By The Sea Part 1

By The Sea.

by Heman White Chaplin.

I.

On the southeastern coast of Ma.s.sachusetts is a small village with which I was once familiarly acquainted. It differs little in its general aspect from other hamlets scattered along that sh.o.r.e. It has its one long, straggling street, plain and homelike, from which at two or three different points a winding lane leads off and ends abruptly in the water.

Fifty years ago the village had a business activity of its own. There still remain the vestiges of a wharf at a point where once was a hammering ship-yard. Here and there, in bare fields along the sea, are the ruins of vats and windmills,--picturesque remains of ancient salt-works.

There is no visible sign left now of the noisy life of the ship-yards, except a marble stone beneath a willow in the burying-ground on the hill, which laments the untimely death of a youth of nineteen, killed in 1830 in the launching of a brig. But traces of the salt-works everywhere remain, in frequent sheds and small barns which are wet and dry, as the saying is, all the time, and will not hold paint. They are built of salt-boards.

There were a good many of the people of the village and its adjoining country who interested me very greatly. I am going to tell you a simple event which happened in one of its families, deeply affecting its little history.

James Parsons was a man perhaps sixty years of age, strongly built, gray-haired, cleanshaven except for the conventional seaman's fringe of beard below the chin, and always exquisitely neat. Whether you met him in his best suit, on Sunday morning, or in his old clothes, going to his oyster-beds or his cranberry-marsh, it was always the same. He was usually in his shirt-sleeves in summer. His white cotton shirt, with its easy collar and wristbands, seemed always to have just come from the ironing-board. "It ain't no trouble at all to keep James clean," I have heard Mrs. Parsons say, in her funny little way; "he picks his way round for all the world just like a p.u.s.s.ycat, and never gets no spots on him, nowhere."

You saw at once, upon the slightest acquaintance with James, that while he was of the same general civilization as his neighbors, he was of a different type. In his narrowness, there was a peculiar breadth and vigor which characterized him. He had about him the atmosphere of a wider ocean.

His early reminiscences were all of that picturesque and adventurous life which prevailed along our coasts to within forty years, and his conversation was suggestive of it He held a silver medal from the Humane Society for conspicuous bravery in the rescue of the crew of a ship stranded in winter in a storm of sleet off Post Hill Bar. He had a war-hatchet, for which he had negotiated face to face with a naked cannibal in the South Sea. He was familiar with the Hoogly.

His language savored always of the sea. His hens "turned in," at night.

He was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was one which always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic character: "South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar." In describing the transactions of domestic life, he used words more properly applicable to the movements of large ships. He would speak of a saucepan as if it weighed a hundred tons. He never tossed or threw even the slightest object; he hove it. "Why, father!" said Mrs. Parsons, surprised at seeing him for a moment untidy; "what have you ben doing?

Your boots and trousers-legs is all white!" "Yes," said Mr. Parsons, apologetically, looking down upon his dusty garments, "I just took that bucket of ashes and hove 'em into the henhouse."

The word "heave," in fact, was always upon his tongue. It applied to everything. "How was this road straightened out?" I asked him one day; "did the town vote to do it?" "No, no," he said quickly; "there was n't never no vote. The se-lec'men just come along one day, and got us all together, and hove in and hove out; and we altered our fences to suit."

I remember hearing him testify as a witness to a will. It appeared that the testator was sick in bed when he signed the instrument. He was suffering greatly, and when he was to sign, it was necessary to lift him with the ex-tremest care, to turn him to the light-stand. "State what was done next," the lawyer asked of James. "Captain Frost was laying on his left side," said James. "Two of us took a holt of him and rolled him over."

He had probably not the least suspicion that his language had a maritime flavor. I asked him one night, as we coasted along toward home, "What do seafaring men call the track of light that the moon makes on the water?

They must have some name for it" "No, no," he said, "they don't have no name for it; they just call it 'the wake of the moon.'"

James's learning had been chiefly gained from the outside world and not from books. I have heard him lay it down as a fact that the word "Bible"

had its etymology from the word "by-bill" (hand-bill). "It was writ,"

he said, "in small parcels, and they was pa.s.sed around by them that writ 'em, like by-bills; and so when they hove it all into one, they called it the Bible.'"

