The Lightning Conductor Discovers America Part 23

(Peter Storm to Richard Moyle, at New York):

_Many thanks. Am looking out._

_P. S._

XXV

MOLLY WINSTON TO MERCeDES LANE

_Wenham._

MERCeDES DEAR:

My first thought as I waked yesterday morning was Aunt Mary. I thought of her in my bath--a cold porcelain bath, rapidly filling up with hot water, and giving me rather the feeling of eating an ice with hot chocolate sauce. I thought of Aunt M. with breakfast and choked her down with my coffee. When we had left our happy home--the Boston hotel--the "chug chug" of our motor sang the song which the West Point cadets have made up for "church call."

_"You've got to go, whether you want to or not!

You've got to go, so you'd better turn out!

Oh, h--ades!"_

But after a while the road was so pretty that I succeeded in forgetting her now and then, as you might forget you were on the way to the dentist's when you pa.s.sed splendid jewellery and hat shops.

We were also on the way to Marblehead and Salem; Aunt Mary wasn't till afterward.

Marblehead, with all its romance of ancient days, is only about sixteen miles from Boston as the automobile flies, but you pa.s.s a good many sweet things first. We went through Somerville, got lost there, and were guided in every direction but the right one by a plague of boys not much bigger than the "dimes" they didn't earn. Jack simply won't look at maps when in the car, or inquire; expects to find his way by instinct, and somehow generally _does_. (Are _all_ men like that?) Crossed the Mystic River, and got on to the velvet surface of the Revere Beach Parkway. But Chelsea came before the Beach: charming old Chelsea, which probably, in its heart, thinks Boston its suburb, and prides itself on almost a century and a half of aristocratic peace since the old fighting days when Israel Putnam won his commission as Major-General there.

There couldn't be a greater contrast than between Chelsea and Revere Beach. It's a good thing that miles of parklike road--fought over once by Independents and British--lie between, or they could never stand each other, those two! Jack and I ought to have come to Revere Beach when we were little boy and girl, for, oh, the joy of it for children! What price the Dragon Gorge, the mountain railway more like the Alps than the Alps are like themselves, the theatres, the shops of every kind, the cottages which are nests for birds rather than commonplace, human habitations?

Opposite, Nahant sat looking delightful and alluring, but we went on to Lynn--Lynn, unattractive at first, and pretty when we got better acquainted, like some of the nicest women I know. It's a great place now for shoes, and was once a great place for pilgrims. What a pity the former are too late for the latter! The Pilgrims must have needed the shoes badly. They could have walked along the Old Pilgrim Road to Swampscott if their feet were equal to it. And perhaps they forgot their feet, as I forgot Aunt Mary, for it is--and must then have been--a lovely road.

Hawthorne used to walk to Swampscott, too, as well as to Marblehead, but he came the other way, from Salem. Do you remember Swampscott was where he found pink and white Susan, who gave him the sugar heart? That was pink, too, with a touch of white perhaps. She sounds so delightful as the "Mermaid!" I'm glad Hawthorne kept the heart for years, and then instead of throwing it away ate it--gave it honourable burial, so to speak--which shows that you _can_ have your heart and eat it, too! (I must, by the by, make a parable of this for Pat, who is eating hers, though she certainly has _not_ got it. She has given it to some one else, though I fancy she _thinks_ she has merely mislaid it.) In apropos of hearts, they make dories in Swampscott; and it's _not_ swampy one bit!

Of course I quoted Whittier's "Skipper Ireson's Ride" to Jack, coming toward Marblehead. It was "up to me" to show my British husband that I, too, had learned things at people's knees.

