Modern American Prose Selections Part 10

Traveling afoot! This is the best posture in which to worship the G.o.d of the Out-of-Doors!

OLD BOATS[25]

WALTER PRICHARD EATON

[Footnote 25: From _Green Trails and Upland Pastures_, by Walter Prichard Eaton. Copyright, 1917, by Doubleday, Page & Co. By permission of the author and of the publishers.]

Anything which man has hewn from stone or shaped from wood, put to the uses of his pleasure or his toil, and then at length abandoned to crumble slowly back into its elements of soil or metal, is fraught for the beholder with a wistful appeal, whether it be the pyramids of Egyptian kings, or an abandoned farmhouse on the road to Moosilauke, or only a rusty hay-rake in a field now overgrown with golden-rod and Queen Anne's lace, and fast surrendering to the returning tide of the forest. A pyramid may thrill us by its tremendousness; we may dream how once the legions of Mark Antony encamped below it, how the eagles of Napoleon went tossing past. But in the end we shall reflect on the toiling slaves who built it, block upon heavy block, to be a monarch's tomb, and on the monarch who now lies beneath (if his mummy has not been transferred to the British Museum). The old gray house by the roadside, abandoned, desolate, with a bittersweet vine entwined around the chimney and a raspberry bush pushing up through the rotted doorsill, takes us back to the days when the pioneer's axe rang in this clearing, hewing the timbers for beam and rafter, and the smoke of the first fire went up that ample flue. How many a time have I paused in my tramping to poke around such a ruin, reconstructing the vanished life of a day when the cities had not sucked our hill towns dry and this scrubby wilderness was a productive farm!

The motor cars go through the Berkshires in steady procession by the valley highways, past great estates betokening our changed civilization. But the back roads of Berkshire are known to few, and you may tramp all the morning over the Beartown Mountain plateau, by a road where the green gra.s.s grows between the ruts, without meeting a motor, or indeed, a vehicle of any sort. A century ago Beartown was a thriving community, producing many thousand dollars' worth of grain, maple sugar, wool, and mutton. To-day there are less than half a dozen families left, and they survive by cutting cord wood from the sheep pastures! We must haul our wool from the Argentine, and our mutton from Montana, while our own land goes back to unproductive wilderness. As the road draws near the long hill down into Monterey, there stands a ruined house beside it, one of many ruins you will have pa.s.sed, the plaster in heaps on the floor, the windows gone, the door half fallen from its long, hand-wrought hinges. It is a house built around a huge central chimney, which seems still as solid as on the day it was completed. The rotted mantels were simply wrought, but with perfect lines, and the panelling above them was extremely good. So was the delicate fanlight over the door, in which a bit of gla.s.s still clings, iridescent now like oil on water. Under the eaves the carpenter had indulged in a Greek border, and over the woodshed opening behind he had spanned a keystone arch. Peering into this shed, under the collapsing roof, you see what is left of an axe embedded in a pile of reddish vegetable mould, which was once the chopping block. Peering through the windows of the house, you see a few bits of simple furniture still inhabiting the ruined rooms. Just outside, in the door-yard, the day lilies, run wild in the gra.s.s, speak to you of a housewife's hand across the vanished years. The barn has gone completely, overthrown and wiped out by the advancing forest edge. Enough of the clearing still remains, however, to show where the cornfields and the pastures lay. They are wild with berry stalks and flowers now, still and vacant under the Summer sun.

The ruins of war are melancholy, and raise our bitter resentment. Yet how often we pa.s.s such an abandoned farm as this without any realization that it, too, is a ruin of war, the ceaseless war of commercial greed. No less surely than in stricken Belgium has there been a deportation here.