But while James had little learning himself, he appreciated it highly in others. I had occasion to ask him once why it was that the son of one of his neighbors, in closing up his father's estate, had not settled his accounts regularly in the probate court. "Oh, I know how that was," he replied; "he settled 'em the other way. You see, he went to the college at Woonsocket, and he learned there how to settle accounts the other way: and that's the way he settled 'em." And then he added, "When Alvin left the college, they giv' him a book that tells how to do all kinds of business, and what you want to do so's to make money; and Alvin has always followed them rules. The consequence is, he's made money, and what he 's made, he 's kep' it. I suppose he's worth not less than sixteen hundred dollars."

Sometimes he would venture a remark of a gallant nature. "They don't generally git the lights in the hall so as to suit me," he once said.

"I don't want it too light, because then it hurts my eyes; but I want it light enough so as 't I can see the women!"

James was a large, strong man, but Mrs. Parsons, although she was little and slight, and was always ailing, constantly a.s.sumed the role of her husband's nurse and protector, not only in household matters, but in other affairs of life. Whenever she had visitors,--and she and James were hospitable in the extreme,--she was pretty sure to end up, sooner or later, if James were present, with some droll criticism of him, as much to his delight as to hers.

James sometimes liked to affect a certain harshness of demeanor; but the disguise was a transparent one. How well do I remember the time--oh, so long ago!--when for some reason or other I happened to have his boat instead of my own, one day, with one of the boys of the village, to go to Matamet, twelve miles off, to visit certain lobster-pots which we had set. We were delayed there by breaking our boom, in jibing. We should have been at home at noon; at seven in the evening we were not yet in sight. When we got in, rather crestfallen at our disaster, particularly as the boat was wanted for the next day, James met us at the pier. We were boys then, and his tongue was free. As he stood there on the sh.o.r.e, bare-headed, hastily summoned from his house, with his hair blowing in the wind, waving his hands and addressing first us and then a knot of men who stood smoking by, no words of censure were too harsh, no comment on our carelessness too cutting, no laments too keen over the irreparable loss of that particular boom. The next time I could take my own boat, if I were going to get cast away. And I remember well how he ended his tirade. "I did n't care nothing about you two," he said. "If you want to git drownded, git drownded; it ain't nothing to me. All I was afraid of was that you 'd gone and capsized my boat, and would n't never turn up to tell where you sunk her. But as for you--" and he laughed a laugh of heartless indifference.

But ten minutes later, and right before his face, at his own front gate, Mrs. Parsons betrayed him. "I never see father so worried," she said, "sence the time he heard about Thomas; why, he 's spent the whole afternoon as nervous as a hawk, going up on the hill with his spy-gla.s.s; and I don't feel so sure but what he was crying. He said he did n't care nothing about the boat,--'What 's that old boat!' says he; but if you boys was drownded out of her, he would n't never git over it." At which James, being so unmasked, laughed in a shamefaced way, and shook us by the shoulders. He had a son who carried on some sort of half-maritime business on one of the wharves, in the city, and lived over his shop. When James went at intervals to visit him, he made his way at once from the railway station to the nearest wharf; then he followed the line of the water around to the shop. Where jib-booms project out over the sidewalk, one feels so thoroughly at home! From the shop he would make short adventurous excursions up Commercial Street and State Street, sometimes going no farther than the nautical-instrument store on the corner of Broad Street, sometimes venturing to Washington Street, or even moving for a short distance up or down in the current of that gay thoroughfare. He loved to comment satirically on the city, with a broad humorous sense of his own strangeness there. "The city folks don't seem to have nothing to do," he said. "They seem to be all out, walking up and down the streets. Come noon, I thought there'd be some let-up for dinner; but they did n't seem to want nothing to eat; they kep' right on walking."

I must not leave James Parsons without telling you of two whale's teeth which stand on his parlor mantel-piece; he ornamented them himself, copying the designs from cheap foreign prints. One of them is what he calls "the meeting-house." It is the high altar of the Cathedral of Seville. On the other is "the wild-beast tamer." A man with a feeble, wishy-washy expression holds by each hand a fierce, but subjugated tiger. His legs dangle loosely in the air. There is nothing to suggest what upholds him in his mighty contest.

II.

Now we must turn from James Parsons to a man of a different type, or rather of a different variety of the same type; for they descend alike from original founders of the town, and, like most of their fellow-townsmen, are both of unqualified Pilgrim stock.

To get to Captain Joseph Pelham's house, you have to drive along a range of hills for some miles, skirting the sea; then you come, half-way, to a bright modern village with trees along the main street, with houses and fences kept painted up, for the most part, but here and there relieved by an unpainted dwelling of a past generation.

