CHAPTER XIGENIUS LOCI
Otis and Shaw were great, and the qualities that made them so, particularly those of Shaw, were indigenous to the soil. It is interesting to look through a book like Freeman’s “Cape Cod,” and study there the portraits of the men who built this unique community. They are often singularly handsome, with a fine, well-bred, upstanding air. They, preëminently, are not villagers, but men of the world who know their world well and have considered its works. Perhaps in every face, whether it has beauty of line or the homely ruggedness graved by generations of positive character, the dominant feature is a certain poise of mind: these men would think, and then judge; they would look at you straight, and it would be difficult for you to conceal your purpose. It would be easier to be persuaded than to persuade them; and in the end it is probable that your yielding would be justified in wisdom. From such characters could be drawn a composite that might fitly be thegenius loci; and lest its secret charm elude us and Cape Cod appear no more than a pleasing sandy offshoot of New England, we should do well to learn of him. He is, as we see him, in essence a follower of the sea: one who pursues romance to mould it to everyday use. For a closer aspect it may be convenient to place him in theeighteen-forties, or earlier, at latest the fifties, in the great days of the clippers.
On the old sailing-vessel there was a constant duel, to challenge the temper of him, between a man’s wit and the lambent will of the sea. And although the steamship has a romance and daring of its own—a puny hull that carries forth upon the waters a little flare of flame to wage the old warfare—it was with sails aloft and no wires from shore that a lad then, who had the gift of using the decisive moment, would best find a career. The master of a ship was master in the markets ashore, and there, or afloat, he must be quick to seize fortune as it came. It is said of such a one that “he had the air, as he had the habit, of success.” He was no reckless adventurer, but aimed to earn an honest living as soberly as any stay-at-home, for whom, and also, perhaps, for fishermen on the Banks, he may have had some easy condescension. He was the aristocrat of the sea. When adventure met him by the way, so much the better if young blood ran hot; but the majority were shrewd cool merchants who sold and bought where their judgment pointed them. They were expert in seamanship because that was one of the tools of their trade; and when they turned a tidy profit on some voyage, they bought shares in the ships they sailed, or others, investing in a business whose every turn was familiar to them, until they could leave the sea to become farmers, or ship-chandlers, or East India merchants. If the seaman founded a house in the city, he sent his boys to college, and took one or two of them into hisoffice to train them as merchants; and in not many decades the same absorbing hazard of trade was to be carried on by other means, or, if by ocean traffic, “steam-kettle sailors” were servants of the counting-rooms ashore.
But ourgenius loci, who was familiar with the cities of the world, chose for his home the town where he was born. When fortune warranted, he married a wife, and built in the village a house that was adorned, voyage after voyage, with a gradual store of treasures from Europe and the East. His women-folk wore the delicate tissues of foreign looms, and managed the farm when he was away, and practised intellectualities; they cooked, sewed, painted, accomplished a dozen small arts with exquisite care. They were ready for the relaxations of society when ships made port, and the village swung to the tune of a larger world. The seafarer loved them with a reticence called for by the custom of the day, and with a tender chivalry that might be the envy of any time.
There is a pretty story of one old captain—men commanded their ships at twenty and were old at forty—whose treasure was a little daughter. She had a maimed foot that must undergo a cruel cure, and for a bribe she had been promised dancing-lessons, the dearest wish of her childish heart. Her ordeal passed, the captain kept faith with her. Through a long winter, while he waited for his ship, in starlight or snow he set the child upon his shoulder and bore her to the hall where the old fiddler taught the boys and girls their steps, and there danced with her,envied because of such attendance, until the foot grew strong and she, who had been shy from the misfortune that had marked her difference in the children’s world, blossomed into the merriest little jade of all the company.
And for him, all the watery highways he must travel were only the road to lead him home. There, his adventure achieved, he lived healthily upon the produce of his farm; poverty, the city kinsman was ready to aver, his only fault. But he had more than enough for the life he had chosen; his manners were as polished and his speeches fine as if he trod the pavement instead of driving about his beloved country roads—he had paced too many miles of deck to walk a rod ashore. He had rich memories, and discrimination in choosing the elements essential to happiness. What should a man need more? And when the end came, and in the graveyard with an outlook to blue water from the hillside where the willows drooped low, he lay beside her whom he loved best, the epitaph there might be, for her: “During a long life she performed all her duties with fidelity and zeal, and died in the triumph of Christian faith and resignation.” And for him: “His integrity of character gave him an honorable distinction among his fellow citizens: his private virtues endeared him to all: his end was peace.”
We do well, now and again, to make friends with another time than our own; and by good fortune some of us, then, may find a path to the Cape of pines anddunes where lay a township recreated for us in twilight stories by the nursery fire. Here peaked-roof houses look out over “the lilac trees which bear no fruit but a pleasant smell,” willow and silvery poplars meet above the road, and here genial spirits populate the brave old time—days when deep-water sailors hailed the little town as home, and women, demure, pure-faced, neat-footed, kept the houses as spotless as their hearts.
