Oldport Days
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Oldport Days
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A day or two later, I was summoned to Boston. Returning thence by
the stage-coach, we drove from Tiverton, the whole length of the
island, under one of those wild and wonderful skies which give,
better than anything in nature, the effect of a field of battle.
The heavens were filled with ten thousand separate masses of
cloud, varying in shade from palest gray to iron-black, borne
rapidly to and fro by upper and lower currents of opposing wind.
They seemed to be charging, retreating, breaking, recombining,
with puffs of what seemed smoke, and a few wan sunbeams sometimes
striking through for fire. Wherever the eye turned, there
appeared some flying fragment not seen before; and yet in an hour
this noiseless Antietam grew still, and a settled leaden film
overspread the sky, yielding only to some level lines of light
where the sun went down. Perhaps our driver was looking toward
the sky more than to his own affairs, for, just as all this ended
a wheel gave out, and we had to stop in Portsmouth for repairs.
By the time we were again in motion, the changing wind had
brought up a final thunder-storm, which broke upon us ere we
reached our homes. It was rather an uncommon thing, so late in
the season; for the lightning, like other brilliant visitors,
usually appears in Oldport during only a month or two of every
year.
The coach set me down at my own door, so soaked that I might have
floated in. I peeped into Severance's room, however, on the way
to my own. Strange to say, no one was there; yet some one had
evidently been lying on the bed, and on the pillow lay the old
book on the Second Sight, open at the very page which had so
bewitched him and vexed me. I glanced at it mechanically, and
when I came to the meaningless jumble, "In thunder two," a flash
flooded the chamber, and a sudden fear struck into my mind. Who
knew what insane experiment might have come into that boy's head?
With sudden impulse, I went downstairs, and found the whole house
empty, until a stupid old woman, coming in from the wood-house
with her apron full of turnips, told me that Severance had been
missing since nightfall, after being for a week in bed,
dangerously ill, and sometimes slightly delirious. The family had
become alarmed,and were out with lanterns, in search of him.
It was safe to say that none of them had more reason to be
alarmed than I. It was something, however, to know where to seek
him. Meeting two neighboring fishermen, I took them with me. As
we approached the well-known wall, the blast blew out our lights,
and we could scarcely speak. The lightning had grown less
frequent, yet sheets of flame seemed occasionally to break over
the dark, square sides of the house, and to send a flickering
flame along the ridge-pole and eaves, like a surf of light. A
surf of water broke also behind us on the Blue Rocks, sounding as
if it pursued our very footsteps; and one of the men whispered
hoarsely to me, that a Nantucket brig had parted her cable, and
was drifting in shore.
As we entered the garden, lights gleamed in the shrubbery. To my
surprise, it was Paul and his wife, with their two oldest
children,--these last being quite delighted with the stir, and
showing so much illumination, in the lee of the house, that it
was quite a Feast of Lanterns. They seemed a little surprised at
meeting us, too; but we might as well have talked from Point
Judith to Beaver Tail as to have attempted conversation there. I
walked round the building; but a flash of lightning showed
nothing on the western piazza save a birch-tree, which lay
across, blown down by the storm. I therefore went inside, with
Paul's household, leaving the fishermen without.
Never shall I forget that search. As we went from empty room to
room, the thunder seemed rolling on the very roof, and the sharp
flashes of lightning appeared to put out our lamps and then
kindle them again. We traversed the upper regions, mounting by a
ladder to the attic; then descended into the cellar and the
wine-vault. The thorough bareness of the house, the fact that no
bright-eyed mice peeped at us from their holes, no uncouth
insects glided on the walls, no flies buzzed in the unwonted
lamplight, scarcely a spider slid down his damp and trailing
web,--all this seemed to enhance the mystery. The vacancy was
more dreary than desertion: it was something old which had never
been young. We found ourselves speaking in whispers; the children
kept close to their parents; we seemed to be chasing some awful
Silence from room to room; and the last apartment, the great
drawing-room, we really seemed loath to enter. The less the rest
of the house had to show, the more, it seemed, must be
concentrated there. Even as we entered, a blast of air from a
broken pane extinguished our last light, and it seemed to take
many minutes to rekindle it.
