and my predicament in the hope of turning my back on any more disappointment and despair.

Copyright 1942, by The Atlantic Monthly, Bouton, Mass. All rights reserved.

I decided that I would be a writer, and I determined to be the kind of writer, like Flaubert, who removes everything from his life except his writing, in order that his writing may live and he may live in it. I would never risk again any sort of disappointment. Personal obscurity and infinite patience and infinite devotion were to be my program. I knew very well that out of these I could build and maintain a delight as intense as the mystic delight of any nun who has renounced the world.

And so I combined an absolutely uneventful outward personal life with a vivid life of imaginary experience. I filled notebook after notebook with ideas for stories, and with all kinds of things, minute and spectacular, that I saw happening in other people’s lives. As they grew, my notebooks became as secretly precious to me as their slowly growing honeycomb must be to a hive of bees. And when I began to entertain, at first mildly and then eagerly, the innocent idea that it would be very nice to have a house of my own, it was mainly for the sake, I thought, of making this secret life of mine safer still from external interference. I was intending to make it very hard indeed for anything to dislodge or disturb me.

So I began to peer among lilac bushes and old apple trees as I went along country roads looking for my house. I thought I knew the sort of house I wanted and that would be suitable for me. It would be dark and weatherbeaten on the outside and have small curved windowpanes and a mossy roof. Unquestionably, for me, a very small, childish spinster, it should be small, something mignonne and doll-like. I had thought of an old Cape Cod cottage with a trumpetvine, or a cluster of outbuildings on some old Topsfield or Ipswich farm — a cream-house, cobbler’s shop, and woodshed all fastened together by narrow passages and made into something fascinating and doll-size. I had once seen a house like that, which its owner called The Thimbles because each building was no bigger than a thimble. After that, “thimble" was the word used by me and my family to describe the thing that was supposed to be suitable for me, for my size and my needs, and it was understood and approved by everybody that sooner or later I should find and buy myself a thimble.

When, therefore, I noticed the FOR SALE sign on a very large high square house on Penobscot Bay overlooking the Majabagaduce River and the islands and the Cape Rozier hills, and when just out of casual curiosity I stepped inside to look at it, I was awestruck by the force of destiny. I didn’t recognize this huge house at all. I had never seen it in my mind’s eye. But I knew that whether I liked it or not, this at last was my house.

The owner’s wife showed us over it, and said she didn’t know what price her husband was asking for it. My sister-in-law laughed scornfully at the idea of an unattached person like me, in rather fragile health, buying that enormous place. It would have been more suitable for her with her family of children. We all laughed very heartily at the idea as we went roaming just for fun through those high square rooms. But I laughed with a secret terror and a secret exultation, because I knew that I had met my fate. I did not tell them what I knew, however, and we stepped out of the house to all appearances as casually as we stepped in.

Then one evening, obsessed and deeply excited still, I was driving with someone, and I asked to go around the road where the house stood. I wanted to see how it looked at night. It was the last house on a dark little road that looped around one end of the town. We came to the turn of the road that evening, and I saw my house facing me across the field. A yellow beam of light was shining from the fanlight over the door. That yellow beam was shining through the long white skirts of a fog, a heavy coast-of-Maine fog, the fresh dripping fog of those fir-scented islands and cold tidal rivers. Beyond and behind the house its fields fell away down toward the tiny lighted windows and peaked roofs of Water Street, and the harbor and the dark islands opposite. When I saw my benign, handsome old house that August night, wrapped in a thick Maine fog, I knew I could not wait another day.

2

Since the story of my house is a story of the liberation of a human being, I must tell what made me a prisoner, and what made the simple act of buying a house so significant and exciting.

As far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the marvelous transformations which take place when a very simple sort of magic is applied to things. Even the most everyday transformation of something undesirable into something desirable has, to me, a tremendous magic power back of it, and it is a power I believe in using more deliberately and often than most people do. This is the story of such transformations, both large and small, and now in the beginning I will tell the nature of the predicament which first made this kind of magic dear to me — the predicament and the magic together which made necessary and possible at last my visit to the almond-shaped island which lay in the palm of my right hand.

