Читать книгу Mirthful Haven - Booth Tarkington - Страница 3

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Northeastward of the heart of New England there is a broad river that runs widening to the sea, and all along its lower reaches, where it lets in the ocean salt and the tides, it is a boundary marking more than a division between two States of the Union. New England itself seems to end there where the long and staggered coast line of the State of Maine begins; moneyed and sanctified old New England does not appear to cross that salty estuary, nor does the old New England landscape, pastoral, gardened and long completed, survive the interruption of the river. The highways near the coast pass at once into country not so sweetly in order; the farther northward and eastward they go the more rugged lies the land, and, out beyond it, keeping pace with this increasing roughness, so is the sea itself less decorous. The stony land’s long buttresses run far out under the tides; reef and rock are everywhere ready to be whitely shrewish. These waters are island-strewn and surge upon an endlessly scalloped and indented coast.

In the long fringes of pine forest upon the ragged shores there is not timber enough to mark with warning spindle buoys all the rocks and shoals that may imperil a mariner; the wonder is that human speech could find names for all of them and for the innumerable bays, estuaries, coves, inlets, channels, capes and havens. In this, however, the early English navigators assisted happily, sprinkling along the coast names that have the air of improvisation and offer hints of mood and event combined, like hurried jottings in a diary. Dark Harbor seems eloquent of more than shadowy waters and Cape Porpoise probably was christened hastily upon a placid day; but hearty crews and captains must have made good cheer on shipboard when they named Mirthful Haven, Christmas Cove and Merrymeeting Bay.

Of these, Mirthful Haven was earliest seen by the discoverers and had the least time to wait before it floated ships more serious-minded than the first one. The third decade of the Seventeenth Century was new when a solemn little vessel delivered upon the shore some bales, sacks and barrels and a handful of risky folk from old England, who came to stay. A few were ploughmen; but others were already fishermen, and, with their womenkind, nearly all somehow contrived to keep alive and cling to their foothold upon the land. They withdrew from the wintry blasts at the harbor mouth to build habitations a mile from the sea, where at low tide the narrowing water is no more than a little river; and there the village of Mirthful Haven stands to-day. To its own people, and those of the coast and countryside, the name long ago became nothing more than a cluster of identifying sounds; and only to the stranger untutored indeed could it still hint of a populace ever hilariously in carnival. For more than three hundred years the place has borne the label of a single afternoon’s seafaring jollity.

Away from the tumbled coast and the rocky woodland of pine and juniper, the village itself, like some outpost wandered into alien country, wears the very aspect of that old New England left far to the south and west. There are the little streets of clean, white, green-shuttered houses as old as the great wine-glass elms that drip shadows down upon the roofs; there are the two white churches with columned porticoes and Christopher Wren steeples, and, for the landward borders, there are the stone-walled pastures that early summer powders cheerily with buttercups and daisies. But upon that other village border, the river, the resemblance is melancholy; for here is found only a New England relic, one of those faded ports where sea-borne traffic comes no more.

Only students of forgotten things would guess the meaning of the ponderous and barnacled posts that still remain, here and there along the banks, all the way from the harbor mouth to a jumble of half-submerged granite blocks, like the vast traces of a Phœnician quay, a mile above the village. Long useless, these big posts and stones are what is left of the great days of Mirthful Haven; though, of the busy shipyards they served, there is now no token at all, and pine thickets have grown high upon the ground where the old square-riggers were launched above the granite locks to be warped by those sturdy posts down to the sea. Commerce, too, knew Mirthful Haven then and was often lively between the wharves and the mercantile houses of Cargo Square, near by. Barques, brigs, brigantines and freight schooners brought everything and were the life of Mirthful Haven until they passed from the sea, leaving behind them, to live as well as it could by fishing, a village almost helplessly marooned.