Factories and cities have swallowed up a whole population, indeed, along the Beartown road. It is easy to say that they went willingly, that they preferred the life of cities; that the dreary tenement under factory grime, with a "movie" theatre around the corner, is an acceptable subst.i.tute to them for the ample fireplaces, the fanlight door, the rolling fields and roadside brook. We hear much discussion in New England to-day of "how to keep the young folks on the farm." But why should they stay on the farm, to toil and starve, in body and mind? We have so organized our whole society on a compet.i.tive commercial basis that they can now do nothing else. Those ancient apple trees beside the ruined house once grew fruit superior in taste to any apple which ever came from Hood River or Wenatchee, and could grow it again; but greed has determined that our cities shall pay five cents apiece for the showy western product, and the small individual grower of the East is helpless. We have raised individualism to a creed, and killed the individual. We have exalted "business," and depopulated our farms. The old gray ruin on the back road to Monterey is an epitome of our history for a hundred years.

But to pursue such reflections too curiously would take our mind from the road, our eyes from the wild flower gardens lining the way--the banks of blueberries fragrant in the sun, the stately borders of meadow rue where the gra.s.sy track dips down through a moist hollow. And to pursue such reflections too curiously would take us far afield from the spot we planned to reach when we took up our pen for this particular journey. That spot was the bit of sandy lane, just in front of Cap'n Bradley's house in old South County, Rhode Island. The lane leads down from the colonial Post Road to the sh.o.r.e of the Salt Pond, and the Cap'n's house is the first one on the left after you leave the road. The second house on the left is inhabited by Miss Maria Mills. The third house on the left is the Big House, where they take boarders. The Big House is on the sh.o.r.e of the Salt Pond. There are no houses on the right of the lane, only fields full of bay and huckleberries.

The lane runs right out on a small pier and apparently jumps off the end into whatever boat is moored there, where it hides away in the hold, waiting to be taken on a far journey to the yellow line of the ocean beach, or the flag-marked reaches of the oyster bars. It is a delightful, leisurely little lane, a byway into another order from the modernized macadam Post Road where the motors whiz. You go down a slight incline to the Cap'n's house, and the motors are shut out from your vision. From here you can glimpse the dancing water of the Salt Pond, and smell it too, when the wind is south, carrying the odour of gasolene the other way. The Cap'n's house is painted brown, a little, brown dwelling with a blue-legged sailor man on poles in the dooryard, revolving in the breeze. The Cap'n is a little brown man, for that matter. He is reconciled to a life ash.o.r.e by his pipe and his pension, and by his lookout built of weathered timber on a gra.s.s-covered sand drift just abaft the kitchen door, whither he betakes himself with his spy gla.s.s on clear days to see whether it is his old friend Cap'n Perry down there on number two oyster bar, or how heavy the traffic is to-day far out beyond the yellow beach line, where Block Island rises like a blue mirage.

Cap'n Bradley boasts a garden, too. It is just across the lane from his front door. There are three varieties of flowers in it--nasturtiums, portulacas, and bright red geraniums. The portulacas grow around the border, then come the nasturtiums, and finally the taller geraniums in the centre. The Cap'n has never seen nor heard of those ridiculous wooden birds on green shafts which it is now the fashion to stick up in flower beds, but he has something quite appropriate, and, all things considered, quite as "artistic." In the bow of his garden, astride a spar, is a blue-legged sailor man ten inches tall, keeping perpetual lookout up the lane. For this flower bed is planted in an old dory filled with earth. She had outlived her usefulness down there in the Salt Pond, or even, it may be, out on the blue sea itself, but no vandal hands were laid upon her to stave her up for kindling wood. Instead, the Captain himself painted her a bright yellow, set her down in front of his dwelling, and filled her full of flowers. She is disintegrating slowly; already, after a rain, the muddy water trickles through her side and stains the yellow paint. But what a pretty and peaceful process! She might not strike you as a happy touch set down in one of those formal gardens depicted in _The House Beautiful_ or _Country Life_, but here beside the salty lane past Cap'n Bradley's door, gaudy in colour, with her load of homely flowers and her quaint little sailor man astride his spar above the bright geraniums, she is perfect. No boat could come to a better end. She's taking portulacas to the Islands of the Blest!