_"Old Flood Ireson for his hard heart, Tarred and feathered, and carried in a cart By the women of Marblehead."_

I wasn't certain I got it just right, but did my best to put a confident ring into my voice, which is half the battle when you're not sure of yourself. What a blow, therefore, to be told that in truth and in deed the women of Marblehead had nothing to do with the job! Jack says the _men_ did it. And worse still, Captain Ireson was supposed to have been a victim rather than a villain, because his sailors mutinied and refused to let him go to the rescue of the sinking ship. I hate having my childish beliefs disturbed! It tears me all up by the roots, and gives me a pain in my spirit's toes. But never mind, there's plenty more romance, which no one can take away from New England, though the very man who wrote about Ireson complained that it had gone:

_"Gone like the Indian wizard's yell And fire dance round the magic rock.

Forgotten like the Druid's spell At moonrise by his holy oak."_

No, no, Whittier, surely you wouldn't say so now if you could see steamboats and trains pouring forth mult.i.tudes, and thousands and tens of thousands of motor cars stuffed full of people from all over the world drawn to New England because of its never, never lost halo of romance!

Did I tell you just now that we were coming toward Marblehead? Well, one can do that, and not get to Marblehead. You can keep on seeing Marblehead and expecting to arrive, while in reality you are going all around "Robin Hood's barn." By the way, I never saw a barn exciting enough to belong to Robin Hood till I came with Jack on this tour through New England. Here, barns are as grand as churches, and very much like them, steeples and all.

A lot of things happened to us on the way to will o' the wisp Marblehead--_old_ Marblehead, I mean, for _new_ Marblehead is just a very gay and jolly summer resort, such as I fancy little Susan would, in her pink sugar heart, have loved. We kept on seeing the old town to our left, across a harbour as full of white yachts and sailboats as a New England pond is of water lilies. Jack was loving everything, and utterly oblivious that beyond Salem lay Aunt Mary-ville. His face was perfectly ecstatic as we crossed a river--Whittier's beloved Merrimac--on an ancient covered wooden bridge. He said the sound of the tires on the slightly loose boards was better music than the followers of Richard Strauss could make from the "noises of life." I do love those covered bridges, don't you? They're so richly brown, some of them, that while one slowly travels along under the roof, it's like looking at the sun through a piece of cider-brown gla.s.s. Or if they're not brown, they're a soft, velvet gray--gray as shadows at full moon, gray as the light in dreams.

I hardly know how, eventually, we did get into old Marblehead, for Jack and I were both so infatuated with the way we lost sight now and then of the goal. Imagine a road lined on either side with apple trees. If you haven't seen these, you have never seen such orchards in your life, my Mercedes! If there was anything as good in Eden, no wonder Eve ate that apple. I shouldn't wonder if she fixed her eye on it when it was still a bud.

And then, behind the orchards, there were hills, playgrounds for baby cedars. Everything contrived to look at least two hundred years old (except the blossoms and the motor cars), and even the pigeons had such an air of colonial serenity that they simply refused to stir for a new-fangled thing like an automobile. They sat still, pretending not to see us, and never changed their expressions!

At last we did get into old Marblehead, and I'm so happy to tell you it was exactly like finding our way round the corner in a picture. You know that thrilling corner in pictures, leading somewhere you are dying to see and never can? Well, now I have seen it. It's Marblehead. Round the corner of the front of the picture where the new, smart things are, we cleverly slipped in. And there was the background running up the canvas, all over funny labyrinths of streets generally leading nowhere, or, if anywhere, back to the same garden we'd just pa.s.sed, a darling garden boiling over with gra.s.s pinks, cabbage roses, sweet williams, and bleeding hearts. Each house was just a little quainter than the other, and Jack and I thought we were going to like Marblehead better than any that ever lived, until--we came to Salem, after Manchester and Magnolia.

Then--we weren't precisely being _untrue_ to Marblehead. No, never that!

_But_ Salem--perhaps it's fair after all to keep a larger place in memory-land for the Witch City.

