608
PARTISAN REV1EW
bat trooper in the war against the Devil. I read Spengler and brooded
through my winters in New Haven about the oncoming downfall of the
West and how it could be prevented. Be certain that under these cir–
cumstances I sent Harlot a telegram that I was on my way, signed it
Ashenden (for Somerset Maugham's British spy), and drove my car, a
1949 Dodge coupe, up from New Haven all the way to the back side of
Mount Desert, where I found the house not at all as it used to be.
I do not know if I care to describe the changes. I would need to
add a treasures-in-trash catalogue to the insights of a geologist: genera–
tions of Hubbards had left their strata. We used to have oak whatnots
in
corners, and blonde-wood Danish in the Cunard; one fine old drafting
table at the Camp had come down to us from Doane Hadlock Hubbard
(who also left us punctilious drawings of a proposed lookout tower one
hundred feet high that he once planned to build on the southern head of
the island). Along the walls were hordes of washed-out framed pho–
tographs, spotted, glass-cracked, oak-mitred, come down to us from the
1850s on. Then there were the color prints, long sun-faded, ofMatisse,
Braque, Dufy, Duchamp - all introduced by my mother. They had been
kept, even if she never came back. Once up on a wall, things remained; it
was a summer house. No wars of selection went on - merely an accom–
modation of accumulation. The beds were a disaster area, summer-cot–
tage pallets. Lumpy, broken-spring mattresses with old ticking, wooden
bureaus with thick paint scored by fingernail scrapings to attest to hot
bored summer afternoons; spider webs on casement windows, birds' nests
under the eaves, and mouse droppings in many an unused room were the
price we paid for that much spread of house.
Rodman Knowles Gardiner and his wife fixed it up when they
bought it from us. Kittredge's father, being a Shakespeare scholar
(distantly related to the famous Shakespearean, George Kittredge, also of
Harvard), knew enough about the unwinding of plots to stipulate later
in the deed of transfer to the couple for a wedding present that in the
event of Kittredge's divorce from Hugh Montague, she was to own the
Keep without impediment. Which is how I returned to living in it. By
way of Kittredge. But that was in time to come. Now in the Easter of
my junior year at Yale, more than two years after the closing with the
Hubbards, Dr. Gardiner and his wife had certainly spruced up the Keep.
Retired from teaching, they moved some of their best Colonial furniture
from their Cambridge home to Maine. There were drapes on the win–
dows now and the walls bore Dr. Gardiner's collection of nineteenth–
century Victorian paintings. The bedrooms had new beds. At first sight I
hated it all. We now looked like aNew England hostelry of the sort
that keeps the temperature too high in winter and screws down the
windows.
