The Country of the Pointed Firs
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Sarah Orne Jewett >> The Country of the Pointed Firs
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10 The Country of
the Pointed Firs
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
Note
SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909) was born and died in South Berwick,
Maine. Her father was the region's most distinguished doctor and,
as a child, Jewett often accompanied him on his round of patient
visits. She began writing poetry at an early age and when she was
only 19 her short story "Mr. Bruce" was accepted by the Atlantic
Monthly. Her association with that magazine continued, and
William Dean Howells, who was editor at that time, encouraged her
to publish her first book, Deephaven (1877), a collection of
sketches published earlier in the Atlantic Monthly. Through
her friendship with Howells, Jewett became acquainted with Boston's
literary elite, including Annie Fields, with whom she developed one
of the most intimate and lasting relationships of her life.
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered
Jewett's finest work, described by Henry James as her "beautiful
little quantum of achievement." Despite James's diminutives, the
novel remains a classic. Because it is loosely structured, many
critics view the book not as a novel, but a series of sketches;
however, its structure is unified through both setting and theme.
Jewett herself felt that her strengths as a writer lay not in plot
development or dramatic tension, but in character development.
Indeed, she determined early in her career to preserve a
disappearing way of life, and her novel can be read as a study of
the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants who lived
in the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast.
Jewett died in 1909, eight years after an accident that
effectively ended her writing career. Her reputation had grown
during her lifetime, extending far beyond the bounds of the New
England she loved.
Contents
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I The Return
II Mrs. Todd
III The Schoolhouse
IV At the Schoolhouse Window
V Captain Littlepage
VI The Waiting Place
VII The Outer Island
VIII Green Island
IX William
X Where Pennyroyal Grew
XI The Old Singers
XII A Strange Sail
XIII Poor Joanna
XIV The Hermitage
XV On Shell-heap Island
XVI The Great Expedition
XVII A Country Road
XVIII The Bowden Reunion
XIX The Feast's End
XX Along Shore
XXI The Backward View
I
The Return
THERE WAS SOMETHING about the coast town of Dunnet which made it
seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine.
Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that
neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to
the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to
be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the
Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and
there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of
garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their
steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the
far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and
its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows
a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming
acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at
first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the
growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.
After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in
the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned
to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same
quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all
that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the
centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told.
One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat
wharf. The tide was high, there was a fine crowd of spectators,
and the younger portion of the company followed her with subdued
excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired, white-
clapboarded little town.
II
Mrs. Todd
LATER, THERE WAS only one fault to find with this choice of a
summer lodging-place, and that was its complete lack of seclusion.
At first the tiny house of Mrs. Almira Todd, which stood with its
end to the street, appeared to be retired and sheltered enough from
the busy world, behind its bushy bit of a green garden, in which
all the blooming things, two or three gay hollyhocks and some
London-pride, were pushed back against the gray-shingled wall. It
was a queer little garden and puzzling to a stranger, the few
flowers being put at a disadvantage by so much greenery; but the
discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of
herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low
end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-
mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and
southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far
corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its
fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large
person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk
that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping
about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and
learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in
exactly which corner of the garden she might be.
At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic
pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarities among the commoner
herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim
sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of
these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have
had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but
now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals
with molasses or vinegar or spirits in a small caldron on Mrs.
Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors,
who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own
ancient-looking vials to be filled. One nostrum was called the
Indian remedy, and its price was but fifteen cents; the whispered
directions could be heard as customers passed the windows. With
most remedies the purchaser was allowed to depart unadmonished from
the kitchen, Mrs. Todd being a wise saver of steps; but with
certain vials she gave cautions, standing in the doorway, and
there were other doses which had to be accompanied on their healing
way as far as the gate, while she muttered long chapters of
directions, and kept up an air of secrecy and importance to the
last. It may not have been only the common aids of humanity with
which she tried to cope; it seemed sometimes as if love and hate
and jealousy and adverse winds at sea might also find their proper
remedies among the curious wild-looking plants in Mrs. Todd's
garden.
The village doctor and this learned herbalist were upon the
best of terms. The good man may have counted upon the unfavorable
effect of certain potions which he should find his opportunity in
counteracting; at any rate, he now and then stopped and exchanged
greetings with Mrs. Todd over the picket fence. The conversation
became at once professional after the briefest preliminaries, and
he would stand twirling a sweet-scented sprig in his fingers, and
make suggestive jokes, perhaps about her faith in a too persistent
course of thoroughwort elixir, in which my landlady professed such
firm belief as sometimes to endanger the life and usefulness of
worthy neighbors.
