Oldport Days
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Oldport Days
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It shows what conversational resources are always at hand in a
seaport town, that the boatman with whom I first happened to
visit this burning vessel had been thrice at sea on ships
similarly destroyed, and could give all the particulars of their
fate. I know no class of uneducated men whose talk is so apt to
be worth hearing as that of sailors. Even apart from their
personal adventures and their glimpses at foreign lands, they
have made observations of nature which are far more careful and
minute than those of farmers, because the very lives of sailors
are always at risk. Their voyages have also made them sociable
and fond of talk, while the pursuits of most men tend to make
them silent; and their constant changes of scene, though not
touching them very deeply, have really given a certain
enlargement to their minds. A quiet demeanor in a seaport town
proves nothing; the most inconspicuous man may have the most
thrilling career to look back upon. With what a superb
familiarity do these men treat this habitable globe! Cape Horn
and the Cape of Good Hope are in their phrase but the West Cape
and the East Cape, merely two familiar portals of their wonted
home. With what undisguised contempt they speak of the enthusiasm
displayed over the ocean yacht-race! That any man should boast of
crossing the Atlantic in a schooner of two hundred tons, in
presence of those who have more than once reached the Indian
Ocean in a fishing-smack of fifty, and have beaten in the
homeward race the ships in whose company they sailed! It is not
many years since there was here a fishing-skipper, whose surname
was "Daredevil," and who sailed from this port to all parts of
the world, on sealing voyages, in a sloop so small that she was
popularly said to go under water when she got outside the lights,
and never to reappear until she reached her port.
And not only those who sail on long voyages, but even our local
pilots and fishermen, still lead an adventurous and untamed life,
less softened than any other by the appliances of modern days. In
their undecked boats they hover day and night along these stormy
coasts, and at any hour the beating of the long-roll upon the
beach may call their full manhood into action. Cowardice is
sifted and crushed out from among them by a pressure so constant;
and they are withal truthful and steady in their ways, with few
vices and many virtues. They are born poor, and remain poor, for
their work is hard, with more blanks than prizes; but their life
is a life for a man, and though it makes them prematurely old,
yet their old age comes peacefully and well. In almost all
pursuits the advance of years brings something forlorn. It is not
merely that the body decays, but that men grow isolated and are
pushed aside; there is no common interest between age and youth.
The old farmer leads a lonely existence, and ceases to meet his
compeers except on Sunday; nobody consults him; his experience
has been monotonous, and his age is apt to grow unsocial. The old
mechanic finds his tools and his methods superseded by those of
younger men. But the superannuated fisherman graduates into an
oracle; the longer he lives, the greater the dignity of his
experience; he remembers the great storm, the great tide, the
great catch, the great shipwreck; and on all emergencies his
counsel has weight. He still busies himself about the boats too,
and still sails on sunny days to show the youngsters the best
fishing-ground. When too infirm for even this, he can at least
sun himself beside the landing, and, dreaming over inexhaustible
memories, watch the bark of his own life go down.
THE HAUNTED WINDOW.
It was always a mystery to me where Severance got precisely his
combination of qualities. His father was simply what is called a
handsome man, with stately figure and curly black hair, not
without a certain dignity of manner, but with a face so shallow
that it did not even seem to ripple, and with a voice so prosy
that, when he spoke of the sky, you wished there were no such
thing. His mother was a fair, little, pallid
creature,--wash-blond, as they say of lace,--patient, meek, and
always fatigued and fatiguing. But Severance, as I first knew
him, was the soul of activity. He had dark eyes, that had a great
deal of light in them, without corresponding depth; his hair was
dark, straight, and very soft; his mouth expressed sweetness,
without much strength; he talked well; and though he was apt to
have a wandering look, as if his thoughts were laying a submarine
cable to another continent, yet the young girls were always glad
to have the semblance of conversation with him in this. To me he
was in the last degree lovable. He had just enough of that
subtile quality called genius, perhaps, to spoil first his
companions, and then himself. His words had weight with you,
though you might know yourself wiser; and if you went to give him
the most reasonable advice, you were suddenly seized with a
slight paralysis of the tongue. Thus it was, at any rate, with
me. We were cemented therefore by the firmest ties,--a nominal
seniority on my part, and a substantial supremacy on his.