When I was five years old I was changed from a rushing, laughing child into a bedridden, meditative one. As the years passed, my mother explained to me just what had happened and why I had to lie so still. She told me how lucky I was that my parents were able to have me taken care of by a famous doctor. Because, without the treatment I was having, I should have had to grow up into a — well, I should have had to be, when I grew up, like the little locksmith who used to come to our house once in a while to fix locks. I knew the little locksmith, and after this, when he came, I stared at him with a very strange, intimate feeling. He never looked back at me. His eyes were always down at what he was doing, and he apparently did not want to talk with or look at anybody. He was very fascinating indeed. He was not big enough to be considered a man, yet he was not a child. In the back his coat hung down from an enormous peak, where the cloth was worn and shiny, between his shoulders, and he walked with a bobbing motion. In front, his chin was almost down on his chest; his hands were long, narrow, and delicate, and his fingers were much cleverer than most people’s fingers. There was something about him, something that was indescribably alluring to a child. Because he was more like a gnome than a human being, he naturally seemed to belong to our world more than to the grown-up world. Yet he seemed to refuse to belong to our world or anybody else’s. He acted as if he lived all alone in a very private world of his own.

Somehow I knew that there was a special word that the grownups called a person shaped like the little locksmith, and I knew that to ordinary healthy grownups it was a terrible word. And the strange thing was that I, Katharine, the Butlers’ darling little girl, had barely escaped that uncanny shape and that terrible word. Because I was being taken care of by a famous doctor, nobody would ever guess, when I grew up, that I might have been just like the little locksmith. Staring wonderingly at him, I knew it. I knew that, compared with him, I was wonderfully lucky and safe. Yet deep within me I had a feeling that underneath my luck and safeness the real truth was that I really belonged with him, even if it was never going to show. I was secretly linked with him, and I felt a strong childish amorous pity and desire toward him, so that there was even a queer erotic charm for me about his gray shabby clothes, the strange awful peak in his back, and his cross, unapproachable sadness which made him not look at other people — not even at me lying on my bed and staring sideways at him.

I was able to stare at him from my bed because I could turn my head from side to side. I had worn a bald spot as big as a quarter on the back of my head just from turning it to look at the people who were in the room with me, or turning it the other way to look out into the branches of the tulip tree that grew outside my window. For the doctor’s treatment consisted in my being strapped down very tight on a stretcher, on a very hard sloping bed, with my shoulders pressed against a hard pad. My head was kept from sinking down on my chest, like the little locksmith’s, by means of a leather halter attached to a rope which went through a pulley at the head of the bed. On the end of the rope hung a five-pound iron weight. This mechanism held me a prisoner for twentyfour hours a day, without the freedom to turn or twist my body or let my chin move out of its up-tilted position in the leather halter, except to go from side to side. My back was kept absolutely still.

I spent very joyous days, as most children do who are strapped into iron frames or pinned down on boards like specimen butterflies. Though my back was imprisoned, my hands and arms and mind were free. I held my pencil and pad of paper up in the air above my face, and I wrote microscopic letters and poems, and made little books of stories, and very tiny pictures. I sewed the smallest doll-clothes anybody had ever seen, with the narrowest of hems and most delicious little ruffles. I painted with water colors and made paper dolls and dollhouse furniture out of paper.

I loved paper — colored paper, fancy tissue and crepe paper, and ordinary white or brown paper, too. It had for me an uncommon charm because of all the things it suggested to my mind that could be made out of it. I used to hold a piece of paper in my hands up above my face and let my eyes dwell on it in a sort of trance until, like the Japanese flowers, it would begin to bloom. Appearing on it, in my mind’s eye, some object would take shape which to me seemed the most adorable object in the world — a house, a box, a fan, or a screen. Then, having seen the image of it, I would put my scissors and paints and paste and fingers to work in order to bring that darling little object into being. Paper was the nearest thing to nothing in the way of material, and yet it was possible to make it into something that people would exclaim over and fall in love with — something that had a shape, something that opened and shut or stood up. It was something precious made out of nothing.

When my hands and arms grew tired from this close application, I had my treasures to enjoy. These were numerous little objects that I loved. They were always near me, on the table beside my bed. There was my Revolutionary bullet, for instance, which one of my cousins had found in the cellar of an old house. I have no idea why I was so very devoted to my bullet, except that it was interesting to feel of and to hold. It was round, and piercingly heavy in the palm of my hand in comparison to its small size, and it had a rough uneven surface. To me, it had great character and importance. I made a little velvet bag to keep it in, marked H. R. H. Bullet.