As it shone once more, a brilliant lightning-flash also swept
through the window, and flickered and flickered, as if it would
never have done. The eldest child suddenly screamed, and pointed
with her finger, first to one great window and then to its
opposite. My eyes instinctively followed the successive
directions; and the double glance gave me all I came to seek, and
more than all. Outside the western window lay Severance, his
white face against the pane, his eyes gazing across and past
us,--struck down doubtless by the fallen tree, which lay across
the piazza, and hid him from external view. Opposite him, and
seen through the eastern window, stood, statue-like, the hooded
figure, but with the great capote thrown back, showing a sad,
eager, girlish face, with dark eyes, and a good deal of black
hair,--one of those faces of peasant beauty such as America never
shows,--faces where ignorance is almost raised into refinement by
its childlike look. Contrasted with Severance's wild gaze, the
countenance wore an expression of pitying forgiveness, almost of
calm; yet it told of wasting sorrow and the wreck of a life.
Gleaming lustrous beneath the lightning, it had a more mystic
look when the long flash had ceased, and the single lantern
burned beneath it, like an altar-lamp before a shrine.
"It is Aunt Emilia," exclaimed the little girl; and as she spoke,
the father, turning angrily upon her, dashed the light to the
ground, and groped his way out without a word of answer. I was
too much alarmed about Severance to care for aught else, and
quickly made my way to the western piazza, where I found him
stunned by the fallen tree,--injured, I feared,
internally,--still conscious, but unable to speak.
With the aid of my two companions I got him home, and he was ill
for several weeks before he died. During his illness he told me
all he had to tell; and though Paul and his family disappeared
next day,--perhaps going on board the Nantucket brig, which had
narrowly escaped shipwreck,--I afterwards learned all the
remaining facts from the only neighbor in whom they had placed
confidence. Severance, while convalescing at a country-house in
Fayal, had fallen passionately in love with a young peasant-girl,
who had broken off her intended marriage for love of him, and had
sunk into a half-imbecile melancholy when deserted. She had
afterwards come to this country, and joined her sister, Paul's
wife. Paul had received her reluctantly, and only on condition
that her existence should be concealed. This was the easier, as
it was one of her whims to go out only by night, when she had
haunted the great house, which, she said, reminded her of her own
island, so that she liked to wear thither the capote which had
been the pride of her heart at home. On the few occasions when
she had caught a glimpse of Severance, he had seemed to her, no
doubt, as much a phantom as she seemed to him. On the night of
the storm, they had both sought their favorite haunt, unconscious
of each other, and the friends of each had followed in alarm.
I got traces of the family afterwards at Nantucket and later at
Narragansett, and had reason to think that Paul was employed, one
summer, by a farmer on Conanicut; but I was always just too late
for them; and the money which Severance left, as his only
reparation for poor Emilia, never was paid. The affair was hushed
up, and very few, even among the neighbors, knew the tragedy that
had passed by them with the storm.
After Severance died, I had that temporary feeling of weakened
life which remains after the first friend or the first love
passes, and the heart seems to lose its sense of infinity. His
father came, and prosed, and measured the windows of the empty
house, and calculated angles of reflection, and poured even death
and despair into his crucible of commonplace; the mother whined
in her feebler way at home; while the only brother, a talkative
medical student, tried to pooh-pooh it all, and sent me a letter
demonstrating that Emilia was never in America, and that the
whole was an hallucination. I cared nothing for his theory; it
all seemed like a dream to me, and, as all the actors but myself
are gone, it seems so still. The great house is yet unoccupied,
and likely to remain so; and he who looks through its western
window may still be startled by the weird image of himself. As I
lingered round it, to-day, beneath the winter sunlight, the snow
drifted pitilessly past its ivied windows, and so hushed my
footsteps that I scarce knew which was the phantom, myself or my
reflection, and wondered if the medical student would not argue
me out of existence next.
This is the end of my story. If I sought for a moral, it would be
hard to attach one to a thing so slight. It could only be this,
that shadow and substance are always ready to link themselves, in
unexpected ways, against the diseased imagination; and that
remorse can make the most transparent crystal into a mirror for
its sin.
A Drift-Wood Fire.
"This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and salt and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule."
A Lyke-Wake Dirge.
The October days grow rapidly shorter, and brighten with more
concentrated light. It is but half past five, yet the sun dips
redly behind Conanicut, the sunset-gun booms from our neighbor's
yacht, the flag glides down from his mainmast, and the slender
pennant, running swiftly up the opposite halyards, dances and
flickers like a flame, and at last perches, with dainty
hesitation, at the mast-head. A tint of salmon-color, burnished
into long undulations of lustre, overspreads the shallower waves;
but a sober gray begins to steal in beneath the sunset rays, and
will soon claim even the brilliant foreground for its own. Pile a
few more fragments of drift-wood upon the fire in the great
chimney, little maiden, and then couch yourself before it, that I
may have your glowing childhood as a foreground for those heaped
relics of shipwreck and despair. You seem, in your scarlet
boating-dress, Annie, like some bright tropic bird,alit for a
moment beside that other bird of the tropics, flame.