We lodged one summer at an old house in that odd suburb of
Oldport called "The Point." It is a sort of Artists' Quarter of
the town, frequented by a class of summer visitors more addicted
to sailing and sketching than to driving and bowing,--persons who
do not object to simple fare, and can live, as one of them said,
on potatoes and Point. Here Severance and I made our summer home,
basking in the delicious sunshine of the lovely bay. The bare
outlines around Oldport sometimes dismay the stranger, but soon
fascinate. Nowhere does one feel bareness so little, because
there is no sharpness of perspective; everything shimmers in the
moist atmosphere; the islands are all glamour and mirage; and the
undulating hills of the horizon seem each like the soft, arched
back of some pet animal, and you long to caress them with your
hand. At last your thoughts begin to swim also, and pass into
vague fancies, which you also love to caress. Severance and I
were constantly afloat, body and mind. He was a perfect sailor,
and had that dreaminess in his nature which matches with nothing
but the ripple of the waves. Still, I could not hide from myself
that he was a changed man since that voyage in search of health
from which he had just returned. His mother talked in her humdrum
way about heart disease; and his father, taking up the strain,
bored us about organic lesions, till we almost wished he had a
lesion himself. Severance ridiculed all this; but he grew more
and more moody, and his eyes seemed to be laying more submarine
cables than ever.
When we were not on the water, we both liked to mouse about the
queer streets and quaint old houses of that region, and to chat
with the fishermen and their grandmothers. There was one house,
however, which was very attractive to me,--perhaps because nobody
lived in it, and which, for that or some other reason, he never
would approach. It was a great square building of rough gray
stone, looking like those sombre houses which everyone remembers
in Montreal, but which are rare in "the States." It had been
built many years before by some millionnaire from New Orleans,
and was left unfinished, nobody knew why, till the garden was a
wilderness of bloom, and the windows of ivy. Oldport is the only
place in New England where either ivy or traditions will grow;
there were, to be sure, no legends about this house that I could
hear of, for the ghosts in those parts were feeble-minded and
retrospective by reason of age, and perhaps scorned a mansion
where nobody had ever lived; but the ivy clustered round the
projecting windows as densely as if it had the sins of a dozen
generations to hide.
The house stood just above what were commonly called (from their
slaty color) the Blue Rocks; it seemed the topmost pebble left by
some tide that had receded,--which perhaps it was. Nurses and
children thronged daily to these rocks, during the visitors'
season, and the fishermen found there a favorite lounging-place;
but nobody scaled the wall of the house save myself, and I went
there very often. The gate was sometimes opened by Paul, the
silent Bavarian gardener, who was master of the keys; and there
were also certain great cats that were always sunning themselves
on the steps, and seemed to have grown old and gray in waiting
for mice that had never come. They looked as if they knew the
past and the future. If the owl is the bird of Minerva, the cat
should be her beast; they have the same sleepy air of
unfathomable wisdom. There was such a quiet and potent spell
about the place that one could almost fancy these constant
animals to be the transformed bodies of human visitors who had
stayed too long. Who knew what tales might be told by these tall,
slender birches, clustering so closely by the sombre
walls?--birches which were but whispering shrubs when the first
gray stones were laid, and which now reared above the eaves their
white stems and dark boughs, still whispering and waiting till a
few more years should show them, across the roof, the topmost
blossoms of other birches on the other side.
Before the great western doorway spread the outer harbor, whither
the coasting vessels came to drop anchor at any approach of
storm. These silent visitors, which arrived at dusk and went at
dawn, and from which no boat landed, seemed fitting guests before
the portals of the silent house. I was never tired of watching
them from the piazza; but Severance always stayed outside the
wall. It was a whim of his, he said; and once only I got out of
him something about the resemblance of the house to some
Portuguese mansion,--at Madeira, perhaps, or at Rio Janeiro, but
he did not say,--with which he had no pleasant associations. Yet
he afterwards seemed to wish to deny this remark, or to confuse
my impressions of it, which naturally fixed it the better in my
mind.
I remember well the morning when he was at last coaxed into
approaching the house. It was late in September, and a day of
perfect calm. As we looked from the broad piazza, there was a
glassy smoothness over all the bay, and the hills were coated
with a film, or rather a mere varnish, inconceivably thin, of
haze more delicate than any other climate in America can show.