It would have been almost a _world_ tragedy if, when the great fire swept over the town, it hadn't stopped short of the old part, which is American history incarnate. That "old part" consists of "old, older, oldest." The oldest houses of all, built about 1635, are very, very simple, as if the Puritans had prayed over them to be delivered from temptation and craving for beauty. Then, next are the ones not quite so old, when people began to be rich and see that Beauty wasn't after all the unpardonable sin. These houses of the eighteenth century look as if architects might have been commissioned to come from the Old World to build them, bringing traditions of gracious decoration for outside and in. Next, there are the far grander and more stately mansions which grew up after the Revolution, when the good folk of New England knew that their land and their fortunes would be theirs forever, undisputed. Salem had grown into an important place then. Merchants and shipowners had plenty of money to spend. They spent it well, too, for they made their dwellings very beautiful, so beautiful that the witch hunters and Quaker persecutors of the past would have been shocked to the bottom of those hollow places they called their hearts.

What a good thing it is that there wasn't much brick to be had when the first old colonial houses were a-building! To be sure, some of the very best in Salem and Boston and other towns are of brick; but brick had to come in ships from old England, so only those persons with the most money and possibly the most cultivated taste could use it. Consequently the characteristic houses of New England and its borders--the white and yellow houses we _think_ of when we say "New England"--were made of wood; and they are unique in the world.

They say that the oldest buildings of Salem--the Gothic, steep-roofed ones--were meant as copies of gabled cottages on the old home side of the water. But if they were, they were as far off the originals as a child's drawing on a slate is far from a steel engraving; and Jack and I are glad, because these dear things are so ingenuously and deliciously American that they could exist nowhere except on this side.

I was only too glad to stay in Salem as long as possible, because it put off Aunt Mary and Wenham, where Jack and I had promised to stay all night, letting the others go on to wait for us at Newburyport. Jack had a map (he doesn't mind having maps of towns, or looking at road maps when _in_ towns), and we took a regular Hawthorne itinerary. We began at the house in Union Street where he was born--a rather pathetic, forlorn house, like the birthplaces of most geniuses; then the next, where the family lived till they moved to Raymond, in sight of the White Mountains; and so on, following to the custom-house where the bored genius weighed and gauged, and not missing a single landmark. All are picturesque to the imagination, but the landmark most picturesque to the eye is of course "The House of Seven Gables," and that, some of those dreadful people who dispute everything nice say, isn't what it pretends to be.

As if such an adorable and perfectly sincere and high-souled looking house would pretend anything! Should I hear such heresy uttered I would stop my ears, but coming on it in print was simple, because all I had to do was to snap the book shut with a bang. It is the dearest, kindest little gray house, which all new houses, no matter how big and distinguished, would be proud to have for their grandmother!

Hawthorne's cousin, Miss Ingersoll, whom he called the "d.u.c.h.ess," lived in the old Turner Street house, and it _had_ had seven gables before his day. It's perfectly legitimate to put them back, and even a _duty_, which has been exquisitely carried out. I should like to kiss the hand of the lady who honoured Hawthorne's beautiful memory by making the house as dear as that memory itself. I suppose it was she who had the brilliant idea of using for a front door an old nailed oak one found in the attic (there must be a lovely attic!), putting the quaint oven of ancient times into the kitchen, and retrieving from oblivion the "d.u.c.h.ess's" toasting fork with which she used to make toast for Hawthorne. There's a creepy story about the way he thought of the murder, from seeing, through a tiny window of greenish gla.s.s, a cousin of his fast asleep and looking as if dead. But there's a story just as fascinating about every house in Salem, connected with Hawthorne.

Romantic and interesting things followed him about in his life, like tame dogs, though he didn't always realize at the moment that they were romantic or interesting. Sometimes he thought only that they were tame.

All over the place you feel the thrill of witches and the torturing of Quakers. That's partly thanks to Longfellow, and Whittier, of course, but mostly from the _influence_ which such tremendous happenings leave, I think. It's as if some picture of the past were in the atmosphere, and now and then, out of a corner of your eye, you caught a glimpse, as you do of the "ghost" of a rainbow when the rainbow seems to have gone.