Thoreau thought that his temperament dated from an earlier period
than the agricultural, because he preferred woodcraft to
gardening; and it is also pleasant to revert to the period when
men had invented neither saws nor axes, but simply picked up
their fuel in forests or on ocean-shores. Fire is a thing which
comes so near us, and combines itself so closely with our life,
that we enjoy it best when we work for it in some way, so that
our fuel shall warm us twice, as the country people say,--once in
the getting, and again in the burning. Yet no work seems to have
more of the flavor of play in it than that of collecting
drift-wood on some convenient beach, or than this boat-service of
ours, Annie, when we go wandering from island to island in the
harbor, and glide over sea-weedgroves and the habitations of
crabs,--or to the flowery and ruined bastions of Rose Island,--or
to those caves at Coaster's Harbor where we played Victor Hugo,
and were eaten up in fancy by a cuttle-fish. Then we voyaged, you
remember, to that further cave in, the solid rock, just above
low-water-mark, a cell unapproachable by land, and high enough
for you to stand erect. There you wished to play Constance in
Marmion, and to be walled up alive, if convenient; but as it
proved impracticable on that day, you helped me to secure some
bits of drift-wood instead. Longer voyages brought waifs from
remoter islands,--whose very names tell, perchance, the changing
story of mariners long since wrecked,--isles baptized Patience
and Prudence, Hope and Despair. And other relics bear witness of
more distant beaches, and of those wrecks which still lie,
sentinels of ruin, along Brenton's Point and Castle Hill.
To collect drift-wood is like botanizing, and one soon learns to
recognize the prevailing species, and to look with pleased
eagerness for new. It is a tragic botany indeed, where, as in
enchanted gardens, every specimen has a voice, and, as you take
each from the ground, you expect from it a cry like the
mandrake's. And from what a garden it comes! As one walks round
Brenton's Point after an autumnal storm, it seems as if the
passionate heaving of the waves had brought wholly new tints to
the surface, hues unseen even in dreams before, greens and
purples impossible in serener days. These match the prevailing
green and purple of the slate-cliffs; and Nature in truth carries
such fine fitnesses yet further. For, as we tread the delicate
seaside turf, which makes the farthest point seem merely the
land's last bequest of emerald to the ocean, we suddenly come
upon curved lines of lustrous purple amid the grass, rows on rows
of bright muscle-shells, regularly traced as if a child had
played there,--the graceful high-water-mark of the terrible
storm.
It is the crowning fascination of the sea, the consummation of
such might in such infantine delicacy. You may notice it again in
the summer, when our bay is thronged for miles on miles with
inch-long jelly-fishes,--lovely creatures, in shape like
disembodied gooseberries, and shot through and through in the
sunlight with all manner of blue and golden glistenings, and
bearing tiny rows of fringing oars that tremble like a baby's
eyelids. There is less of gross substance in them than in any
other created thing,--mere water and outline, destined to perish
at a touch, but seemingly never touching, for they float secure,
finding no conceivable cradle so soft as this awful sea. They are
like melodies amid Beethoven's Symphonies, or like the songs that
wander through Shakespeare, and that seem things too fragile to
risk near Cleopatra's passion and Hamlet's woe. Thus tender is
the touch of ocean; and look, how around this piece of oaken
timber, twisted and torn and furrowed,--its iron bolts snapped
across as if bitten,--there is yet twined a gay garland of
ribbon-weed, bearing on its trailing stem a cluster of bright
shells, like a mermaid's chatelaine.
Thus adorned, we place it on the blaze. As night gathers without,
the gale rises. It is a season of uneasy winds, and of strange,
rainless storms, which perplex the fishermen, and indicate rough
weather out at sea. As the house trembles and the windows rattle,
we turn towards the fire with a feeling of safety. Representing
the fiercest of all dangers, it yet expresses security and
comfort.