Then I remember my Japanese rabbit. He was about one inch long, made of pottery, and covered with a warm gray glaze. He was hunched up into a ball, his nose on the ground and his ears up against his back, the most compact and lovable little shape I ever saw. I liked rolling him around in the palm of my hand, then shutting my hand and hugging him tight. I would pretend he was only a pebble. When he was shut up in my hand he felt enough like one to fool anybody. Then I would open my fingers and give myself the surprise and joy of discovering that he was not a pebble at all, but a marvelous little rabbit. All over again, as if I had never seen him before, I would study him and dote upon the perfect microscopic carving of his ears, eyes, nose, and whiskers.

I had a great many other Japanese things, too, thanks to Professor Morse. As I lay on my bed I heard people talking about Japan a great deal, as if it were a newly discovered country. Professor Morse had just come back to Salem after living in Japan for many years, and I used to hear him excitedly telling my grandfather about all the things he had seen and learned there. More and more Japanese things kept coming into our house, and many of them came to me to use — such as rice paper, bamboo-handled paintbrushes, and bowls, and fragrant little wooden boxes. I held them in my hands, I felt of them and smelled them. That fragrance! How it clung to each thing, as if it were the signature of Japan! I snuffed it in the pages of the folding books that were made of crepe paper as soft and crushable as thick silk; it was in the prints of terrible warriors and pale-faced women, and on the little pottery figures and the chopsticks; and most of all, perhaps, that sharp fragrance filled all the smooth surfaces and every crack and corner of the softly shutting little wooden boxes.

Because I was not able to explore for myself, I was quick to catch and cling tight to every interesting thing that came within reach of my bed, like the cannibalistic flowers that catch their food as it goes floating by.

Besides all my treasures, of course I had certain books always near me. I had my Boutet de Monvel books which I could live in for hours, staring for a long, long time at each illustrated page, soaking up into my brain and fingers for my own future use Boutet de Monvel’s way of drawing certain things. I had books of pictures for gazing at and books of stories for reading, each one a different world I lived in — Little Women, The Counterpane Fairy, Heidi, Cranford, Alice, The Cuckoo Clock, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Lorna Doone, Don Quixote. I read also the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, Rab and His Friends and Marjorie Fleming, Dickens’s and Sir Walter Scott’s novels, and Shakespeare. I had the St. Nicholas Magazine which came every month, causing wild eagerness and excitement and utter satisfaction in me and my brothers. Through the Letter Box I began a correspondence with a Swiss girl, Yvonne Jequier.

For companions near at hand I had my brothers, Fergus and Warren, just older than I, and my little sister, Lurana, who was very cute to draw, and docile about posing for me. We were all made of the same stuff. The boys and I were a league ourselves — especially Warren and I. I can never forget, for instance, the day when Warren showed me that there was more than one way to draw feet. I was like the Egyptians: I had not advanced beyond the practice of always making the feet exactly alike. I made them pointed flat away from each other. Suddenly Warren crept up to me and showed me a great secret about drawing feet, which burst upon me like the dawn of a new scientific truth. After that I always did them the new way — one foot pointing straight toward me and the other pointing daintily sideways.

Sometimes other children came to play with us, but they were all rather dim. They came into my room and stood around heavily and watched what we were doing. But they didn’t have gumption or imagination enough to join us in the things we liked to do. Games like tag and hide-and-seek were all they could understand, and if my brothers were absorbed in more subtle occupations up in my room these visitors would have to stand around and wait. When finally the boys rose up and went galloping through the house or out of doors to play active games, and my little sister went rushing after them, I never felt a pang or any sense of being left behind. I could always call them back by writing a new poem or drawing a new picture, and they would come eagerly to see it. There was no need for me to feel sad, because we all so wholeheartedly took it for granted that no other amusement was really interesting compared with drawing or writing or making something. I was the lucky one because I could do these things all day long and never be interrupted by having somebody tell me to pick up my clothes or start for school. And when they were away I always had my nurse to talk to and order about.

When strange children came into the room there would sometimes be one among them who took a ghoulish pleasure in staring at my halter and rope and whispering about it to the child next to him. Even without looking up, my brothers and I knew when this happened and it filled us with fury, with disgust and contempt for the child’s stupidity in not knowing what was important and what was not important. The first time it happened it produced a very surprising sensation in me about myself, which was like tasting a queer new taste that I didn’t know existed. Something repulsive had come into my room, something that surely had nothing to do with me. Yet the child’s staring eyes said that it had everything to do with me; they said that the repulsive thing was myself and my halter and rope.