Once a hopeful railroad sent a spur that way, but, upon the coming of the automobile, withdrew its tracks, as did a disappointed interurban trolley-line; the population of the village, beginning to dwindle as shipping and ship-building began to perish, still dwindles even to-day, though miraculously there is always some of it left. So is there some commerce left, not upon the soggy wharves but lingering in those same two-storied, wooden, mercantile houses that partially enclose the patch of beaten earth called Cargo Square. The old-time ship-chandlers and merchants of the Square would not recognize the shop windows now staring at one another across that dusty little oblong, with its stone horse-trough at one end and cast-iron Civil War soldier and World War bronze tablet at the other. To those whiskered traders of another day the Square would appear fantastic not only in the character of wares displayed but because its commerce has borrowed a peculiar habit from certain animals of the neighboring woodlands; it hibernates.

The torpidity of the Square, however, sets in earlier than does that of the forest creatures. It begins with a visible abruptness always upon the same date, the first Monday of September, and is complete before the fringing birch trees of the woods are yellow within the autumn haze. Then both Square and village lie dormant except for two daily flickerings of life about the post-office, similar stirrings at the schoolhouse, and thin, occasional movements to and from the white churches. Between the tides the surface of the river thickens in the cold and dulls like pewter; sea-birds gabble and complain along the banks, uttering the only sounds heard there, unless some fisherman’s boat chugs down the harbor or comes in half-frozen from the lonely ocean. The fisherman himself, desiring warmth, may find it perhaps at the grocery or the drug store, though not at noon, when both are locked; nor, if he seeks food as well, may he obtain it then at Mouse’s Restaurant. For, supplementing a window display of a catsup bottle and three printed announcements, “Hot New England Dinner 40¢”, “Clam Chowder with doughnut 25¢”, “Fried Clam Sandwich 10¢”, there hangs from the unpolished brass door-knob a placard thoughtfully explanatory: “Gone Home To Dinner. Geo. H. Mouse Prop’r.”

Torpidity is most complete of all where the seven or eight largest houses of the village are neighbor to one another across ample yards pillared with grand elms. These are houses with the Georgian façade, hinting good mahogany within, and noble of aspect—appropriately so, for here lived those old nobles of the village, the ship-builders and the deep-sea captains. A height of three stories was not enough for several of the maritime grandees; they crowned the roof with a classic cupola whence the ship-owner or the captain’s wife might gaze out to the open sea and early learn what craft turned in toward the harbor mouth. No captain’s wife or vessel magnate carries a spy-glass up the stairs to any of the cupolas now, and from only one of the houses does a light ever fall through a window upon the snow. The others stand shuttered, locked and boarded close throughout the winter; they hibernate, indeed, from September into June and thus make wholly obsolete that mark of the North with which they are all equipped, the covered passageway between house and stable.

Elsewhere in the village such passageways connect lesser houses with smaller stables, and two or three of them still serve their original purpose to provide a snow-bound man with easy means to reach his stock; most of the others only give him a sheltered way to reach an automobile (useless until a snow-plough carves out a road) and gaze wistfully upon a grey old sleigh extinct in an empty stall. Old age boasts of everything long past, even of ancient weather, as if that were its own possession; so the old men of Mirthful Haven maintain testily that the climate is softening. The rousing winters of their boyhood are no longer known, they say, for then the snow would be level above the fences and only the tops of gateposts would be seen; the river would freeze over and the eight-foot tide recede under the solid bridging of two feet of ice; so cold were these old winters of theirs that the ice would form far out beyond the harbor mouth and a man could walk forth upon the very ocean itself. Never again would Mirthful Haven be visited by weather of that polar heartiness, the aged men said, and when, only a few years ago, both coast and inland lay clutched and frozen for months by just such a winter, they were gracious with approval; it was like old times, they said, and inconsistently took some approbation to themselves. “Didn’t I tell you?” they asked, edging closer to the stove.