Should a gale tear the roof from over our heads and show the
black sky alone above us, we should not feel utterly homeless
while this fire burned,--at least I can recall such a feeling of
protection when once left suddenly roofless by night in one of
the wild gorges of Mount Katahdin. There is a positive
demonstrative force in an open fire, which makes it your fit ally
in a storm. Settled and obdurate cold may well be encountered by
the quiet heat of an invisible furnace. But this howling wind
might depress one's spirits, were it not met by a force as
palpable,--the warm blast within answering to the cold blast
without. The wide chimney then becomes the scene of contest: wind
meets wind, sparks encounter rain-drops, they fight in the air
like the visioned soldiers of Attila; sometimes a daring drop
penetrates, and dies, hissing, on the hearth; and sometimes a
troop of sparks may make a sortie from the chimney-top. I know
not how else we can meet the elements by a defiance so
magnificent as that from this open hearth; and in burning
drift-wood, especially, we turn against the enemy his own
ammunition. For on these fragments three elements have already
done their work. Water racked and strained the hapless ships, air
hunted them, and they were thrown at last upon earth, the
sternest of all. Now fire takes the shattered remnants, and makes
them a means of comfort and defence.
It has been pointed out by botanists, as one of Nature's most
graceful retributions, that, in the building of the ship, the
apparent balance of vegetable forces is reversed, and the herb
becomes master of the tree, when the delicate, blue-eyed flax,
taking the stately pine under its protection, stretches over it
in cordage, or spreads in sails. But more graceful still is this
further contest between the great natural elements, when this
most fantastic and vanishing thing, this delicate and dancing
flame, subdues all these huge vassals to its will, and, after
earth and air and water have done their utmost, comes in to
complete the task, and to be crowned as monarch. "The sea drinks
the air," said Anacreon, "and the sun the sea." My fire is the
child of the sun.
I come back from every evening stroll to this gleaming blaze; it
is a domestic lamp, and shines for me everywhere. To my
imagination it burns as a central flame among these dark houses,
and lights up the whole of this little fishing hamlet, humble
suburb of the fashionable watering-place. I fancy that others too
perceive the light, and that certain huge visitors are attracted,
even when the storm keeps neighbors and friends at home. For the
slightest presage of foul weather is sure to bring to yonder
anchorage a dozen silent vessels, that glide up the harbor for
refuge, and are heard but once, when the chain-cable rattles as
it runs out, and the iron hand of the anchor grasps the rock. It
always seems to me that these unwieldy creatures are gathered,
not about the neighboring lighthouse only, but around our
ingle-side. Welcome, ye great winged strangers, whose very names
are unknown! This hearth is comprehensive in its hospitalities;
it will accept from you either its fuel or its guests; your
mariners may warm themselves beside it, or your scattered timbers
may warm me. Strange instincts might be supposed to thrill and
shudder in the ribs of ships that sail toward the beacon of a
drift-wood fire. Morituri salutant. A single shock, and all that
magnificent fabric may become mere fuel to prolong the flame.
Here, beside the roaring ocean, this blaze represents the only
receptacle more vast than ocean. We say, "unstable as water." But
there is nothing unstable about the flickering flame; it is
persistent and desperate, relentless in following its ends. It is
the most tremendous physical force that man can use. "If drugs
fail," said Hippocrates, "use the knife; should the knife fail,
use fire." Conquered countries were anciently given over to fire
and sword: the latter could only kill, but the other could
annihilate. See how thoroughly it does its work, even when
domesticated: it takes up everything upon the hearth and leaves
all clean. The Greek proverb says, that "the sea drinks up all
the sins of the world." Save fire only, the sea is the most
capacious of all things.
But its task is left incomplete: it only hides its records, while
fire destroys them. In the Norse Edda, when the gods try their
games, they find themselves able to out-drink the ocean, but not
to eat like the flame. Logi, or fire, licks up food and trencher
and all. This chimney is more voracious than the sea. Give time
enough, and all which yonder depths contain might pass through
this insatiable throat, leaving only a few ashes and the memory
of a flickering shade,--pulvis et umbra. We recognize this when
we have anything to conceal. Deep crimes are buried in earth,
deeper are sunk In water, but the deepest of all are confided by
trembling men to the profounder secrecy of flame. If every old
chimney could narrate the fearful deeds whose last records it has
cancelled, what sighs of undying passion would breathe from its
dark summit,--what groans of guilt! Those lurid sparks that whirl
over yonder house-top, tossed aloft as if fire itself could not
contain them, may be the last embers of some written scroll, one
rescued word of which might suffice for the ruin of a household,
and the crushing of many hearts.