As soon as I recovered from the first shock of it, I knew that the child’s eyes lied. And I felt inside myself, as part of me, a crystal quality, a sort of happiness that was like a spring always bubbling fresh and new. No matter if I tried, I could never, inside myself, feel anything except happy and sparkling. So when that presence came into my room again, and always with certain children, I knew it was something which was really a part of them more than a part of me. But I could not help tasting again that queer astonished sensation about myself whenever they stared at me in that particular way.

This same feeling of my own intrinsic separateness was always with me, too, when certain grown-up callers insisted on coming burblingly upstairs “to see poor little Katharine.” I could always hear them coming, and I knew just what to expect. I didn’t need to be very subtle to realize from their puffing exclamations of pity and their heavily tactful asides that these visitors imagined I was unfortunate. Under their breath I heard the gruesome word “afflicted.”

Such people bored me beyond words. I knew they were not interested in me at all as Katharine, only as “poor little Katharine.” They never paid any attention to what I was drawing or making; they were blind to all the interesting treasures around me. They were not real people, surely, but just large meaningless objects that had got into my room by mistake and were very much in the way there. The only impression, luckily, these visitors left on me was disgust for their ignorance and a fresher satisfaction in my own affairs.

3

As far as I knew from personal experience, those boring old lady visitors of mine and the children who sometimes came and stared at me were the most disturbing sort of persons the world contained. We had no volcanoes in our family. Consequently there were no eruptions of anger or jealousy or selfishness. I knew from hearsay and from reading that these emotions existed and that they were shocking, hideous things, but they never came into our midst to disturb our peace and friendliness towards one another. We gave things back and forth to each other as a matter of course. Brothers and sisters who fought to get things away from each other seemed to us incredibly stupid and vulgar. What fun did they have? We were always so busy and interested making things and doing things together that the passions of ownership and competition never had a chance to grow in us. From this mature sort of childhood we grew up, as may be imagined, very immature and ignorant emotionally, and not very well prepared to understand more violent people when we met them later on.

Our parents had preserved our ignorance by their own dignity and reserve which made them hide their own emotional life from us completely. I should never have guessed that they had any life different and apart from ours if it had not been for two or three mysterious pieces of evidence that came to me by accident: once, a halfoverheard fragment of a strange sentence; once the terrible sound of a man crying; and once a single cry of despair or grief from my mother in another room, followed by a quickly shut door and then silence. These sounds, suddenly breaking in on my peculiarly protected, tranquil, and impersonal life were as startling as the sudden unexplained appearance of blood. I shook when I heard them, with sudden emotion aroused by something I did not even know about. I did not want to know what it was. I shrank from it. I was afraid because, whatever it was, I had a feeling that it was too big for me to bear, or even to know existed. I had my own cosmic troubles that were too big for me, but they were somehow a part of me. There was a sound, a timbre, in human troubles that I could not endure at all. My world, mostly inanimate, and myself, immovable, were not geared for those troubles and emotions.

There was, however, one poignant emotion to which we had all been awakened by the sensitiveness of our parents, and which we all enjoyed consciously. This was an awareness of something which I cannot describe, because its peculiar quality lay in its being indescribable. I can only call it the ineffable charm of life. We were sensitive to the atmosphere of certain times and places, of certain unpredictable external things which gave us an acute pleasure which we all seemed to feel and understand in each other. There was not too much stress laid upon this experience. It was felt much more than it was talked about. It was a feeling of ecstasy that was almost distress when it came, because it came so bound up and clogged by our own stupid feeling — the stupid ache of never being able to equal it or match it with anything like itself when it came.

There was one favorite experience which, above all others, gave us that feeling. That was our annual coming home from Stowe. Stowe was the village in Northern Vermont where we spent every summer in a little farmhouse that had belonged to our grandparents. When the last day came we said passionate good-byes to everything, and leaving that world of mountain coolness and resinous air, we traveled all day in the train, arriving at last in the city in the dusk of a hot fall night. Then it began to come, that indescribable feeling, — a spirit that moved in us violently and strangely; a sweet and intense awareness of the drama and wonder of life, — produced in us by that change of scene.

We loved Stowe with a passionate love; and yet on that evening our new poignant memory of it made us love the city in no ordinary way. The September mountain air that we had breathed that very morning made our sudden entrance into the evening city strangely thrilling, and the September heat of the city came over us with a wonderful languor.