Miss Maria Mills, in the next house, never followed the sea, and her idea of a garden is more conventional. She grows hollyhocks beside the house, and sweet peas on her wire fence. But at the lane's end, where the water of the Salt Pond laps the pier, you may see another old boat put to humbler uses, now that its seafaring days are over, and uses sometimes no less romantic than the Cap'n's garden. It is a flat-bottomed boat, and lies bottom side up just above the little beach made by the lap of the waves, for the tide does not affect the Salt Pond back here three miles from the outlet. The paint has nearly gone from this aged craft, though a few flakes of green still cling under the gunwales. But in place of paint there have appeared an incredible number of initials, carved with every degree of skill or clumsiness, over bottom and sides. This boat is the bench whereon you wait for the launch to carry you down the Pond, for the catboat or thirty-footer to be brought in from her moorings, for Cap'n Perry to land with a load of oysters; or it is the bench you sit upon to watch the sunset glow behind the pines on the opposite headland, the pines where the blue herons roost, or to see the moon track on the dancing water. The Post Road is alive with motors now, far into the evening. You get your mail from the little post office beside it as quickly as possible--which isn't very quickly, to be sure, for we do not hurry in South County, even when we are employed by Uncle Sam--and then you turn down the quiet lane, past the Cap'n's garden, toward the lap of quiet water and the salty smell. Affairs of State are now discussed, of a summer evening, upon the bottom of this upturned boat, while a case knife dulled by oyster sh.e.l.ls picks out a new initial. And when the fate of the nation is settled, or to-morrow's weather thoroughly discussed (the two are of about equal importance to us in South County, with the balance in favour of the weather), and the debaters have departed to bed, some of them leaving by water with a rattle of tackle or, more often in these degenerate days, the _put, put_ of an unm.u.f.fled exhaust, then other figures come to the upturned boat, speaking softly or not at all, and in the morning you may, perhaps, find double initials freshly cut, with a circle sentimentally enclosing them. So the old craft pa.s.ses her last days beside the lapping water, a pleasant and useful end.

On the other side of the Big House from the pier, at the head of a tiny dredged inlet, there is an old boathouse. It seems but yesterday that we used to warp the _Idler_ in there when summer was over, get the chains under her, and block her up for the winter. She spent the winter on one side of the slip; the _Sea Mist_, a clumsy craft that couldn't stir short of a half gale, spent the winter on the other side. Over them, on racks, the rowboats were slung. There was a larger boathouse for the big fellows.

What busy days we spent in May or June, caulking and sc.r.a.ping and painting, splicing and repairing, making the little _Idler_ ready for the sea again!

She was an eighteen-foot cat, a bit of a tub, I fear, but the best on the Pond in her day, eating up close into the wind, sensitive, alert, with a pair of white heels she had shown to many a larger craft. Surely it was but yesterday that I rowed out to her where she was moored a hundred feet from sh.o.r.e, climbed aboard, hoisted sail, and, with my pipe drawing sweetly, sat down beside the tiller and played out the sheet till the sail filled; there was a crack and snaffle of straining tackle, the boat leaped forward, the tiller batted my ribs, the _Idler_ heeled over, and then quietly, softly, as rhythmic as a song, the water raced hissing along her rail, the little waves slapped beneath her bow--and the world was good to be alive in!

Surely it was but yesterday that the white sail of the _Idler_ was like a gull's wing on the Pond!

But the white sail wings are few on the Pond to-day, and the _Idler_ lies on her side in the weeds behind the boathouse. She had to make room for the motor craft. She is too bulky for a flower bed, too convex for a bench. Her paint is nearly gone now, both the yellow body colour and the pretty green and white stripe along her rail that we used to put on with such care. Her seams are yawning, and the rain water pool that at first settled on the low side of her c.o.c.kpit has now seeped through, and a little deposit of soil has acc.u.mulated, in which a sickly weed is growing. Poor old _Idler_! One day I got an axe, resolved to break her up, but when it came to the point of burying the first blow my resolution failed. I thought of all the hours of enthusiastic labour I had spent upon those eighteen feet of oak ribs and planking; I thought of all the thrilling hours of the race, when we had squeezed her into the wind past Perry's Point and saved a precious tack; I thought of the dreamy hours when she had borne us down the Pond in the summer sunshine, or through the gray, mysterious fog, or under the stars above the black water. So instead, I laid my hand gently on her rotting tiller, and then took the axe back to the woodshed. She will never ride the waves again, but she shall dissolve into her elements peacefully, in sight of the salt water, in the quiet gra.s.s behind the boathouse.