The "Witch House," where Judge Corwin lived at the time of the persecution, is almost hidden away now, as if it were trying to escape from something, and at last brought to bay like a very small, fierce animal. Even now I can hardly bear to think of those days, and all those poor people suffering through a few naughty, hysterical children. I'm sure the Indian woman t.i.tuba could haunt me in Salem even if I lived in a perfectly new, perfectly good modern hotel! I should have tried the experiment, I think, if it hadn't been for Aunt Mary being so nearby, at Wenham.

Well, quite late in the afternoon (I forgot to tell you we lunched, but you may take that for granted, with so many men in the party) we said good-bye to Salem. We said other things, too, all in praise of it; and Jack felt particularly reverential because Salem sent the first ships from America to Indian and Russian ports. Wasn't it sporting when you think of what ships were then? But these seafaring men of the New England coast were like the men of Devon, the "bravest of the brave."

Aunt Mary had plumped heavily down on my heart again, before we got to Beverly, and this time I couldn't put her out of my mind though the grandeur of the north coast was in my eyes. Oliver Wendell Holmes lived in Beverly and loved it, but then he had no Aunt Mary in the neighbourhood.

Did you ever read what Thackeray said about Wenham Lake Ice? It seems every London house of any pretension had it on its dinner table, but I don't think it travels so far in these days of artificial ice. The lake's still there, anyhow, in a hollow to the left of the road as you go, gleaming blue and mysterious as watching eyes between the dark trunks of a pine forest. Then, after that lake, there was no more excuse for lingering, unless at the monument. We came into Wenham. Jack was trying to look brave.

"In a few minutes now," said he, with galvanized cheerfulness, "we shall be having tea with your Aunt Mary."

At that instant (we had purposely dropped back to bring up the rear of the procession after Salem, letting even the lumbering Hippopotamus b.u.mble on ahead) we beheld all our family of cars drawn up under some skysc.r.a.ping elms, in front of the most delectable tea-house you ever met in your life. The Hippo was in front of a very fine old white church, with "I am one of the pillars of New England" written in every line of it; but it was certainly the tea-house which had arrested its career.

[Ill.u.s.tration: map]*

There was a large green and white striped umbrella or two protecting some little tables, and grouped round those little tables were our friends.

"I'm _hanged_ if we'll be having tea with my Aunt Mary!" said I, with that firm-jawed look Jack has got to know and fear as characteristic of the American wife at bay.

So we had tea there, under elms so generously deep and thick that large populations of robins live in them without ever having seen each other's faces. They were, to the tree world, what Blenheim is in castle world.

People can come and live there for years, they say, without the duke ever knowing they've arrived. Well, so could whole families of birds live in these elms without the leading robin hearing an alien chirp.

We drowned our sorrows in tea and cream, and buried our sinister premonitions in scones. Also cakes. A wonderful woman had made them--a lady-woman. She will be the heroine of my great American novel, if I ever write one. I hope to goodness she won't be gone from Wenham before it's finished and I can send her a presentation copy! Everything was green and white in the tea-house, except the dear little things to be sold there: weather-c.o.c.ks, and door-stops, and old china. We bought specimens of these as sops to Cerberus--I mean, as presents for Aunt Mary--and when there was no longer a pretext for lingering we crept reluctantly away with the spoils.

It was absolutely _no_ comfort to me, as we crawled through the pretty square, and approached "Miss Keddison's mansion" (only too easy to find) that Wenham would be a lovely place to spend not only one but many nights in. There, on a colonial porch, behind colonial pillars, in a colonial rocking-chair, sat Aunt Mary on the watch. _She_ looked not only colonial but Doric!

We had got ahead of the others by this time, and my aunt, rising from her chair, with a gesture stopped the whole procession. I don't know whether she meant to do this or not, but no one would have dared pa.s.s, any more than if she had been a railway barrier with "Stop! Look!