Oldport Days
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Oldport Days
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How unlike are those weird and gloomy nights to this sunny noon,
when I rest my oars in this sheltered bay, where a small lagoon
makes in behind Coaster's Harbor Island, and the very last breath
and murmur of the ocean are left outside! The coming tide steals
to the shore in waves so light they are a mere shade upon the
surface till they break, and then die speechless for one that has
a voice. And even those rare voices are the very most
confidential and silvery whispers in which Nature ever spoke to
man; the faintest summer insect seems resolute and assured beside
them; and yet it needs but an indefinite multiplication of these
sounds to make up the thunder of the surf. It is so still that I
can let the wherry drift idly along the shore, and can watch the
life beneath the water. The small fry cluster and evade between
me and the brink; the half-translucent shrimp glides gracefully
undisturbed, or glances away like a flash if you but touch the
surface; the crabs waddle or burrow, the smaller species
mimicking unconsciously the hue of the soft green sea-weed, and
the larger looking like motionless stones, covered with barnacles
and decked with fringing weeds. I am acquainted with no better
Darwinian than the crab; and however clumsy he may be when taken
from his own element, he has a free and floating motion which is
almost graceful in his own yielding and buoyant home. It is so
with all wild creatures, but especially with those of water and
air. A gull is not reckoned an especially graceful bird, but
yonder I see one, snowy white, that has come to fish in this safe
lagoon, and it dips and rises on its errands as lightly as a
butterfly or a swallow. Beneath that neighboring causeway the
water-rats run over the stones, lithe and eager and alert, the
body carried low, the head raised now and then like a hound's,
the tail curving gracefully and aiding the poise; now they are
running to the water as if to drink, now racing for dear life
along the edge, now fairly swimming, then devoting an interval to
reflection, like squirrels, then again searching over a pile of
sea-weed and selecting some especial tuft, which is carried, with
long, sinuous leaps, to the unseen nest. Indeed, man himself is
graceful in his unconscious and direct employments: the poise of
a fisherman, for instance, the play of his arm, the cast of his
line or net,--these take the eye as do the stealthy movements of
the hunter, the fine attitudes of the wood-chopper, the grasp of
the sailor on the helm. A haystack and a boat are always
picturesque objects, and so are the men who are at work to build
or use them. So is yonder stake-net, glistening in the noonday
light,--the innumerable meshes drooping in soft arches from the
high stakes, and the line of floats stretching shoreward, like
tiny stepping-stones; two or three row-boats are gathered round
it, with fishermen in red or blue shirts, while one white
sail-boat hovers near. And I have looked down on our beach in
spring, at sunset, and watched them drawing nets for the young
herring, when the rough men looked as graceful as the nets they
drew, and the horseman who directed might have been Redgauntlet
on the Solway Sands.
I suppose it is from this look of natural fitness that a windmill
is always such an appropriate object by the sea-shore. It is
simply a four-masted schooner, stranded on a hill-top, and
adapting itself to a new sphere of duty. It can have needed but a
slight stretch of invention in some seaman to combine these lofty
vans, and throw over them a few remodelled sails. The principle
of their motion is that by which a vessel beats to windward; the
miller spreads or reefs his sails, like a sailor,--reducing them
in a high wind to a mere "pigeon-wing" as it is called, two or
three feet in length, or in some cases even scudding under bare
poles. The whole structure vibrates and creaks under rapid
motion, like a mast; and the angry vans, disappointed of
progress, are ready to grind to powder all that comes within
their grasp, as they revolve hopelessly in this sea of air.
When the sun grows hot, I like to take refuge in a sheltered nook
beside Goat Island Lighthouse, where the wharf shades me, and the
resonant plash of waters multiplies itself among the dark piles,
increasing the delicious sense of coolness. While the noonday
bells ring twelve, I take my rest. Round the corner of the pier
the fishing-boats come gliding in, generally with a boy asleep
forward, and a weary man at the helm; one can almost fancy that
the boat itself looks weary, having been out since the early
summer sunrise. In contrast to this expression of labor ended,
the white pleasure-boats seem but to be taking a careless stroll
by water; while a skiff full of girls drifts idly along the
shore, amid laughter and screaming and much aimless splash. More
resolute and business-like, the boys row their boat far up the
bay; then I see a sudden gleam of white bodies, and then the boat
is empty, and the surrounding water is sprinkled with black and
bobbing heads. The steamboats look busier yet, as they go puffing
by at short intervals, and send long waves up to my retreat; and
then some schooner sails in, full of life, with a white ripple
round her bows, till she suddenly rounds to drops anchor, and is
still. Opposite me, on the landward side of the bay, the green
banks slope to the water; on yonder cool piazza there is a young
mother who swings her baby in the hammock, or a white-robed
figure pacing beneath the trailing vines. Peace and lotus-eating
on shore; on the water, even in the stillest noon, there are life
and sparkle and continual change.