It seems to me that all my life I have had memories of old boats. One of my earliest recollections is of _Old Ironsides_, in the Charlestown Navy Yard, dismantled and decked over, but saved from destruction by Dr. Holmes's poem. What thrilling visions it awoke to climb aboard her and tread her decks! Acres of spinnaker and topgallants broke out aloft, cannon boomed, smoke rolled, "grape and canister" flew through the air, chain shot came hurtling, and the Stars and Stripes waved through it all, triumphant. The white ironclads out in the channel (for in those days they were white) evoked no such visions. Another memory is of a childhood trip to New Bedford and a long walk for hours by the water front, out on green and rotting piers where chunky, square-rigged whalers, green and rotting, too, were moored alongside. The life of the whaler was in those days something infinitely fascinating to us boys. We read of the chase, the hurling of the harpoon, the mad ride over the waves towed by the plunging monster. And here were the very ships which had taken the brave whalers to the hunting grounds, here on their decks were some of the whale boats which had been towed over the churned and blood-flecked sea! Why should they be green and rotting now? They produced upon me an impression of infinite sadness. It seemed as if a great hand had suddenly wiped a romantic bloom off my vision of the world.

But it was not long after that I knew the romance of a launching. It was at Kennebunkport in Maine. All summer the ship yards on either side of the river, close to the little town and under the very shadow of the white meeting house steeple, had rung with the blows of axe and hammer. The great ribs rose into place, the sheathing went on, the decks were laid, the masts stepped; finally the first rigging was adjusted. After the workmen left in the late afternoon, we boys swarmed over the ships--three-masters, smelling deliciously of new wood and caulking, and played we were sailors. When the rope ladders were finally in place, we raced up and down them, sitting in the crow's nest on a line with the church weather vane, and pretending to reef the sails. It was an event when the ships were launched. The tide was at the flood, gay canoes filled the stream along both banks, hundreds of people ma.s.sed on the sh.o.r.e. A little girl stood in the bow with a bottle of wine on a string. An engine tooted, cables creaked, and down the greased way slid the ship, with a dip and a heave when she hit the water that made big waves on either side and set the canoes to rocking madly, while the crowd cheered and shouted. After the launching, the schooners were towed out to sea, and down the coast, to be fitted elsewhere. We boys followed them in canoes as far as the breakwater, and watched them disappear. Soon their sails would be set, and they would join the white adventurers out there on the world rim.

Where are they now, I wonder? Are they still buffeting the seas, or do they lie moored and outmoded beside some green wharf, their days of usefulness over? I remember hoping, as I watched them pa.s.s out to sea, that they would not share the fate of the unknown craft which lay buried in the sands a mile down the coast. It was said that she came ash.o.r.e in the "Great Storm"

of 1814 (or thereabouts). Nothing was left of her in our day but her st.u.r.dy ribs, which thrust up a few feet above the sand, outlining her shape, and were only visible at low water. On a stormy day, when the seas were high, I used to stand at the head of the beach and try to picture how she drove up on the sh.o.r.e, shuddering deliciously as each great wave came pounding down on all that was left of her oaken frame. When I read in the newspaper of a wreck I thought of her, and I think of her to this day on such occasions, thrusting up black and dripping ribs above the wet sands at low water, or vanishing beneath the pounding foam of the breakers.