Over the water there were white gulls flying, lazy and low;
schools of young mackerel displayed their white sides above the
surface; and it seemed as if even a butterfly might be seen for
miles over that calm expanse. The bay was covered with
mackerel-boats, and one man sculled indolently across the
foreground a scarlet skiff. It was so still that every white
sail-boat rested where its sail was first spread; and though the
tide was at half-ebb, the anchored boats swung idly different
ways from their moorings. Yet there was a continuous ripple in
the broad sail of some almost motionless schooner, and there was
a constant melodious plash along the shore. From the mouth of the
bay came up slowly the premonitory line of bluer water, and we
knew that a breeze was near.
Severance seemed to rise in spirits as we approached the house,
and I noticed no sign of shrinking, except an occasional lowering
of the voice. Seeing this, I ventured to joke him a little on his
previous reluctance, and he replied in the same strain. I seated
myself at the corner, and began sketching old Fort Louis, while
he strolled along the piazza, looking in at the large, vacant
windows. As he approached the farther end, I suddenly heard him
give a little cry of amazement or dismay, and, looking up, saw
him leaning against the wall, with pale face and hands clenched.
A minute sometimes appears a long while; and though I sprang to
him instantly, yet I remember that it seemed as if, during that
instant, the whole face of things had changed. The breeze had
come, the bay was rippled, the sail-boats careened to the wind,
fishes and birds were gone, and a dark gray cloud had come
between us and the sun. Such sudden changes are not, however,
uncommon after an interval of calm; and my only conscious thought
at the time was of wonder at the strange aspect of my companion.
"What was that?" asked Severance in a bewildered tone. I looked
about me, equally puzzled. "Not there," he said. "In the window."
I looked in at the window, saw nothing, and said so. There was
the great empty drawing-room, across which one could see the
opposite window, and through this the eastern piazza and the
garden beyond. Nothing more was there. With some persuasion,
Severance was induced to look in. He admitted that he saw nothing
peculiar; but he refused all explanation, and we went home.
"Never let me go to that house again," he said abruptly, as we
entered our own door.
I pointed out to him the absurdity of thus yielding to a nervous
delusion, which was already in part conquered, and he finally
promised to revisit the scene with me the next day. To clear all
possible misgivings from my own mind, I got the key of the house
from Paul, explored it thoroughly, and was satisfied that no
improper visitor had recently entered the drawing-room at least,
as the windows were strongly bolted on the inside, and a large
cobweb, heavy with dust, hung across the doorway. This did no
great credit to Paul's stewardship, but was, perhaps, a slight
relief to me. Nor could I see a trace of anything uncanny outside
the house. When Severance went with me, next day, the coast was
equally clear, and I was glad to have cured him so easily.
Unfortunately, it did not last. A few days after, there was a
brilliant sunset, after a storm, with gorgeous yellow light
slanting everywhere, and the sun looking at us between bars of
dark purple cloud, edged with gold where they touched the pale
blue sky; all this fading at last into a great whirl of gray to
the northward, with a cold purple ground. At the height of the
show, I climbed the wall to my favorite piazza, and was surprised
to find Severance already there.
He sat facing the sunset, but with his head sunk between his
hands. At my approach, he looked up, and rose to his feet. "Do
not deceive me any more," he said, almost savagely, and pointed
to the window.
I looked in, and must confess that, for a moment, I too was
startled. There was a perceptible moment of time during which it
seemed as if no possible philosophy could explain what appeared
in sight. Not that any object showed itself within the great
drawing-room, but I distinctly saw--across the apartment, and
through the opposite window--the dark figure of a man about my
own size, who leaned against the long window, and gazed intently
on me. Above him spread the yellow sunset light, around him the
birch-boughs hung and the ivy-tendrils swayed, while behind him
there appeared a glimmering water-surface, across which slowly
drifted the tall masts of a schooner. It looked strangely like a
view I had seen of some foreign harbor,--Amalfi, perhaps,--with a
vine-clad balcony and a single human figure in the foreground. So
real and startling was the sight that at first it was not easy to
resolve the whole scene into its component parts. Yet it was
simply such a confused mixture of real and reflected images as
one often sees from the window of a railway carriage, where the
mirrored interior seems to glide beside the train, with the
natural landscape for a background. In this case, also, the frame
and foliage of the picture were real, and all else was reflected;
the sunlit bay behind us was reproduced as in a camera, and the
dark figure was but the full-length image of myself.