Here you have an option. You may either pursue your road through the high-lying prosperous street, with peeps of salt water to the right, or you may turn sharply off at a little store and descend to the lower road. It is always a struggle to choose.

The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the creek, broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-gra.s.s which will cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along the white, precipitous beach; you pa.s.s the long, shaky pier, with half-decayed fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of fish-cars, seines, and barrels. Then the road, following the sh.o.r.e a little longer, climbs the hill and enters the woods. Two miles more and you come out to fields with mossy fences, and occasional houses.

The houses begin to be more frequent. All at once you enter the main street of W------.

In a moment you see that you have come into a new atmosphere. There is a large modern church among the older ones. There are large, fine houses, some old-fashioned, others new. By some miraculous intervention Queen Anne has not as yet made her appearance. There are handsome, well-filled stores, going into no little refinement in stock. There is, of course, a small brick library, built by the bounty of a New Yorker who was born here. There is a brick national bank, and a face brick block occupied above by Freemasons, orders of Red Men, Knights Templars, and the Pool of Siloam Lodge, I. O. O. F., and below by a savings bank and a local marine insurance company.

It is here that we shall find Captain Joseph Pelham. If a stranger has occasion to inquire for the leading men of the place he is always first referred to him. It is he who heads every list and is the chairman of every meeting. When a certain public man, commanding but a small following here, appeared, upon his campaign tour, and found no one to escort him to the platform and preside, so that he was obliged to justify his appearance here by the Scripture pa.s.sage, "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick;" at the moment of entering the hall, closely packed with curious opponents, disposed perhaps to be derisive when the situation for the visitor was embarra.s.sing in the extreme,--it was Captain Joseph Pelham who, though the bitterest opponent of them all, rose from his seat, gave the speaker his arm, escorted him to the platform, presented him with grave courtesy to the audience, and sat beside him through the entire discourse.

While Captain Pelham continued to go to sea, and after that, until he was made president of the insurance company, he lived a mile or two out of the town, in a house he had inherited. It is picturesquely situated, on a bare hill, with a wide view of the inland and the ocean. As you look down from its south windows, the cl.u.s.ter of houses nestling together at the sh.o.r.e below stand sharply out against the water. It is one of those white houses common in our older towns,--two-storied, long on the street, with the front door in the middle. Of the interior it is enough to say that its owner had sailed for thirty years to Hong-Kong, Calcutta and Madras. It had a prevailing odor of teak and lacquer. In the front hall was a vast china cane-holder; a turretted Calcutta hat hung on the hat-tree; a heavy, varnished Chinese umbrella stood in a corner; a long and handsome settee from Java stood against the wall.

In the parlors, on either hand, were Chinese tables shutting up like telescopes, elaborate rattan chairs of different kinds, and numberless other things of this sort, which had plainly been honestly come by, and not bought.

Then, if you met the Captain's favor, he would show you with becoming pride some family relics, and tell you about them. They came mostly from his paternal grandfather, who was a shipmaster too, had commanded a privateer in the Revolution, and made a fortune. There were a number of pieces of handsome furniture,--these you could see for yourself What would be shown you, with a half-diffident air, would be: a silver mug; two Revere tablespoons; a few tiny teaspoons marked F.; a handsome sword and scabbard; a yellow satin waistcoat and small-clothes; portraits, not artistic, but effective, of his grandfather, in a velvet coat and knee-breeches, with a long spygla.s.s in his hand, and of his grandmother, a strong, matter-of-fact looking woman, handsomely dressed.

But the thing which the Captain secretly treasured most, but brought out last, was his grandmother's Dutch Bible. It is a curious old book; you can see it still if you wish. It has an elaborate frontispiece. Sixteen cuts of leading incidents in Scripture history conduct you by gentle stages, from Eden, through the offering of Isaac, to the close of the Evangelists, and surround Dr. Martin Luther, who, in a gown, holds back the curtains of a pillared alcove, to show you, through two windows, an Old and a New Testament landscape, and a lady sitting beneath a canopy, with an open volume. The covers are of thick bevelled board covered with leather. There was once a heavy clasp. The edges are richly gilded, and figures are p.r.i.c.ked in the gilding. It is very handsomely printed.

It was in the possession, in 1760, of a young New England girl, the Captain's grandmother. There is a story about it,--a story too long to tell here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled early in New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson.

A hundred years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance sprang up with certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this Bible, then new and elegant, found its way over the sea as a gift to young Mistress Preston. In New England, and as a relic of the early ties of our people with Holland, momentarily renewed after a century had pa.s.sed away, it is probably unique. It was a last farewell from Holland to her English children, before she parted company with them forever.