One of those fishermen whose boats have just glided to their
moorings is to me a far more interesting person than any of his
mates, though he is perhaps the only one among them with whom I
have never yet exchanged a word. There is good reason for it; he
has been deaf and dumb since boyhood. He is reported to be the
boldest sailor among all these daring men; he is the last to
retreat before the coming storm; the first after the storm to
venture through the white and whirling channels, between
dangerous ledges, to which others give a wider berth. I do not
wonder at this, for think how much of the awe and terror of the
tempest must vanish if the ears be closed! The ominous undertone
of the waves on the beach and the muttering thunder pass harmless
by him. How infinitely strange it must be to have the sight of
danger, but not the sound! Fancy such a deprivation in war, for
instance, where it is the sounds, after all, that haunt the
memory the longest; the rifle's crack, the irregular shots of
skirmishers, the long roll of alarm, the roar of great guns. This
man would have missed them all. Were a broadside from an enemy's
gunboat to be discharged above his head, he would not hear it; he
would only recognize, by some jarring of his other senses, the
fierce concussion of the air.
How much deeper seems his solitude than that of any other "lone
fisher on the lonely sea"! Yet all such things are comparative;
and while the others contrast that wave-tossed isolation with the
cheeriness of home, his home is silent too. He has a wife and
children; they all speak, but he hears not their prattle or their
complaints. He summons them with his fingers, as he summons the
fishes, and they are equally dumb to him. Has he a special
sympathy with those submerged and voiceless things? Dunfish, in
the old newspapers, were often called "dumb'd fish"; and they
perchance come to him as to one of their kindred. They may have
learned, like other innocent things, to accept this defect of
utterance, and even imitate it. I knew a deaf-and-dumb woman
whose children spoke and heard; but while yet too young for
words, they had learned that their mother was not to be reached
in that way; they never cried or complained before her, and when
most excited would only whisper. Her baby ten months old, if
disturbed in the night, would creep to her and touch her lips, to
awaken her, but would make no noise.
One might fancy that all men who have an agonizing sorrow or a
fearful secret would be drawn by irresistible attraction into the
society of the deaf and dumb. What awful passions might not be
whispered, what terror safely spoken, in the charmed circle round
yonder silent boat,--a circle whose centre is a human life which
has not all the susceptibilities of life, a confessional where
even the priest cannot hear! Would it not relieve sorrow to
express itself, even if unheeded? What more could one ask than a
dumb confidant? and if deaf also, so much the safer. To be sure,
he would give you neither absolution nor guidance; he could
render nothing in return, save a look or a clasp of the hand; nor
can the most gifted or eloquent friendship do much more. Ah! but
suddenly the thought occurs, suppose that the defect of hearing,
as of tongue, were liable to be loosed by an overmastering
emotion, and that by startling him with your hoarded confidence
you were to break the spell! The hint is too perilous; let us row
away.
A few strokes take us to the half-submerged wreck of a
lime-schooner that was cut to the water's edge, by a collision in
a gale, twelve months ago. The water kindled the lime, the cable
was cut, the vessel drifted ashore and sunk, still blazing, at
this little beach. When I saw her, at sunset, the masts had been
cut away, and the flames held possession on board. Fire was
working away in the cabin, like a live thing, and sometimes
glared out of the hatchway; anon it clambered along the gunwale,
like a school-boy playing, and the waves chased it as in play;
just a flicker of flame, then a wave would reach up to overtake
it; then the flames would be, or seem to be, where the water had
been; and finally, as the vessel lay careened, the waves took
undisturbed possession of the lower gunwale, and the flames of
the upper. So it burned that day and night; part red with fire,
part black with soaking; and now twelve months have made all its
visible parts look dry and white, till it is hard to believe that
either fire or water has ever touched it. It lies over on its
bare knees, and a single knee, torn from the others, rests
imploringly on the shore, as if that had worked its way to land,
and perished in act of thanksgiving. At low tide, one half the
frame is lifted high in air, like a dead tree in the forest.