It was easy to explain all this to Severance, but he shook his
head. "So cool a philosopher as yourself," he said, "should
remember that this image is not always visible. At our last
visit, we looked for it in vain. When we first saw it, it
appeared and disappeared within ten minutes. On your mechanical
theory it should be other-wise."
This staggered me for a moment. Then the ready solution occurred,
that the reflection depended on the strength and direction of the
light; and I proved to him that, in our case, it had appeared and
disappeared with the sunshine. He was silenced, but evidently not
convinced; yet time and common-sense, it seemed, would take care
of that.
Soon after all this, I was called out of town for a week or two.
If Severance would go with me, it would doubtless complete the
cure, I thought; but this he obstinately declined. After my
departure, my sister wrote, he seemed absolutely to haunt the
empty house by the Blue Rocks. He undoubtedly went here to
sketch, she thought. The house was in charge of a real-estate
agent,--a retired landscape-painter, whose pictures did not sell
so profitably as their originals; and her theory was, that this
agent hoped to make our friend buy the place, and so allured him
there under pretence of sketching. Moreover, she surmised, he was
studying some effect of shadow, because, unlike most men, he
appeared in decent spirits only on cloudy days. It is always so
easy to fit a man out with a set of ready-made motives! But I
drew my own conclusions, and was not surprised to hear, soon
after, that Severance was seriously ill.
This brought me back at once,--sailing down from Providence in an
open boat, I remember, one lovely moonlight night. Next day I saw
Severance, who declared that he had suffered from nothing worse
than a prolonged sick-headache. I soon got out of him all that
had happened. He had seen the figure in the window every sunny
day, he said. Of course he had, if he chose to look for it, and I
could only smile, though it perhaps seemed unkind. But I stopped
smiling when he went on to tell that, not satisfied with these
observations, he had visited the house by moonlight also, and had
then seen, as he averred, a second figure standing beside the
first.
Of course, there was no defence against such a theory as this,
except simply to laugh it down; but it made me very anxious, for
it showed that he was growing thoroughly morbid. "Either it was
pure fancy," I said, "or it was Paul the gardener."
But here he was prepared for me. It seemed that, on seeing the
two figures, Severance had at once left the piazza, and, with an
instinct of common-sense that was surprising, had crossed the
garden, scaled the wall, and looked in at the window of Paul's
little cottage, where the man and his wife were quietly seated at
supper, probably after a late fishing-trip. "There was another
reason," he said; but here he stopped, and would give no
description of the second figure, which he had, however, seen
twice again, always by moon-light. He consented to let me
accompany him the following night.
We accordingly went. It was a calm, clear night, and the moon lay
brightly on the bay. The distant shores looked low and filmy; a
naval vessel was in the harbor, and there was a ball on board,
with music and fire-works; some fishermen were singing in their
boats, late as was the hour. Severance was absorbed in his own
gloomy reveries; and when we had crossed the wall, the world
seemed left outside, and the glamour of the place began to creep
over me also. I seemed to see my companion relapsing into some
phantom realm, beyond power of withdrawal. I talked, sang,
whistled; but it was all a rather hollow effort, and soon ceased.
The great house looked gloomy and impenetrable, the moonlight
appeared sick and sad, the birch-boughs rustled in a dreary way.
We went up the steps in no jubilant mood.
I crossed the piazza at once, looked in at the farthest window,
and saw there my own image, though far more faintly than in the
sunlight. Severance then joined me, and his reflected shape stood
by mine. Something of the first ghostly impression was renewed, I
must confess, by this meeting of the two shadows; there was
something rather awful in the way the bodiless things nodded and
gesticulated at each other in silence. Still, there was nothing
more than this, as Severance was compelled to own; and I was
trying to turn the whole affair into ridicule, when suddenly,
without sound or warning, I saw--as distinctly as I perceive the
words I now write--yet another figure stand at the window, gaze
steadfastly at us for a moment, and then disappear. It was, as I
fancied, that of a woman, but was totally enveloped in a very
full cloak, reaching to the ground, with a peculiarly cut hood,
that stood erect and seemed half as long as the body of the
garment. I had a vague recollection of having seen some such
costume in a picture.