To arrive at this quietest of seaside villages late in June,
when the busy herb-gathering season was just beginning, was also to
arrive in the early prime of Mrs. Todd's activity in the brewing of
old-fashioned spruce beer. This cooling and refreshing drink had
been brought to wonderful perfection through a long series of
experiments; it had won immense local fame, and the supplies for
its manufacture were always giving out and having to be
replenished. For various reasons, the seclusion and uninterrupted
days which had been looked forward to proved to be very rare in
this otherwise delightful corner of the world. My hostess and I
had made our shrewd business agreement on the basis of a simple
cold luncheon at noon, and liberal restitution in the matter of hot
suppers, to provide for which the lodger might sometimes be seen
hurrying down the road, late in the day, with cunner line in hand.
It was soon found that this arrangement made large allowance for
Mrs. Todd's slow herb-gathering progresses through woods and
pastures. The spruce-beer customers were pretty steady in hot
weather, and there were many demands for different soothing syrups
and elixirs with which the unwise curiosity of my early residence
had made me acquainted. Knowing Mrs. Todd to be a widow, who had
little beside this slender business and the income from one hungry
lodger to maintain her, one's energies and even interest were
quickly bestowed, until it became a matter of course that she
should go afield every pleasant day, and that the lodger should
answer all peremptory knocks at the side door.
In taking an occasional wisdom-giving stroll in Mrs. Todd's
company, and in acting as business partner during her
frequent absences, I found the July days fly fast, and it was not
until I felt myself confronted with too great pride and pleasure in
the display, one night, of two dollars and twenty-seven cents which
I had taken in during the day, that I remembered a long piece of
writing, sadly belated now, which I was bound to do. To have been
patted kindly on the shoulder and called "darlin'," to have been
offered a surprise of early mushrooms for supper, to have had all
the glory of making two dollars and twenty-seven cents in a single
day, and then to renounce it all and withdraw from these pleasant
successes, needed much resolution. Literary employments are so
vexed with uncertainties at best, and it was not until the voice of
conscience sounded louder in my ears than the sea on the nearest
pebble beach that I said unkind words of withdrawal to Mrs. Todd.
She only became more wistfully affectionate than ever in her
expressions, and looked as disappointed as I expected when I
frankly told her that I could no longer enjoy the pleasure of what
we called "seein' folks." I felt that I was cruel to a whole
neighborhood in curtailing her liberty in this most important
season for harvesting the different wild herbs that were so much
counted upon to ease their winter ails.
"Well, dear," she said sorrowfully, "I've took great advantage
o' your bein' here. I ain't had such a season for years, but I
have never had nobody I could so trust. All you lack is a few
qualities, but with time you'd gain judgment an' experience, an' be
very able in the business. I'd stand right here an' say it to
anybody."
Mrs. Todd and I were not separated or estranged by the change
in our business relations; on the contrary, a deeper intimacy
seemed to begin. I do not know what herb of the night it was that
used sometimes to send out a penetrating odor late in the evening,
after the dew had fallen, and the moon was high, and the cool air
came up from the sea. Then Mrs. Todd would feel that she must talk
to somebody, and I was only too glad to listen. We both fell under
the spell, and she either stood outside the window, or made an
errand to my sitting-room, and told, it might be very commonplace
news of the day, or, as happened one misty summer night, all that
lay deepest in her heart. It was in this way that I came to know
that she had loved one who was far above her.
"No, dear, him I speak of could never think of me," she said.
"When we was young together his mother didn't favor the match, an'
done everything she could to part us; and folks thought we both
married well, but't wa'n't what either one of us wanted most; an'
now we're left alone again, an' might have had each other all the
time. He was above bein' a seafarin' man, an' prospered more
than most; he come of a high family, an' my lot was plain an' hard-
workin'. I ain't seen him for some years; he's forgot our youthful
feelin's, I expect, but a woman's heart is different; them feelin's
comes back when you think you've done with 'em, as sure as spring
comes with the year. An' I've always had ways of hearin' about
him."
She stood in the centre of a braided rug, and its rings of
black and gray seemed to circle about her feet in the dim light.
Her height and massiveness in the low room gave her the look of a
huge sibyl, while the strange fragrance of the mysterious herb blew
in from the little garden.
III
The Schoolhouse
FOR SOME DAYS after this, Mrs. Todd's customers came and went past
my windows, and, haying-time being nearly over, strangers began to
arrive from the inland country, such was her widespread reputation.