There was no thaw that could be trusted at all, that year, until April. Then days of rain began to dissolve the packed snow; patches of ground long unseen appeared here and there a little shamefully, but grew raggedly larger until at last after a week of wet Northeaster all the brown earth lay exposed and unfamiliar. Captain Francis Embury, last of the Haven’s deep-sea captains, walking home with the afternoon’s mail, a Boston newspaper, under his arm and his ivory-topped Malakka walking-stick glinting from a hand gloved in sealskin, sniffed better weather in the air. “You can smell it; you can smell it if you can’t tell it any other way,” he paused to inform a deferential fellow-citizen at a corner. “Clouds still from the no’theast; but all they are, they’re just left over. Wind’s about to shift sou’westerly; then you’ll see a mite of a break to the nor’west and we’ll get a dry nor’west wind and fair to-morrow. What’s made this whole winter so cold, it’s the moon. She got off her course—drifted ’way to the no’th of where she ought to’ve been—but now she’s back and we’ll have a regular, nice, good spring, the kind we’re entitled to. I know what I’m talkin’ about!”

No fellow-citizen of the Captain’s would have dreamed of challenging that, and this one went on, enheartened as by information acquired at the very source. The Captain sonorously hummed an air from “The Bohemian Girl” and continued upon his way, walking with his feet wide apart and a slightly swinging motion, as if the soles of his overshoes might be descending upon a deck that alternately rose to meet them and then fell away. Yet there was a kind of gallantry, too, in this sailoring walk, as in the Captain’s roving, bright blue eye and in all of the short stout figure that still expressed both power and liveliness in spite of its years and the present muffling of an antique blue overcoat lined with sealskin and collared with sable. The Haven believed the Captain fairly into his earlier eighties; but the rumor had no countenance from him, nor did anyone ever dare even mention it to him, for naturally he could be severe when roused. It was legendary in the village, learned from Mirthful Haven men who had sailed under him, that he could always make his voice heard above the roarin’ of the tempest.

Turning into his own street, the elm-bordered thoroughfare where stand the shuttered, fine mansions, Captain Embury had to proceed with his feet less wide apart, for here the wooden sidewalk has but the width of two boards laid side by side; and so he came to his own big house, that only one in the ancient grandees’ neighborhood still alive and inhabited through seasons other than the summer. As pleasant tokens of its life, red geranium blossoms showed themselves genially between the symmetrically parted lace curtains of the four front windows of the ground floor, and, if proof were needed that the house was Captain Embury’s, two small, brightly polished brass cannon upon the broad granite doorstep stood cautiously chained to the fluted pillars of the beautiful white doorway. The Captain himself had placed the geraniums in the windows; it was he who kept them watered, and early every morning polished the brass of the two ship’s guns. Forty years a widower and childless, he had never allowed any woman to get a grip upon the ordering of his ship-shape house, not even in the kitchen; and he had found no landsmen servitors who were equal to the care of his collections and instantly active or even wholly placable upon a bellowed word of command. So he lived all alone; the place was his treasure, and, in truth, no house could well have been more a man’s own than this one was the Captain’s.

With his hand on the latch of the picket-gate, he paused and glanced across the street at the only thoroughly ugly building in Mirthful Haven, the schoolhouse. Outlandishly Gothic in effort and faced with cement blocks unpleasantly imitating stone, it was a naive architectural insult to the fine street, and the Captain’s glance at it might well have been one of annoyance. On the contrary, this glance of his was debonair. His habitual expression, in which the air of command collaborated happily with a hint of spicy jauntiness, emphasized the jauntiness decisively; and, except for the whiteness of his small, curled moustache and the neat hair that showed between his sealskin cap and sable collar, he became momentarily the portrait of a youthful captain in foreign ports, glancing sidelong at a Venetian casement, or a latticed window in Algiers, perhaps. “Captain of a clipper ship at twenty-three, I was!” he said sometimes, sighing ruefully. “Captain of a clipper ship in the China seas at twenty-three, and I thought I was God!”