When I traveled, in those days, I had to be carried on my stretcher, and I was brought up from the station laid across the two seats of an old-fashioned cab. It was a short drive up from the station, and it was with that drive that the best of it began, for me at least. The dark swaying plumes of the elm trees overhead in the almost tropical twilight, the clop-clop of the horse’s feet on the city pavement, the queer smell inside the cab, were inexpressibly beautiful to me.

We reached our little Victorian house and saw again in the half-dark the fancy iron fence along the front of our garden, the brick walk going to the side door, and the trellised arch over the walk where the great sumptuous trumpetvine grew. I was carried through the gate and along the brick walk, my fingers clinging tight to the slender iron framework of my stretcher as I went swaying forward to the uneven rhythm of my nurse’s and my father’s footsteps.

During that brief passage, I smelled again the burned, dusty, September smell of the city garden, and heard again how the air was all filled with the mysterious shrill ringing of the September crickets. I went under the dark bower of the trumpetvine that I loved. Its rich, extravagant summer growth, the long sprays that hung out of it and moved with every breath of air, and the burnt orange of the slender tube-shaped flowers made something for me as incommunicable as a remembered song. It was that great, rich trumpetvine, especially the trumpetvine, that gave the feeling of ineffable mystery and charm that was always and eternally a part of that night when we came home from Stowe.

The boys had of course walked up from the station and got there long before us. And Warren, slipping past me as I was being maneuvered into the house, would perhaps drop a bunch of grapes into the nest between my ear and my shoulder. I could smell them and feel them against my neck, our little dark blue Salem grapes that grew in the arbor at the very back of our garden. Or perhaps Fergus would drop on my chest a moist and beautiful autumn rose from the rose garden on the terrace. So in ecstasy I went sailing through the side door and up the back stairs, my stretcher hoisted and quivering and almost perpendicular until I arrived at last in my old room and was moored again to my bed beside the tulip tree.

My nurse, unstrapping me from my stretcher and rolling me back and forth to get my arms out of my sleeves, would take off my traveling clothes and put my thinnest nightgown on me for the hot city night. I lay and watched her and listened to her in a kind of delicious hypnotism: her hand reaching up and pulling down the window shades, and the look of her back as she opened bureau drawers, and the rustling sounds she made as she put things away — every little action, every little touch and sound, was different that night, and wonderful.

We lay awake as long as we could manage to stay awake, all four of us, in our different rooms, — half-conscious, inarticulate, impressionable, stupid children, — so that we might enjoy to the full our queer annual rapture of hearing over and over the slow rise and fall of the Salem crickets’ trill, and the strange, familiar sound of people’s feet going up and down on the brick sidewalk in the street, and of staring dreamily at our strange, familiar bedroom walls and watching the way the city arc-light made great moving shadows of horse-chestnut leaves and branches.

After the first night at home that particular magic began to fade and was soon all gone, locked away somewhere in a cupboard of time, precious and strange, to wait for our lives to live another enormous year around again. After that night, Salem was just Salem, and Stowe became the word that always could evoke for us something marvelous and far away.

For me, that one night was a blessed reprieve, because it drugged me with new sensations strong enough to make me forget for a few hours a secret that weighed on me eternally. For although my daytime life was so delightful and absorbing, when evening came I left it, and descended into hell.

4

I had two hideous familiars, two fiendish jailers who, with the sudden onrush of darkness and solitude, leaped on me every night and seized me one on each side and would not let me go. These two were two Awful Thoughts which my mind had hit upon in its explorings and been poisoned by and made sick and swollen by, as if one of them had been a snake that had bitten me and the other an evil plant that had stung me. One of the two Awful Thoughts was the endlessness of Space, and the other was the endlessness of Time. Every night, gripped by these two horrors, my brain rolled over backward in humble, piteous convulsions of fear, and my body trembled and shook with the hideous disaster of being forced to exist in the very arms of these two unthinkable things.

Yet, on the other hand, not to have been born, never to have been me at all, to have remained forever nonexistent somewhere in outer Space, was even more lonely and terrible to think of. There was no escape from thinking, in life or in death, since I believed in the immortality of my own consciousness — that it was doomed to continue FOREVER either in heaven or in hell Each night the whole terrible realization would spread slowly and surely to the very edges of my body and mind, soaking me, cooking me, in the pure poison of horror. Like a terrified mouse, my mind would scurry this way and that for a hole to hide in, for some little nestlike thought that I could curl up in. But there was no such little hole. All the daytime life and its thoughts which I loved so much became at night suddenly unreliable and false. My cousins, our jokes, Christmas presents, my dolls, the Woodsey Path in Stowe, my birthday and what I wanted, the St. Nicholas — I ran appealing and stricken among them all, my nicest, dearest daytime thoughts, and they availed nothing against the feeling of cosmic loneliness and doom. My Awful Thoughts breathed an icy breath on all the charm and fun and adorableness of the life of day and made it crumple into nothing and prove itself to have been no more than a pitiful deception.