Perhaps all other elements are tenderer in their dealings with
what is intrusted to them than is the air. Fire, at least,
destroys what it has ruined; earth is warm and loving, and it
moreover conceals; water is at least caressing,--it laps the
greater part of this wreck with protecting waves, covers with
sea-weeds all that it can reach, and protects with incrusting
shells. Even beyond its grasp it tosses soft pendants of moss
that twine like vine-tendrils, or sway in the wind. It mellows
harsh colors into beauty, and Ruskin grows eloquent over the
wave-washed tint of some tarry, weather-beaten boat. But air is
pitiless: it dries and stiffens all outline, and bleaches all
color away, so that you can hardly tell whether these ribs
belonged to a ship or an elephant; and yet there is a certain
cold purity in the shapes it leaves, and the birds it sends to
perch upon these timbers are a more graceful company than
lobsters or fishes. After all, there is something sublime in that
sepulture of the Parsees, who erect near every village a dokhma,
or Tower of Silence, upon whose summit they may bury their dead
in air.
Thus widely may one's thoughts wander from a summer boat. But the
season for rowing is a long one, and far outlasts in Oldport the
stay of our annual guests. Sometimes in autumnal mornings I glide
forth over water so still, it seems as if saturated by the
Indian-summer with its own indefinable calm. The distant islands
lift themselves on white pedestals of mirage; the cloud-shadows
rest softly on Conanicut; and what seems a similar shadow on the
nearer slopes of Fort Adams is in truth but a mounted battery,
drilling, which soon moves and slides across the hazy hill like a
cloud.
I hear across nearly a mile of water the faint, Sharp orders and
the sonorous blare of the trumpet That follows each command; the
horsemen gallop and wheel; suddenly the band within the fort
strikes up for guard-mounting, and I have but to shut my eyes to
be carried back to warlike days that passed by,--was it centuries
ago? Meantime, I float gradually towards Brenton's Cove; the
lawns that reach to the water's edge were never so gorgeously
green in any summer, and the departure of the transient guests
gives to these lovely places an air of cool seclusion; when
fashion quits them, the imagination is ready to move in. An
agreeable sense of universal ownership comes over the
winter-staying mind in Oldport. I like to keep up this little
semblance of habitation on the part of our human birds of
passage; it is very pleasant to me, and perhaps even pleasanter
to them, that they should call these emerald slopes their own for
a month or two; but when they lock the doors in autumn, the ideal
key reverts into my hands, and it is evident that they have only
been "tenants by the courtesy," in the fine legal phrase.
Provided they stay here long enough to attend to their lawns and
pay their taxes, I am better satisfied than if these estates were
left to me the whole year round.
The tide takes the boat nearer to the fort; the horsemen ride
more conspicuously, with swords and trappings that glisten in the
sunlight, while the white fetlocks of the horses twinkle in
unison as they move. One troop-horse without a rider wheels and
gallops with the rest, and seems to revel in the free motion.
Here also the tide reaches or seems to reach the very edge of the
turf; and when the light battery gallops this way, it is as if it
were charging on my floating fortress. Upon the other side is a
scene of peace; and a fisherman sings in his boat as he examines
the floats of his stake-net, hand over hand. A white gull hovers
close above him, and a dark one above the horsemen, fit emblems
of peace and war. The slightest sounds, the rattle of an oar, the
striking of a hoof against a stone, are borne over the water to
an amazing distance, as if the calm bay amid its seeming quiet,
were watchful of the slightest noise. But look! in a moment the
surface is rippled, the sky is clouded, a swift change comes over
the fitful mood of the season; the water looks colder and deeper,
the greensward assumes a chilly darkness, the troopers gallop
away to their stables, and the fisherman rows home. That
indefinable expression which separates autumn from summer creeps
almost in an instant over all. Soon, even upon this Isle of
Peace, it will be winter.
Each season, as winter returns, I try in vain to comprehend this
wonderful shifting of expression that touches even a thing so
essentially unchanging as the sea. How delicious to all the
senses is the summer foam above yonder rock; in winter the foam
is the same, the sparkle as radiant, the hue of the water
scarcely altered; and yet the effect is, by comparison, cold,
heavy, and leaden. It is like that mysterious variation which
chiefly makes the difference between one human face and another;
we call it by vague names, and cannot tell in what it lies; we
only know that when expression changes, all is gone. No warmth of
color, no perfection of outline can supersede those subtile
influences which make one face so winning that all human
affection gravitates to its spell, and another so cold or
repellent that it dwells forever in loneliness, and no passionate
heart draws near. I can fancy the ocean beating in vague despair
against its shores in winter, and moaning, "I am as beautiful, as
restless, as untamable as ever: why are my cliffs left desolate?
why am I not loved as I was loved in summer?"