No damsel’s face, nor that of a lively matron, looked forth from any of the schoolhouse windows, however; nothing showed there at all. But a vocal buzzing and sounds of movement came from within the building as the bell of a clock struck four, and, at this, as upon a signal to himself, the Captain promptly opened his gate. He passed along the brick walk that led to the front door; but he did not enter there. Instead, he went round the corner of the house to a side door that opened inward from a long and narrow verandah, let himself in with a large brass key and closed the door behind him. Immediately he removed his heavy overcoat, his sealskin cap and his overshoes; then with gravity he took from one waistcoat pocket a small round mirror backed with celluloid and from another a little comb.

The mirror showed him a plump, handsome old face, rosy after his walk, as he used the comb first to correct a slight disarrangement of his hair and then to prepare his moustache for a hurried curling upon his two forefingers. He unbuttoned his black “cutaway” coat, smoothing back the lapels so that a genteel garniture of gold watch-chain and seals might not be deprived of a proper share of notice; then, departing from the passageway where he had completed this simple toilet, he went into the nearer of the two front parlors that opened upon the broad central hall. Here, after placing a geranium blossom in the buttonhole of the left lapel of his coat, he looked thoughtfully for a moment at the parent plant itself, and, taking it up in its red pot, went out to the granite step before the white front doorway. There he paused and appeared to cogitate, though not upon the fact that April is a little early for geraniums to be brought outdoors.

Seemingly, the Captain was arrested by the slight problem: where best to set the plant as an ornament to his doorway; but in reality his gaze was sidelong, occupied expectantly with the schoolhouse door across the street. The pupils of the lower grades had been dismissed half an hour earlier; the groups just now beginning to emerge were of the high school, and, except for the scuffling and alternately hoarse and falsetto barkings of a few of the younger boys, they came out decorously. The fifteen or twenty girls walked in pairs or trios, with linked arms, and chattered intimately—all but one, who was a little too conspicuously alone in the midst of them. That is, she was not only alone, she was left alone by the others, for those who passed her on the way across the gravelled yard made a little distance between her and themselves, talked more busily together and walked faster as they went by her. Their eyes narrowed a little, too, as they thus gave her no chance to join them; but this exclusion of her did not seem to be founded upon some fresh emotional impulse; on the contrary, it was obviously almost unconscious and had the air of habit. The girl herself looked pensive; and to her also her exclusion was plainly no new thing but habitual.

She was marked apart from her schoolmates by more than their avoidance of her. In the main, the others, boys and girls alike, were meagre-faced and pasty with too much living near the stove in double-windowed houses under the pinch of that hard winter; in her cheeks, alone among them all, glowed a youthful, bright and healthy color, and she was the only one of the girls a stranger would instantly have called pretty. She was fifteen, shapely and lithe in the shabbiest blue sweater, rough skirt, old stockings and patched leather high boots to be seen in the schoolhouse yard; her eyes gleamed blue to the Captain more than a hundred feet away, and her hair was the kind of brown that looks red at a little distance. The Captain, indeed, believed that it was red and admired it not the less on that account.

One of the older boys, coming from behind her, made a pretense of stumbling and fell heavily against her, clutching her shoulder as if to support himself. “Oh, you Edna Pelter!” he whispered, and grinned derisively but did not take his grasping hand from her shoulder.

This, too, must have seemed something habitual to her, for she did not speak or even turn her head to look at him; she jerked herself free, automatically rather than impatiently, and went on, crossing over to the wooden footway on the Captain’s side of the street. She did not seem aware of the gallant figure standing between the two little bright brass cannon, though the Captain’s sidelong gaze had never moved from her since she had appeared in the schoolhouse doorway. With the potted geranium still apparently perplexing him, he watched her until she turned at the next corner, going eastward toward the sea, and was lost to his sight; then he carried the purely histrionic plant, its purpose served, back into the parlor and set it down upon the table whence he had taken it.

Although he had not yet made her acquaintance—did not, indeed, even know her name—it was for this glimpse of the fifteen-year-old girl, Edna Pelter, that Captain Francis Embury, nearing eighty, came directly home every day after mail-time instead of lingering for gossip in the drug store, as formerly had been his wont. He was the only person in the world, except herself, who felt that much interest in her.