But this domestic hearth of ours holds only, besides its
drift-wood, the peaceful records of the day,--its shreds and
fragments and fallen leaves. As the ancients poured wine upon
their flames, so I pour rose-leaves in libation; and each morning
contributes the faded petals of yesterday's wreaths. All our
roses of this season have passed up this chimney in the blaze.
Their delicate veins were filled with all the summer's fire, and
they returned to fire once more,--ashes to ashes, flame to flame.
For holding, with Bettina, that every flower which is broken
becomes immortal in the sacrifice, I deem it more fitting that
their earthly part should die by a concentration of that burning
element which would at any rate be in some form their ending; so
they have their altar on this bright hearth.
Let us pile up the fire anew with drift-wood, Annie. We can
choose at random; for our logs came from no single forest. It is
considered an important branch of skill in the country to know
the varieties of firewood, and to choose among them well. But
to-night we have the whole Atlantic shore for our wood-pile, and
the Gulf Stream for a teamster. Every foreign tree of rarest name
may, for aught we know, send its treasures to our hearth. Logwood
and satinwood may mingle with cedar and maple; the old cellar
floors of this once princely town are of mahogany, and why not
our fire? I have a very indistinct impression what teak is; but
if it means something black and impenetrable and nearly
indestructible, then there is a piece of it, Annie, on the hearth
at this moment.
It must be owned, indeed, that timbers soaked long enough in
salt-water seem almost to lose their capacity of being burnt.
Perhaps it was for this reason that, in the ancient "lyke-wakes"
of the North of England, a pinch of salt was placed upon the dead
body, as a safeguard against purgatorial flames. Yet salt melts
ice, and so represents heat, one would think; and one can fancy
that these fragments should be doubly inflammable, by their
saline quality, and by the unmerciful rubbing which the waves
have given them. I have noticed what warmth this churning process
communicates to the clotted foam that lies in tremulous masses
among the rocks, holding all the blue of ocean in its bubbles.
After one's hands are chilled with the water, one can warm them
in the foam. These drift-wood fragments are but the larger foam
of shipwrecks.
What strange comrades this flame brings together! As foreign
sailors from remotest seas may sit and chat side by side, before
some boarding-house fire in this seaport town, so these shapeless
sticks, perhaps gathered from far wider wanderings, now nestle
together against the backlog, and converse in strange dialects as
they burn. It is written in the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma,
that, "as two planks, floating on the surface of the mighty
receptacle of the waters, meet, and having met are separated
forever, so do beings in this life come together and presently
are parted." Perchance this chimney reunites the planks, at the
last moment, as death must reunite friends.
And with what wondrous voices these strayed wanderers talk to one
another on the hearth! They bewitch us by the mere fascination of
their language. Such a delicacy of intonation, yet such a volume
of sound. The murmur of the surf is not so soft or so solemn.
There are the merest hints and traceries of tones,--phantom
voices, more remote from noise than anything which is noise; and
yet there is an undertone of roar, as from a thousand cities, the
cities whence these wild voyagers came. Watch the decreasing
sounds of a fire as it dies,--for it seems cruel to leave it, as
we do, to die alone. I watched beside this hearth last night. As
the fire sank down, the little voices grew stiller and more
still, and at last there came only irregular beats, at varying
intervals, as if from a heart that acted spasmodically, or as if
it were measuring off by ticks the little remnant of time. Then
it said, "Hush!" two or three times, and there came something so
like a sob that it seemed human; and then all was still.
If these dying voices are so sweet and subtile, what legends must
be held untold by yonder fragments that lie unconsumed!
Photography has familiarized us with the thought that every
visible act, since the beginning of the world, has stamped itself
upon surrounding surfaces, even if we have not yet skill to
discern and hold the image. And especially, in looking on a
liquid expanse, such as the ocean in calm, one is haunted with
these fancies. I gaze into its depths, and wonder if no stray
reflection has been imprisoned there, still accessible to human
eyes, of some scene of passion or despair it has witnessed; as
some maiden visitor at Holyrood Palace, looking in the ancient
metallic mirror, might start at the thought that perchance some
lineament of Mary Stuart may suddenly look out, in desolate and
forgotten beauty, mingled with her own. And if the mere waters of
the ocean, satiate and wearied with tragedy as they must be,
still keep for our fancy such records, how much more might we
attribute a human consciousness to these shattered fragments,
each seared by its own special grief.
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