Jessie Fauset, "My House and a Glimpse of My Life Therein" (1914)
by Jessie Fauset
Far away on the top of a gently sloping hill stands my house. On one side the hill slopes down into a valley, the site of a large country town; on the other it descends into a forest, thick with lofty trees and green, growing things. Here in stately solitude amid such surroundings towers my dwelling; its dull-red brick is barely visible through the thick ivy, but the gleaming tops of its irregular roof and sloping gables catch the day’s sunlight and crown it with a crown of gold.
An irregular, rambling building is this house of mine, built on no particular plan, following no order save that of desire and fancy. Peculiarly jutting rooms appear, and unsuspected towers and bay-windows,—the house seems almost to have built itself and to have followed its own will in so doing. If there be any one distinct feature at all, it is that halls long and very broad traverse the various parts of the house, separating a special set of rooms here, making another division there. Splendid halls are these, with fire places and cosy arm-chairs, and delightful, dark corners, and mysterious closets, and broad, shallow stairs. Just the place in winter for a host of young people to gather before the fire-place, and with pop-corn and chestnuts, stories and apples, laugh away the speeding hours while the wind howls without.
The hall on the ground floor has smaller corridors that branch off and lead at their extremity into the garden. Surely, no parterre of the East, perfumed with all the odors of Araby, and peopled with houris, was ever so fair as my garden! Surely, nowhere does the snow lie so pure and smooth and deep, nowhere are the evergreen trees so very tall and stately as in my garden in winter! Most glorious is it in late spring and early June. Out on the green, green sward I sit under the blossoming trees; in sheer delightful idleness I spend my hours, listening to the blending of wind-song with the “sweet jargoning” of little birds. If a shower threatens I flee across my garden’s vast expanse, past the gorgeous rosebushes and purple lilacs, and safe within my little summer-house, watch the “straight-falling rain,” and think of other days, and sighing wish that Kathleen and I had not parted in anger that far-off morning.
When the shower ceases, I hasten down the broad path, under the shelter of lofty trees, until I reach one of my house’s many doors. Once within, but still in idle mood, I perch myself on a window-seat and look toward the town. Tall spires and godly church steeples rise before me; high above all climbs the town clock; farther over in the west, smoke is curling from the foundries. How busy is the life beyond my house! Through the length of the long hall to the window at the opposite side I go, and watch the friendly nodding of tall trees and the tender intercourse of all this beautiful green life. Suddenly the place becomes transformed—this is an enchanted forest, the Forest Morgraunt—in and out among the trees pass valiant knights and distressed ladies. Prosper le Gai rides to the rescue of Isoult la Desirous. Surely, the forest life beyond my house is full of purpose and animation, too. From the window I roam past the sweet, familiar chambers, to the attic staircase, with its half-hidden angles and crazy old baluster. Up to the top of the house I go, to a dark little store-room under the eaves. I open the trap-door in the middle of the ceiling, haul down a small ladder, mount its deliciously wobbly length, and behold, I am in my chosen domain—a queen come into her very own! If it choose I can convert it into a dread and inaccessible fortress, by drawing up my ladder and showering nutshells and acorns down on the heads of would-be intruders. Safe from all possible invasion, I browse through the store of old, old magazines and quaint books and journals, or wander half-timidly through my infinite unexplored land of mystery, picking my way past heaps of delightful rubbish and strong, secret chests, fancying goblins in the shadowy corners, or watching from the little windows the sunbeams’ play on the garden, and the grey-blue mist hanging far-off over the hollow valley.
From such sights and fancies I descend to my library, there to supplement my flitting ideas with the fixed conception of others. Although I love every brick and little bit of mortar in my dwelling, by library is of all portions the very dearest to me. In this part of the house more than any place else, have those irregular rooms been added, to receive my ever-increasing store of books. In the large room,—the library proper,—is a broad, old-fashioned fire-place, and on the rug in front I lie and read, and read again, all the dear simple tales of earlier days, “Mother Goose,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Arabian Nights”; here, too, I revel in modern stories of impossible adventure. But when a storm rises at night, say, and the rain beats and dashes, and all without is raging, I draw a huge, red armchair before the fire and curl into its hospitable depths,
“And there I sit
Reading old things,
Of knights and lorn damsels
While the wind sings—
Oh, drearily sings!”
Off in one of the little side-rooms stands my desk, covered with books that have caught my special fancy and awakened my thoughts. This is my living-room, where I spend my moods of bitterness and misunderstanding, and questioning, and joy, too, I think. Often in the midst of a heap of books, the Rubaiyat and a Bible, Walter Pater’s Essays and “Robert Elsmere” and “Aurora Leigh,” and books of belief, of insinuation, of open unbelief, I bow my head on my desk in a passion of doubt and ignorance and longing, and ponder, ponder. Here on this desk is a book in which I jot down all the little, beautiful word-wonders, whose meanings are so often unknown to me, but whose very mystery I love. I write, “In Vishnu Land what Avatar?” and “After the red pottage comes the exceedingly bitter cry,” and all the other sweet, incomprehensible fragments that haunt my memory so. High up on many of the shelves in the many rooms are books as yet unread by me, Schopenhauer and Gorky, Petrarch and Sappho, Goethe and Kant and Schelling; much of Ibsen, Plato and Ennius and Firdausi, and Lafcadis Hearn,—a few of these in the original. With such reading in store for me, is not my future rich?
Can such a house as this one of mine be without immediate and vivid impression on its possessor? First and most of all it imbues me with a strong sense of home; banishment from my house would surely be life’s most bitter sorrow. It is so eminently and fixedly mine, my very own, that the mere possession of it,—a house not yours or another’s, but mine, to lie in as I will,—is very sweet to me. It is absolutely the chey soi of my soul’s desire. With this sense of ownership, a sense which is deeper than I can express, a sense which is almost a longing for
some unknown, unexplainable, entire possession—passionate, spiritual absorption of my swelling—comes a feeling that is almost terror. Is it right to feel thus, to have this vivid, permeating and yet wholly intellectual enjoyment of the material loveliness and attractiveness of my house? May this not be perhaps a sensuality of the mind, whose influence may be more insidious, more pernicious, more powerful to unfit me for the real duties of life than are other lower and yet more open forms of enjoyment? Oh, I pray not! My house is inexpressibly dear to me, but the light of the ideal beyond, “the light that never was on sea or land,” is dearer still.
This, then, is my house, and this in measure, is my life in my house. Here, amid my favorite books, and pictures, and fancies, and longings, and sweet mysteries, shall old age come upon me, in fashion most inglorious, but in equal degree most peaceful and happy. Perhaps—that is! For after all my house is constructed of dream-fabric, and the place of its building is - Spain!
[The Crisis 8.3 (July 1914): 143-145]