MADAM DELIA'S EXPECTATIONS.
Madam Delia sat at the door of her show-tent, which, as she
discovered too late, had been pitched on the wrong side of the
Parade. It was"Election day" in Oldport, and there must have been
a thousand people in the public square; there were really more
than the four policemen on duty could properly attend to, so that
half of them had leisure to step into Madam Delia's tent, and see
little Gerty and the rattlesnakes. It was past the appointed
hour; but the exhibition had never yet been known to open for
less than ten spectators, and even the addition of the policemen
only made eight. So the mistress of the show sat in resolute
expectation, a little defiant of the human race. It was her
thirteenth annual tour, and she knew mankind.
Surely there were people enough; surely they had money enough;
surely they were easily pleased. They gathered in crowds to hear
crazy Mrs. Green denouncing the city government for sending her
to the poorhouse in a wagon instead of a carriage. They thronged
to inspect the load of hay that was drawn by the two horses whose
harness had been cut to pieces, and then repaired by Denison's
Eureka Cement. They all bought whips with that unfailing
readiness which marks a rural crowd; they bought packages of
lead-pencils with a dollar so skilfully distributed through every
six parcels that the oldest purchaser had never found more than
ten cents in his. They let the man who cured neuralgia rub his
magic curative on their foreheads, and allowed the man who
cleaned watch-chains to dip theirs in the purifying powder. They
twirled the magic arrow, which never by any chance rested at the
corner compartments where the gold watches and the heavy
bracelets were piled, but perpetually recurred to the side
stations, and indicated only a beggarly prize of india-rubber
sleeve-buttons. They bought ten cents' worth of jewelry,
obtaining a mingled treasure of two breast-pins, a plain gold
ring, an enamelled ring, and "a piece of California gold." But
still no added prizes in the human lottery fell to the show-tent
of Madam Delia.
As time went on and the day grew warmer, the crowd grew visibly
less enterprising, and business flagged. The man with the
lifting-machine pulled at the handles himself, a gratuitous
exhibition before a circle of boys now penniless. The man with
the metallic polish dipped and redipped his own watch-chain. The
men at the booths sat down to lunch upon the least presentable of
their own pies. The proprietor of the magic arrow, who had
already two large breastpins on his dirty shirt, selected from
his own board another to grace his coat-collar, as if thereby to
summon back the waning fortunes of the day. But Madam Delia still
sat at her post, undaunted. She kept her eye on two sauntering
militia-men in uniform, but they only read her sign and seated
themselves on the curbstone, to smoke. Then a stout black soldier
came in sight; but he turned and sat down at a table to eat
oysters, served by a vast and smiling matron of his own race. But
even this, though perhaps the most wholly cheerful exhibition
that the day yielded, had no charms for Madam Delia. Her own
dinner was ordered at the tavern after the morning show; and
where is the human being who does not resent the spectacle of
another human being who dines earlier than himself?
It grew warmer, so warm that the canvas walls of the tent seemed
to grasp a certain armful of heat and keep it inexorably in; so
warm that the out-of-door man was dozing as he leaned against the
tent-stake, and only recovered himself at the sound of Madam
Delia's penetrating voice, and again began to summon people in,
though there was nobody within hearing. It was so warm that Mr.
De Marsan, born Bangs, the wedded husband of Madam Delia, dozed
as he walked up and down the sidewalk, and had hardly voice
enough to testify, as an unconcerned spectator, to the value of
the show. Only the unwearied zeal of the showwoman defied alike
thermometer and neglect, She kept her eye on everything,--on Old
Bill as he fed the monkeys within, on Monsieur Comstock as he
hung the trapeze for the performance, on the little girls as they
tried to peddle their songs, on the sleepy out-of-door man, and
on the people who did not draw near. If she could, she would have
played all the parts in her own small company, and would have put
the inexhaustible nervous energies of her own New England nature
(she was born at Meddibemps, State of Maine) into all. Apart from
this potent stimulus, not a soul in the establishment, save
little Gerty, possessed any energy whatever. Old Bill had
unfortunately never learned total abstinence from the wild
animals among which he had passed his life; Monsieur Comstock's
brains had chiefly run into his arms and legs; and Mr. De Marsan,
the nominal head of the establishment, was a peaceful
Pennsylvanian, who was wont to move as slowly as if he were one
of those processions that take a certain number of hours to pass
a given point. This Madam Delia understood and expected; he was
an innocent who was to be fed, clothed, and directed; but his
languor was no excuse for the manifest feebleness of the
out-of-door man. "That man don't know how to talk no more 'n
nothin' at all," said Madam Delia reproachfully, to the large
policeman who stood by her. "He never speaks up bold to nobody.