If you take the sh.o.r.e line train from Boston to New York, you pa.s.s through a sleepy old town in Connecticut where a spur track with rusty rails runs out to the wharves, and moored to these wharves are side-wheel steamers which once plied the Sound. It served somebody's purpose or pocket better to discontinue the line, and with its cessation and the cessation of work in the ship yards close by, the old town pa.s.sed into a state of salty somnolence. The harbour is gla.s.sy and still, opening out to the blue waters of the Sound. Still are the white steamers by the wharves, where once the gang planks shook with the tread of feet and the rumble of baggage trucks.

Many a time, as the train paused at the station, I have watched the black stacks for some hint of smoke, hoping against hope that I should see the old ship move, and turn, and go about her rightful seafaring. But it was never to be. There were only ghosts in engine room and pilot house. Like the abandoned dwelling on the upland road to Monterey, these steamers were mute witnesses to a vanished order. But always as the train pulled out from the station I sat on the rear platform and watched the white town and the white steamers and the gla.s.sy harbour slip backward into the haze--and it seemed as if that haze was the gentle breath of oblivion.

I live inland now, far from the smell of salt water and the sight of sails.

Yet sometimes there comes over me a longing for the sea as irresistible as the l.u.s.t for salt which stampedes the reindeer of the north. I must gaze on the unbroken world-rim, I must feel the sting of spray, I must hear the rhythmic crash and roar of breakers and watch the sea-weed rise and fall where the green waves lift against the rocks. Once in so often I must ride those waves with cleated sheet and tugging tiller, and hear the soft hissing song of the water on the rail. And "my day of mercy" is not complete till I have seen some old boat, her seafaring done, heeled over on the beach or amid the fragrant sedges, a mute and wistful witness to the romance of the deep, the blue and restless deep where man has adventured in craft his hands have made since the earliest sun of history, and whereon he will adventure, ardently and insecure, till the last syllable of recorded time.

ZEPPELINITIS[26]

PHILIP LITTELL

[Footnote 26: Reprinted by permission from _Books and Things_, by Philip Littell. Copyright 1919, by Harcourt, Brace and Howe, Inc.]

Much reading of interviews with returning travellers who had almost seen Zeppelins over London, and of wireless messages from other travellers who had come even nearer seeing the great sight, had made me, I suppose, morbidly desirous of escape from a city where other such travellers were presumably at large. However that may be, when Mrs. Watkin asked me to spend Sunday at her place in the country, I broke an old habit and said I'd go. When last I had visited her house she worshipped success in the arts, and her recipe was to have a few successes to talk and a lot of us unsuccessful persons to listen. At that time her aesthetic was easy to understand. "Every great statue," she said, "is set up in a public place.

Every great picture brings a high price. Every great book has a large sale.

That is what greatness in art means." Her own brand of talk was not in conflict with what she would have called her then creed. She never said a thing was very black. She never said it was as black as the ace of spades.

She always said it was as black as the proverbial ace of spades. Once I ventured to insinuate that perhaps it would be more n.o.bly new to say "as black as the proverbial ace of proverbial spades," but the suggestion left her at peace with her custom. Well, when I got to her house last week, and had a chance to scrutinize the others, they did not look as if she had chosen them after any particular pattern.

Dinner, however, soon enabled us all to guess the model from which Mrs.

Watkin had striven to copy her occasion. I was greatly relishing the conversation of my left-hand neighbor, a large-eyed, wondering-eyed woman, who said little and seemed never to have heard any of the things I usually say when dining out, and who I dare swear would have looked gratefully surprised had I confided to her my discovery that in the beginning G.o.d created the heaven and the earth. Before we were far gone with food the attention of this tactful person was torn from me by our hostess, whose voice was heard above the other voices: "Oh, Mr. Slicer, do tell us your experience. I want _all_ our friends to hear it." Mr. Slicer, identifiable by the throat-clearing look which suffused his bleached, conservative face, was not deaf to her appeal. He had just returned from London, where he had been at the time of the Zeppelin raid, and although he had not himself been so fortunate as to see a Zeppelin, but had merely been a modest witness of the sporting fort.i.tude with which London endured that visitation, the Zeppelin-in-chief had actually been visible to the brother of his daughter's governess. "At the noise of guns," said Mr. Slicer, "we all left the restaurant where we were dining, Mrs. Humphry Ward, George Moore, Asquith, Miss Pankhurst and I, and walked, not ran, into the street, where it was the work of a moment for me to climb a lamp-post, whence I obtained a nearer view of what was going on overhead. Nothing there but blackness."