Sometimes I saw a pale young creature like a white windflower left
over into midsummer, upon whose face consumption had set its bright
and wistful mark; but oftener two stout, hard-worked women from the
farms came together, and detailed their symptoms to Mrs. Todd in
loud and cheerful voices, combining the satisfactions of a friendly
gossip with the medical opportunity. They seemed to give much from
their own store of therapeutic learning. I became aware of the
school in which my landlady had strengthened her natural gift; but
hers was always the governing mind, and the final command, "Take of
hy'sop one handful" (or whatever herb it was), was received in
respectful silence. One afternoon, when I had listened,--it was
impossible not to listen, with cottonless ears,--and then laughed
and listened again, with an idle pen in my hand, during a
particularly spirited and personal conversation, I reached for my
hat, and, taking blotting-book and all under my arm, I resolutely
fled further temptation, and walked out past the fragrant green
garden and up the dusty road. The way went straight uphill, and
presently I stopped and turned to look back.
The tide was in, the wide harbor was surrounded by its dark
woods, and the small wooden houses stood as near as they could get
to the landing. Mrs. Todd's was the last house on the way
inland. The gray ledges of the rocky shore were well covered with
sod in most places, and the pasture bayberry and wild roses grew
thick among them. I could see the higher inland country and the
scattered farms. On the brink of the hill stood a little white
schoolhouse, much wind-blown and weather-beaten, which was a
landmark to seagoing folk; from its door there was a most beautiful
view of sea and shore. The summer vacation now prevailed, and
after finding the door unfastened, and taking a long look through
one of the seaward windows, and reflecting afterward for some time
in a shady place near by among the bayberry bushes, I returned to
the chief place of business in the village, and, to the amusement
of two of the selectmen, brothers and autocrats of Dunnet Landing,
I hired the schoolhouse for the rest of the vacation for fifty
cents a week.
Selfish as it may appear, the retired situation seemed to
possess great advantages, and I spent many days there quite
undisturbed, with the sea-breeze blowing through the small, high
windows and swaying the heavy outside shutters to and fro. I hung
my hat and luncheon-basket on an entry nail as if I were a small
scholar, but I sat at the teacher's desk as if I were that great
authority, with all the timid empty benches in rows before me. Now
and then an idle sheep came and stood for a long time looking in at
the door. At sundown I went back, feeling most businesslike, down
toward the village again, and usually met the flavor, not of the
herb garden, but of Mrs. Todd's hot supper, halfway up the hill.
On the nights when there were evening meetings or other public
exercises that demanded her presence we had tea very early, and I
was welcomed back as if from a long absence.
Once or twice I feigned excuses for staying at home, while
Mrs. Todd made distant excursions, and came home late, with both
hands full and a heavily laden apron. This was in pennyroyal time,
and when the rare lobelia was in its prime and the elecampane was
coming on. One day she appeared at the schoolhouse itself, partly
out of amused curiosity about my industries; but she explained that
there was no tansy in the neighborhood with such snap to it as some
that grew about the schoolhouse lot. Being scuffed down all the
spring made it grow so much the better, like some folks that had it
hard in their youth, and were bound to make the most of themselves
before they died.
IV
At the Schoolhouse Window
ONE DAY I reached the schoolhouse very late, owing to attendance
upon the funeral of an acquaintance and neighbor, with whose sad
decline in health I had been familiar, and whose last days both the
doctor and Mrs. Todd had tried in vain to ease. The services had
taken place at one o'clock, and now, at quarter past two, I stood
at the schoolhouse window, looking down at the procession as it
went along the lower road close to the shore. It was a walking
funeral, and even at that distance I could recognize most of the
mourners as they went their solemn way. Mrs. Begg had been very
much respected, and there was a large company of friends following
to her grave. She had been brought up on one of the neighboring
farms, and each of the few times that I had seen her she professed
great dissatisfaction with town life. The people lived too close
together for her liking, at the Landing, and she could not get used
to the constant sound of the sea. She had lived to lament three
seafaring husbands, and her house was decorated with West Indian
curiosities, specimens of conch shells and fine coral which they
had brought home from their voyages in lumber-laden ships. Mrs.
Todd had told me all our neighbor's history. They had been girls
together, and, to use her own phrase, had "both seen trouble till
they knew the best and worst on 't." I could see the sorrowful,
large figure of Mrs. Todd as I stood at the window. She made a
break in the procession by walking slowly and keeping the after-
part of it back. She held a handkerchief to her eyes, and I knew,
with a pang of sympathy, that hers was not affected grief.
Beside her, after much difficulty, I recognized the one
strange and unrelated person in all the company, an old man who had
always been mysterious to me. I could see his thin, bending
figure. He wore a narrow, long-tailed coat and walked with a
stick, and had the same "cant to leeward" as the wind-bent trees on
the height above.
This was Captain Littlepage, whom I had seen only once or
twice before, sitting pale and old behind a closed window; never
out of doors until now. Mrs. Todd always shook her head gravely
when I asked a question, and said that he wasn't what he had been
once, and seemed to class him with her other secrets. He might
have belonged with a simple which grew in a certain slug-haunted
corner of the garden, whose use she could never be betrayed
into telling me, though I saw her cutting the tops by moonlight
once, as if it were a charm, and not a medicine, like the great
fading bloodroot leaves.