THE PASTURE BARS
THE PASTURE BARS
THE PASTURE BARS
From month on to month, the village might have been a colony forsworn by world and men; but when the Flying Cloud or Halcyon made port, it brimmed with life eager to have its due before next sailing-day. From the cap’n’s mansion on Main Street to the low-eaved house whose oldest son swung his hammock in the fo’c’s’le, doors opened with an easy welcome. This home had sent a mate, that a cabin boy, another would never see again the brave fellow who had been lost off Mozambique. They had been as sons to the “old man,” who on the planks of his ship was patriarch or despot as character should determine; but now all were equal by the freemasonry of home. Sea-chests gave up their treasure, and bits of ebony and jade were added to mantel curios, an ivory junk spread its crimson sail beside the Tower of Pisa, a spirited portrait of the Leviathan entering the port of Malaga was hung opposite the waxen survival of Aunt Jane’s funeral wreath. And in shaded parlors the fragrance of sandalwood and attar-of-rose and the spicy odor of lacquer mingled with the breath of syringa wafted in from the garden.
Then there was an interchange of high festivities among the cap’n’s families when French china, latticed with gold, set off Belfast damask, and the silver tea-service, which Cap’n Jason had brought from Russia in ’36, stood cheek by jowl with East Indian condiment and English glass. Amid the rustle of lustrous satin and silk the guests gathered about the board, and cups were stood in cup-plates while tea was sipped from saucers poised in delicately crooked fingers. Conversation swung easily around the world, from adventures in the Spanish Main to a dinner at “Melbun” on the English barque whose captain they had greeted in every harbor of the globe where trade was good; and they recalled with Homeric jest the ball at Singapore when many friendly ships rode at anchor in the bay.
But it was on a Sunday that the town blossomed as sweetly as any rose in June, when wives and sweethearts, in silks and fairypeñasand wraps heavy with patient embroideries of the East, made their way to the village church where a second mate led the hymns with his flute and the cap’n droned after on a viol. “There is a land mine eye hath seen” swelled into a joyous chorus of treble and rumbling bass, while men thought of the sultry day at Surinam when they had longed for the “blissful shores” of home. And as the parson made his prayer for “those who go down to the sea in ships,” they pitied the poor fellows whose guidepost was a compass as cheerfully as if they themselves were to dare no perils greater than the Big Channel in the bay. Church over, the road was aflutter withrainbow color. And sunburnt beaux in tight white trousers, blue coats, agonizing stocks, and top-hats rakishly a-tilt, peered under the arc of leghorn bonnets where moss-rosebuds nestled against smoothly banded hair, while beneath his surtout and her mantilla or pelisse the hearts beat out their mating-tune.
All of us have our land of refuge: for one it is a town, or a house endeared by its remembered atmosphere of simplicity and health; another needs but to cross the threshold of a room where sits the being who has been the best friend of every year; a third has only the land of dreams to people at his will. And one refreshes the ideals of his youth, perhaps, or seeks to wipe out with forgetfulness the scar of some old sin; others, faint with terror for the fate of ships that drift in black seas of hate and lust, find the comfort of cleared vision and steadier brain.
The nation has its land of renewal in the genius of our fathers. Those early Pilgrims, the first immigrants, had by nature the spirit of democracy. They recognized what one man owes another: they were “tied to all care of each other’s good.” They were prepared for growth and change. With good John Robinson, they kept an open mind, nor did they believe that God had “revealed his whole will to them.” “It is not possible,” they held, “that full perfection of knowledge should break forth all at once.” For their Fundamentals, they took over the best body of law that the time afforded, but with no rigid mind: they adapted andadded to the law of their fathers with a flexibility that gave genuine freedom to men of their day and promised freedom to the future. The laws they passed were calculated to ensure a man’s loyalty, and to help him live straight. “Government exists that men may live in happy homes,” might have been their dictum. They were entirely human: they enjoyed the free life of the open, and feasting, and the sober perfection of their dress; they liked a fair fight and no favor; they liked best of all a man’s job, and labored unswervingly to bring to pass their ideal of what life should be. Their feet were on the ground, and they exulted in the fact that their vision reached beyond the clouds. If it be true that “no country can escape the implication of the ideas upon which it was founded,” it were well that our feet should be set on that same ground of vigorous simplicity and faith, our vision, though with another aspect than theirs, reach above the clouds. They passed on an inheritance of sane and clear and just thought that we should do well to use: that, and belief in the progressive revelation of truth. And by happy chance the spot they chose for home—New England, Plymouth, the dunes and meadows of the Cape—typifies their very spirit: the homely beauty, the invigorating atmosphere, the health of salt winds and cleansing of the sea.
THE END