I have told you about this house, as I recall it, although Captain Pelham had now ceased to live there, because it was there alone that he seemed completely at home. Furnished as it was from the four quarters of the globe, everything seemed to fit in with his ways. He supplemented the Chinese tables, and they supplemented him. But when he ceased to go to sea, in late middle life, and settled down at home upon his competency, and began a little later to become interested in public matters; when he was at last made president of the insurance company, a director in the bank, and a trustee in the savings bank, and when affairs were left more and more to his control, it became convenient for him to get into town; and his wife and daughter were perhaps ambitious for the change.

So he had sold his house by the sea, and had bought a large and somewhat pretentious one on the main street, with a cast-iron summer arbor, and a bay-window closed in for a conservatory. He had furnished it from the city with new Brussels carpet, with a parlor set, a sitting-room set, a dining-room set, and chamber sets; and the antique things which had given his former home an air of charming picturesqueness were for the most part tucked away in unnoticed corners.

The Captain never seemed to me to have become quite naturalized in his new home. He never belonged to the furniture, or the furniture to him.

The place where you saw him best in these later days was in the office of his insurance company, or in the little business-room of one of the banks, surrounded by a knot of more substantial townsmen, or talking patiently with some small farmer or seafaring man seeking for insurance or a loan. One of the most marked features of his character was a certain patience and considerateness which made all borrowers apply by preference to him. He would sit down at his little table with a plain man whose affairs were in disorder, and listen with close attention to his application for a loan. Somehow the man would find himself disclosing all the particulars of his distress. Then Captain Pelham, in his quiet way, would go over the whole matter with him; would plan with him on his concerns; would try to see if it were not possible to postpone a little the payment of debts and to hasten the collection of claims; to get a part of the money for a short time from a son in Boston or a married daughter in New Bedford; and so, by pulling and hauling, to weather the Cape.

I must say a word about his position in town matters. He had been at sea the greater part of the time from sixteen to fifty-two. During that time he had had absolutely no concern with political affairs. He had never voted: for he had never, as it had happened, been ash.o.r.e at the time of an election. And yet before he had been at home six years he was one of the selectmen of the town and overseer of the poor, and had become familiar with the details of Ma.s.sachusetts town government, superficially so simple, in fact so complex. It was a large town, of no small wealth. Lying as it did along the seaboard, where havoc was always being made by disasters of the sea, there was not only a larger number than in an inland town of persons actually quartered in the poorhouse, but there were many broken families who had to be helped in their own homes. And it was to me an interesting fact that in dealing with two score households of this cla.s.s, Captain Pel-ham, who had spent most of his time at sea, was able to display the utmost tact and judgment. He applied to their affairs that same plain kindliness and sound sense which he showed in the matter of discounts at the bank.

While the friendships of Captain Pelham were chiefly in his own town, his acquaintance was not confined to it. In his own quiet, unpretending way he was something of a man of the world. He was known in the marine insurance offices in the large cities. He had been familiar all his life with large affairs; he had commanded valuable ships, loaded with fortunes in teas and silks, in the days when an India captain was a merchant.

III.

You will ask me why it is that I have been telling you about these men, and what it is that connects them.

It was now ten years since Captain Pelham's only son, himself at twenty-two the master of a vessel, had married a daughter of James Parsons,--a tall, impulsive, and warm-hearted girl,--one of those girls to whom children always cling. Both James Parsons's daughters had proved attractive and had married well. It had been a disappointment in Captain Pelham's household, perhaps, that this son, their especial pride, should not have married into one of the wealthy families in his own village. At first there had been a little visiting to and fro; it had lasted but a little time, and then the two households had settled down, as the way is in the country, to follow each its own natural course of living. George Pelham's wife had always lived in an odd little house, all doors and windows, near by her father, in her native village.

It was from Porto Cabello that that message came,--yellow fever--a short sickness--a burial in a stranger's grave. George Pelham's wife had been for two or three years of less than her usual strength. It was not long after that news came,--came so suddenly, with no warning,--that she began to fade away; and after ten months she died.

I remember seeing her a week or two before her death. Her bed had been set up in her little parlor for the convenience of those who were attending upon her. She lay on her back, bolstered up. The paleness of her face was intensified by her coal-black hair, lying back heavy on the pillow. Her hands were thin and transparent, and I remember well the straining look in her eyes as she talked with me about the boy whom she was going to leave.