I could see that she was trying to keep pace with the old
captain's lighter steps. He looked like an aged grasshopper of
some strange human variety. Behind this pair was a short,
impatient, little person, who kept the captain's house, and gave it
what Mrs. Todd and others believed to be no proper sort of care.
She was usually called "that Mari' Harris" in subdued conversation
between intimates, but they treated her with anxious civility when
they met her face to face.
The bay-sheltered islands and the great sea beyond stretched
away to the far horizon southward and eastward; the little
procession in the foreground looked futile and helpless on the edge
of the rocky shore. It was a glorious day early in July, with a
clear, high sky; there were no clouds, there was no noise of the
sea. The song sparrows sang and sang, as if with joyous knowledge
of immortality, and contempt for those who could so pettily concern
themselves with death. I stood watching until the funeral
procession had crept round a shoulder of the slope below and
disappeared from the great landscape as if it had gone into a cave.
An hour later I was busy at my work. Now and then a bee
blundered in and took me for an enemy; but there was a useful stick
upon the teacher's desk, and I rapped to call the bees to order as
if they were unruly scholars, or waved them away from their riots
over the ink, which I had bought at the Landing store, and
discovered to be scented with bergamot, as if to refresh the labors
of anxious scribes. One anxious scribe felt very dull that day; a
sheep-bell tinkled near by, and called her wandering wits after it.
The sentences failed to catch these lovely summer cadences. For
the first time I began to wish for a companion and for news from
the outer world, which had been, half unconsciously, forgotten.
Watching the funeral gave one a sort of pain. I began to wonder if
I ought not to have walked with the rest, instead of hurrying away
at the end of the services. Perhaps the Sunday gown I had put on
for the occasion was making this disastrous change of feeling, but
I had now made myself and my friends remember that I did not really
belong to Dunnet Landing.
I sighed, and turned to the half-written page again.
V
Captain Littlepage
IT WAS A long time after this; an hour was very long in that coast
town where nothing stole away the shortest minute. I had lost
myself completely in work, when I heard footsteps outside. There
was a steep footpath between the upper and the lower road, which I
climbed to shorten the way, as the children had taught me, but I
believed that Mrs. Todd would find it inaccessible, unless she had
occasion to seek me in great haste. I wrote on, feeling like a
besieged miser of time, while the footsteps came nearer, and the
sheep-bell tinkled away in haste as if someone had shaken a stick
in its wearer's face. Then I looked, and saw Captain Littlepage
passing the nearest window; the next moment he tapped politely at
the door.
"Come in, sir," I said, rising to meet him; and he entered,
bowing with much courtesy. I stepped down from the desk and
offered him a chair by the window, where he seated himself at once,
being sadly spent by his climb. I returned to my fixed seat behind
the teacher's desk, which gave him the lower place of a scholar.
"You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage," I
said.
"A happy, rural seat of various views,"
he quoted, as he gazed out into the sunshine and up the long wooded
shore. Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased
as a child.
"My quotation was from Paradise Lost: the greatest of poems,
I suppose you know?" and I nodded. "There's nothing that ranks, to
my mind, with Paradise Lost; it's all lofty, all lofty," he
continued. "Shakespeare was a great poet; he copied life, but you
have to put up with a great deal of low talk."
I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that
Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading; she
had also made dark reference to his having "spells" of some
unexplainable nature. I could not help wondering what errand had
brought him out in search of me. There was something quite
charming in his appearance: it was a face thin and delicate with
refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if he had suffered
from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his
careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing
care on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari'
Harris to be a very common-place, inelegant person, who would have
no such standards; it was plain that the captain was his own
attentive valet. He sat looking at me expectantly. I could not
help thinking that, with his queer head and length of thinness, he
was made to hop along the road of life rather than to walk. The
captain was very grave indeed, and I bade my inward spirit keep
close to discretion.
"Poor Mrs. Begg has gone," I ventured to say. I still wore my
Sunday gown by way of showing respect.
"She has gone," said the captain,--"very easy at the last, I
was informed; she slipped away as if she were glad of the
opportunity."
I thought of the Countess of Carberry, and felt that history
repeated itself.
"She was one of the old stock," continued Captain Littlepage,
with touching sincerity. "She was very much looked up to in this
town, and will be missed."
I wondered, as I looked at him, if he had sprung from a line
of ministers; he had the refinement of look and air of command
which are the heritage of the old ecclesiastical families of New
England. But as Darwin says in his autobiography, "there is no
such king as a sea-captain; he is greater even than a king or a
schoolmaster!"
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