Instinctively I glanced at Mrs. Watkin, upon whose lips the pa.s.sage of words like "as the proverbial ace of spades" was clearly to be seen. "Of course," Mr. Slicer went on, "I couldn't indefinitely hold my coign of vantage, which I relinquished in favor of Mrs. Humphry Ward, to whom at her laughing request George Moore and I gave a leg up. She remained there a few moments, one foot on my shoulder and one on Sir Edward Carson's--she is not a light woman--and then we helped her down, Asquith and I. When I got back to my lodgings in Half-Moon Street I found that the governess's brother, who had been lucky enough to see a Zeppelin, had gone home. I shall not soon forget my experience." This narrative was wonderful to my left-hand neighbor. It made her feel as if she had really been there and seen it all with her own eyes.

Mr. Mullinger, who was the next speaker on Mrs. Watkin's list, and who had returned from Europe on the same boat with Mr. Slicer, had had a different experience. On the evening of the raid he was in a box at the theatre where Guitry, who had run over from Paris, was appearing in the little role of _Phedre_, when the noise of firing was heard above the alexandrines of Racine. "With great presence of mind," so Mr. Mullinger told us, "Guitry came down stage, right, and said in quizzical tone to us: '_Eh bien, chere pet.i.te folle et vieux marcheur_, just run up to the roof, will you please, and tell us what it's all about, don't you know.' The Princess and I stood up and answered in the same tone, 'Right-o, _mon vieux_,' and were aboard the lift in no time. From the roof we could see nothing, and as it was raining and we had no umbrellas, we of course didn't stay. When we got back I stepped to the front of the box and said: 'The Princess and Mr. Mullinger beg to report that on the roof it is raining rain.' The words were nothing, if you like, but I spoke them just like that, with a twinkle in my eye, and perhaps it was that twinkle which rea.s.sured the house and started a roar of laughter. The performance went on as if nothing remarkable had happened.

Wonderfully poised, the English." And this narrative, too, was so fortunate as to satisfy my left-hand neighbor. It made her feel as if she had been there herself, and heard all these wonderful things with her own ears.

After that, until near the end of dinner, it was all Zeppelins, and I hope I convey to everyone within sound of my voice something of my own patriotic pride in a country whose natives when abroad among foreigners consort so freely and easily with the greatest of these. No discordant note was heard until the very finish, when young Puttins, who as everybody knows has not been further from New York than Asbury Park all summer, told us that on the night of the raid he too had been in London, where his only club was the Athenaeum. When the alarm was given he was in the Athenaeum pool with Mr.

Hall Caine, in whose company it has for years been his custom to take a good-night swim. "Imagine my alarm," young Puttins continued, "when I saw emerging from the surface of the waters, and not five yards away from the person of my revered master, a slender object which I at once recognized as a miniature periscope. I shouted to my companion. In vain. Too late. A slim fountain spurted fountain-high above the pool, a dull report was heard, and the next instant Mr. Hall Caine had turned turtle and was sinking rapidly by the bow. When dressed I hastened to notify the authorities. The pool was drained by noon of the next day but one. We found nothing except, near the bottom of the pool, the commencement of a tunnel large enough for the ingress and egress of one of those tiny submersibles the credit for inventing which neither Mr. Henry Ford nor Professor Parker ever tires of giving the other. I have since had reason to believe that not one swimming-pool in Great Britain is secure against visits from these miniature pests. Indeed, I may say, without naming any names," ... but at this moment Mrs. Watkin interrupted young Puttins by taking the ladies away. She looked black as the proverbial.

October, 1915.