Of course, I dashed round the corner of the house, threaded the
birch-trees, and stood on the eastern piazza. No one was there.
Without losing an instant, I ran to the garden wall and climbed
it, as Severance had done, to look into Paul's cottage. That
worthy was just getting into bed, in a state of complicated
deshabille, his blackbearded head wrapped in an old scarlet
handkerchief that made him look like a retired pirate in reduced
circumstances. He being accounted for, I vainly traversed the
shrubberies, returned to the western piazza, watched awhile
uselessly, and went home with Severance, a good deal puzzled.
By daylight the whole thing seemed different. That I had seen the
figure there was no doubt. It was not a reflected image, for we
had no companion. It was, then, human. After all, thought I, it
is a commonplace thing enough, this masquerading in a cloak and
hood. Someone has observed Severance's nocturnal visits, and is
amusing himself at his expense. The peculiarity was, that the
thing was so well done, and the figure had such an air of
dignity, that somehow it was not so easy to make light of it in
talking with him.
I went into his room, next day. His sick-headache, or whatever it
was, had come on again, and he was lying on his bed. Rutherford's
strange old book on the Second Sight lay open before him. "Look
there," he said; and I read the motto of a chapter:--
"In sunlight one,
In shadow none,
In moonlight two,
In thunder two,
Then comes Death."
I threw the book indignantly from me, and began to invent
doggerel, parodying this precious incantation. But Severance did
not seem to enjoy the joke, and it grows tiresome to enact one's
own farce and do one's own applauding.
For several days after he was laid up in earnest; but instead of
getting any mental rest from this, he lay poring over that
preposterous book, and it really seemed as if his brain were a
little disturbed. Meanwhile I watched the great house, day and
night, sought for footsteps, and, by some odd fancy, took
frequent observations on the gardener and his wife. Failing to
get any clew, I waited one day for Paul's absence, and made a
call upon the wife, under pretence of hunting up a missing
handkerchief,--for she had been my laundress. I found the
handsome, swarthy creature, with her six bronzed children around
her, training up the Madeira vine that made a bower of the whole
side of her little, black, gambrel-roofed cottage. On learning my
errand, she became full of sympathy, and was soon emptying her
bureau-drawers in pursuit of the lost handkerchief. As she opened
the lowest drawer, I saw within it something which sent all the
blood to my face for a moment. It was a black cloth cloak, with a
stiff hood two feet long, of precisely the pattern worn by the
unaccountable visitant at the window. I turned almost fiercely
upon her; but she looked so innocent as she stood there,
caressing and dusting with her fingers what was evidently a pet
garment, that it was really impossible to denounce her.
"Is that a Bavarian cloak?" said I, trying to be cool and
judicial.
Here broke in the eldest boy, named John, aged ten, a native
American, and a sailor already, whom I had twice fished up from a
capsized punt. "Mother ain't a Bavarian," quoth the young salt.
"Father's a Bavarian; mother's a Portegee. Portegees wear them
hoods."
"I am a Portuguese, sir, from Fayal," said the woman, prolonging
with sweet intonation the soft name of her birthplace. "This is
my capote, she added, taking up with pride the uncouth costume,
while the children gathered round, as if its vast folds came
rarely into sight.
"It has not been unfolded for a year," she said. As she spoke,
she dropped it with a cry, and a little mouse sprang from the
skirts, and whisked away into some corner. We found that the
little animal had made its abode in the heavy woollen, of which
three or four thicknesses had been eaten through, and then matted
together into the softest of nests. This contained, moreover, a
small family of mouselets, who certainly had not taken part in
any midnight masquerade. The secret seemed more remote than ever,
for I knew that there was no other Portuguese family in the town,
and there was no confounding this peculiar local costume with any
other.
Returning to Severance's chamber, I said nothing of all this. He
was, by an odd coincidence, looking over a portfolio of Fayal
sketches made by himself during his late voyage. Among them were
a dozen studies of just such capotes as I had seen,--some in
profile, completely screening the wearer, others disclosing
women's faces, old or young. He seemed to wish to put them away,
however, when I came in. Really, the plot seemed to thicken; and
it was a little provoking to understand it no better, when all
the materials seemed close to one's hands.
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