That night he did something he couldn’t have contemplated before. At the Munroe door, he broke an engagement to spend an evening in company. “There’s some business in Salinas I’ve got to attend to,” he explained. “I stand to lose some money if I don’t go right in.”
In Salinas he went straight to the public library. “Have you got any pictures of Vermont houses—pretty ones?” he asked the librarian.
“You’ll probably find some in the magazines. Come! I’ll show you where to look.”
They had to warn him when the library was about to close. He had found pictures of interiors, but of interiors he had never imagined. The rooms were built on a plan; each decoration, each piece of furniture, even the floors and walls were related, were a part of the plan. Some deep and instinctive feeling in him for arrangement, for color and line had responded to the pictures. He hadn’t known rooms could be like that—all in one piece. Every room he had ever seen was the result of a gradual and accidental accumulation. Aunt Sophie sent a vase, father bought a chair. They put a stove in the fireplace because it threw more heat; the Sperry Flour Company issued a big calendar and mother had its picture framed; a mail order house advertised a new kind of lamp. That was the way rooms were assembled. But in the pictures someone had an idea, and everything in the room was a part of the idea. Just before the library closed he came upon two pictures side by side. One showed a room like those he knew, and right beside it was another picture of the same room with all the clutter gone, and with the idea in it. It didn’t look like the same place at all. For the first time in his life, Pat was anxious to go home. He wanted to lie in his bed and to think, for a strange new idea was squirming into being in the back of his mind.
Pat could not sleep that night. His head was too full of plans. Once he got up and lighted the lamp to look in his bank book. A little before daylight he dressed and cooked his breakfast, and while he ate, his eyes wandered again and again to the locked door. There was a light of malicious joy in his eyes. “It’ll be dark in there,” he said. “I better rip open the shutters before I go in there.”
When the daylight came at last, he took a crowbar and walked around the house, tearing open the nailed shutters as he went. The parlor windows he did not touch, for he didn’t want to disturb the rose bush. Finally he went back into the kitchen and stood before the locked door. For a moment the old vision stopped him. “But it will be just for a minute,” he argued. “I’ll start in tearing it to pieces right away.” The crowbar poised and crashed on the lock. The door sprang open crying miserably on its dry hinges, and the horrible room lay before him. The air was foggy with cobwebs; a musty, ancient odor flowed through the door. There were the two rocking chairs on either side of the rusty stove. Even through the dust he could see the little hollows in their cushions. But these were not the terrible things. Pat knew where lay the centre of his fears. He walked rapidly through the room brushing the cobwebs from his eyes as he went. The parlor was still dark for its shutters were closed. Pat didn’t have to grope for the table; he knew exactly where it was. Hadn’t it haunted him for ten years? He picked up table and Bible together, ran out through the kitchen and hurled them into the yard.
Now he could go more slowly. The fear was gone. The windows were stuck so hard that he had to use the bar to pry them open. First the rocking chairs went out, rolling and jumping when they hit the ground, then the pictures, the ornaments from the mantel, the stuffed orioles. And when the movable furniture, the clothing, the rugs and vases were scattered about under the windows, Pat ripped up the carpets and crammed them out, too. Finally he brought buckets of water and splashed the walls and ceilings thoroughly. The work was an intense pleasure to him. He tried to break the legs from the chairs when he threw them out. While the water was soaking into the old dark wall paper, he collected all of the furniture from under the windows, piled it up and set fire to it. Old musty fabrics and varnished wood smoldered sullenly and threw out a foul stench of dust and dampness. Only when a bucket of kerosene was thrown over the pile did the flame leap up. The table and chairs cracked as they released their ghosts into the fire. Pat surveyed the pile joyfully.
“You would sit in there all these years, wouldn’t you?” he cried. “You thought I’d never get up the guts to bum you. Well, I just wish you could be around to see what I’m going to do, you rotten stinking trash.” The green carpets burned through and left red, flaky coals. Old vases and jars cracked to pieces in the heat. Pat could hear the sizzle of mentholatum and painkiller gushing from containers and boiling into the fire. He felt that he was presiding at the death of his enemy. Only when the pile had burned down to coals did he leave it. The walls were soaked thoroughly by now, so that the wall paper peeled off in long, broad ribbons.
That afternoon Pat drove in to Salinas and bought all e magazines on house decoration he could find. In the evening, after dinner he searched the pages through. At last, in one of the magazines, he found the perfect room.
There had been a question about some of the others; there was none about this one. And he could make it quite easily. With the partition between the sitting room and the parlor torn out, he would have a room thirty feet long and fifteen wide. The windows must be made wide, the fireplace enlarged and the floor sandpapered, stained and polished. Pat knew he could do all these things. His hands ached to be at work. “Tomorrow I’ll start,” he said. Then another thought stopped him. “She thinks it’s pretty now. I can’t very well let her know I’m doing it now. Why, she’d know I heard her say that about the Vermont house. I can’t let people know I’m doing it. They’d ask why I’m doing it.” He wondered why he was doing it. “It’s none of their darn business why,” he explained to himself. “I don’t have to go around telling people why. I’ve got my reasons. By God! I’ll do it at night,” Pat laughed softly to himself. The idea of secretly changing his house delighted him. He could work here alone, and no one would know. Then, when it was all finished, he could invite a few people in and pretend it was always that way. Nobody would remember how it was ten years ago.
This was the way he ordered his life: During the day he worked on the farm, and at night rushed into the house with a feeling of joy. The picture of the completed room was tacked up in the kitchen. Pat looked at it twenty times a day. While he was building window seats, putting up the French-grey paper, coating the woodwork with cream-colored enamel, he could see the completed room before him. When he needed supplies, he drove to Salinas late in the evening and brought back his materials after dark. He worked until midnight and went to bed breathlessly happy.
The people of the valley missed him from their gatherings. At the store they questioned him, but he had his excuse ready. “I’m taking one of those mail courses,” he explained. “I’m studying at night.” The men smiled. Loneliness was too much for a man, they knew. Bachelors on farms always got a little queer sooner or later.
“What are you studying, Pat?”
“Oh! What? Oh! I’m taking some lessons in—building.”
“You ought to get married, Pat. You’re getting along in years.”
Pat blushed furiously. “Don’t be a damn fool,” he said. As he worked on the room, Pat was developing a little play, and it went like this: The room was finished and the furniture in place. The fire burned redly; the lamps threw misty reflections on the polished floor and on the shiny furniture. “I’ll go to her house, and I’ll say, offhand, ‘I hear you like Vermont houses.’ No! I can’t say that, I’ll say, ‘Do you like Vermont houses? Well, I’ve got a room that’s kind of like a Vermont room.’ ” The preliminaries were never quite satisfactory. He couldn’t come on the perfect way for enticing her into his house. He ended by skipping that part. He could think it out later.