Why don't he tell 'em what's inside the tent? I don't want him to
say no more 'n the truth, but he might tell that. Tell 'em about
Gerty, you nincum! Tell 'em about the snakes. Tell 'em what
Comstock is. 'T ain't the real original Comstock" (this to the
policeman), "it's only another that used to perform with him in
Comstock Brothers. This one can't swaller, so we leave out the
knives."
"Where's t' other?" said the sententious policeman, whose ears
were always open for suspicious disappearances.
"Didn't you hear?" cried the incredulous lady. "Scattered! Gone!
Went off one day with a box of snakes and two monkeys. Come, now,
you must have heard. We had a sight of trouble pay-in'
detectives."
"What for a looking fellow was he?" said the policeman.
"Dark complected," was the reply. "Black mustache. He understood
his business, I tell you now. Swallered five or six knives to
onst, and give good satisfaction to any audience. It was him that
brought us Gerty and Anne,--that's the other little girl. I
didn't know as they was his children, and didn't know as they
was, but one day he said he got 'em from an old woman in New
York, and that was all he knew."
"They're smart," said the man, whom Gerty had just coaxed into
paying three cents instead of two for Number Six of the "Singer's
Journal,"--a dingy little sheet, containing a song about a fat
policeman, which she had brought to his notice.
"You'd better believe it,"said Madam Delia, proudly. "At least
Gerty is; Anne ain't. I tell 'em, Gerty knows enough for both.
Anne don't know nothin', and what she does know she don't know
sartin. All she can do is just to hang on: she's the strongest
and she does the heavy business on the trapeze and parallel
bars."
"Is Gerty good on that?" said the public guardian.
"I tell you," said the head of the establishment.--"Go and dress,
children! Five minutes!"
All this time Madam Delia had been taking occasional fees from
the tardy audience, had been making change, detecting counterfeit
currency, and discerning at a glance the impostures of one
deceitful boy who claimed to have gone out on a check and lost
it. At last Stephen Blake and his little sister entered, and the
house was regarded as full. These two revellers had drained deep
the cup of "Election-day" excitement. They had twirled all the
arrows, bought all the jewelry, inspected all the colored eggs,
blown at all the spirometers, and tasted all the egg-pop which
the festal day required. These delights exhausted, they looked
round for other worlds to conquer, saw Madam Delia at her
tent-door, and were conquered by her.
She did, indeed, look energetic and comely as she sat at the
receipt of custom, her smooth black hair relieved by gold
ear-rings, her cotton velvet sack by a white collar, and her dark
gingham dress by a cheap breastpin and by linen cuffs not very
much soiled. The black leather bag at her side had a well-to-do
look; but all else in the establishment looked a little
poverty-stricken. The tent was made of very worn and soiled
canvas, and was but some twenty-five feet square. There were no
seats, and the spectators sat on the grass. There was a very
small stage raised some six feet; this was covered with some
strips of old carpet, and surrounded by a few old and tattered
curtains. Through their holes you could easily see the lithe
brown shoulders of the little girls as they put on their
professional suits; and, on the other side, Monsieur Comstock,
scarcely hidden by the drapery, leaned against a cross-bar, and
rested his chin upon his tattooed arms as he counted the
spectators. Among these, Mr. De Marsan, pacing slowly,distributed
copies of this programme:--
THIRTEENTH ANNUAL TOUR.
----
MADAM DELIA'S MUSEUM AND VARIETY COMBINATION-WILL
EXHIBIT.
---- PROCLAMATION TO THE PUBLIC.--The Proprietors would say that
they have abandoned the old and played-out practice of decorating
the outer walls of all principal streets with flaming Posters and
Handbills, and have adopted the congenial, and they trust
successful, plan of advertising with Programmes, giving a full
and accurate description as now organized, which will be
distributed in Hotels, Saloons, Factories, Workshops, and all
private dwellings,by their Special Agents, three days before the
exhibition takes place.
----
MADAM DELIA WITH HER
PET SNAKES.
MISS GERTY,
THE CHILD WONDER,
DANSEUSE AND CONTORTIONIST,
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