Every night, as if I were compelled as a sort of punishment, I went over and over the same hopeless path, climbing up to the brink of unthinkableness and then tumbling back again — up and back, up and back, until I could actually feel the aching groove the repetition made inside my head. Every night I would endure and endure and endure, knowing I must not call or cry out, until I simply could not bear it any longer. When the unbearable limit suddenly came, I screamed. I called, “Papa!" Then I listened, boiling with fear. It was worse to have screamed if nobody came — more horrible, more lonely. Sometimes nobody heard me the first time, and I called again. “Papa!” Then, oh, merciful! I heard footsteps — slow, calm, cozy footsteps. Into the back hall, up the stairs, across the threshold of my room the footsteps brought my tall, narrow-shouldered, frail Papa.

He sat down close beside me and put his healing and comforting hand upon me. Wonderful hand! Wonderful calm quietness! Then he began to recite Wordsworth’s poem about the daffodils. After that, “ Lochinvar.” Always the same two poems. Then perhaps he would sit without speaking, and in the calm loving stillness that he created between us I was supposed to lose my childish nervous fears and begin to grow sleepy. But even while he sat so close to me in the darkness, we were separated. For I was sure that he had never thought about endlessness. Otherwise he could not have been so calm. He, like all the other strangely casual grownups, had apparently never come across these Awful Thoughts. His innocent mind had never explored as far as mine had done. He, like the rest, could be so preoccupied with the cozy life of our earth, of our sitting room downstairs, of his books, of the new Atlantic Monthly, that he was unbelievably forgetful of the awful abyss in which our earth was hanging.

I kept trying, in spite of my failure every night, to bring myself to the fearful point of speaking of it to him. I would work myself up by a terrific force of will to a decision to ease my mind, come what would. I got my first sentence up to the threshold of possible plausible utterance, and at last a few parched dreadful words would cross my lips. Then my heart thundered as I paused to see what the effect would be. My father, to my amazement, remained perfectly unperturbed. “Let’s think about Stowe,”he would say. “See if you can see the Woodsey Path in your mind’s eye. Tell me, can you see how it looks when the raspberries are ripe on the wild raspberry bushes?” Tears of disappointment rushed to my eyes in the darkness. He didn’t know! He couldn’t understand! To please him, I would try to force myself to think about the raspberry bushes or whatever else he suggested to soothe me, while I gave up once more the hope of ever sharing my suffering. The contrast between my horrors and his simple unquestioning innocence and tranquillity was too much for me. I felt as if I were the mature person and he the happy unconscious child. And so I felt a yearning tenderness and pity for him, and an ever more lonely despair for myself.

I realized again and again that grownups were too cheerful — even the sensitive ones like my father — to understand really terrible things. In my loneliness I thought that I had been initiated by chance into a knowledge that no human being was supposed to have or endure. I felt myself secretly an exile from the happy unconscious level of existence that my father, and everyone else that I knew, inhabited. I was banished and damned forever. It was as if they breathed a different air. I contemplated my situation with a fearful wistfulness, because I could see so well how blissfully happy I should have been, with my talents, and all my treasures, St. Nicholas, our summers in Stowe, if only I could have wiped out forever that unlucky day when my mind had roamed too far. Such was the underlying sense of cosmic woe and cosmic disaster that curdled the joy of my childhood. And all the while, some docile unconscious sweetness kept me from ever questioning the disaster that had befallen my body.

It is a very long time now since I lay quaking on my bed and my father sat beside me night after night, so tenderly aware of me and never knowing that I was in hell. Now that, being grown-up myself, I have become strangely casual and calm about the universe, I can tell it at last. But it is many years too late: he is gone — long, long ago; and it doesn’t matter any more. And too late I know that his tranquillity those evenings concealed from me agonies of his own. Why couldn’t we both have cried out and told each other all about our horrors and clung together and really known each other, father and child?

(To be continued)