Читать книгу Wickford Point - John P. Marquand - Страница 8

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I drove slowly out of Harvard Square and very carefully along the turnpike, anxious to make no mistake which might lead me into controversy with the state police. Though I assumed that I was not under the influence of liquor, the authorities might have given themselves the benefit of a reasonable doubt. At any rate there was not much necessity for caution, for the road, stretching uncompromisingly in its straight line over the low hills, was very nearly deserted. Now and then I passed a heavy truck moving on some nameless errand, but that was all which occurred to interrupt my thoughts. Allen Southby, though not in the way he had intended, had given me a stimulating evening. I had not thought before that anything about me or about the family might be interesting, and now I realized that my generation had lived through a span of change. Everything was fascinating and very vivid, like all ideas before you set them down on paper.

It was a cloudy night. When I drove down the hill, under the elm trees, everything at Wickford Point was foggy and as black as pitch where the headlights did not strike. In an exaggerated effort to be careful I ran into the rear wall of the shed before I shut off the engine and the lights.

Cousin Clothilde was sitting in the long parlor and Sid was sitting with her, looking at his thumbs as he revolved one about the other, and Sid's sister, my second cousin, Bella Brill, was putting red polish on her nails.

"For God's sake," I said to Sid, "don't do that."

"It's more than you can do," said Sid. "I can move one thumb clockwise and the other counterclockwise, both at the same time. I've been working at it all evening."

"Well, don't do it now," I said.

"I bet you five dollars you can't do it," said Sid.

"As soon as I get to this place," I remarked, "everyone says I can't do anything, and what's more no one does anything. It doesn't stand to reason, it isn't true, that you've been practising with your thumbs all night."

"Darling," said Cousin Clothilde, "you should be careful not to drink too much. It always makes you cross. Please let's not have everybody cross. Everybody keeps quarreling. Sid and Bella have been quarreling."

"Sid's just been talking," Bella said. "He's been giving us a lecture." She was looking at me, frowning. "What's the matter with you tonight?"

"There's nothing the matter with me," I answered.

Bella looked at me mysteriously from the corners of her eyes.

"Darling," she said, "that friend of yours, Patricia Leighton, telephoned you from New York tonight."

Cousin Clothilde was listening and Sid had stopped rotating his thumbs.

"All right," I said. "Did she say why?"

"I'm sure I don't know what she wanted," Bella said, "and she wouldn't tell me. I think it was rather fresh of her."

"It must be that she didn't want you to know, honey bee," I said.

"Oh, shut up," said Bella.

"Shut up yourself," I said.

"Darling," said Cousin Clothilde, "that isn't being kind to Bella. She went way into the other part of the house to answer your telephone call."

Bella looked at me again and everything about her became sweetly but innocently seductive.

"He isn't cross," Bella said. "I know when he's cross and when he isn't. He's just thinking about something. There's something on his mind and he doesn't want us or Pat Leighton to interrupt him."

"I wish you wouldn't think about something, darling," said Cousin Clothilde. "It always makes me nervous when you think. Your mind keeps jumping around and you can't sit still."

"Let him think if he wants to," said Bella.

"Where are you going?" said Cousin Clothilde. "Why don't you sit down?"

"I'm going out for a walk," I said.

"Why do you want to go for a walk, darling?" she said. "Sid, do you think he should go for a walk?"

"How should I know?" said Sid.

"Bella," said Cousin Clothilde, "you go out with him."

"All right," said Bella, "I'll go with you."

"I don't want anybody," I said. "I want to be alone."

Bella took my arm and walked beside me on the lawn. Everything was a different degree of blackness, beginning with the sky and river and ending with the house and trees. The bullfrogs were croaking in the pond in a strange, mournful chorus.

"I wish those frogs would shut up," I said. "I want to think."

Bella gave my arm a shake.

"You can't think here," she said, "any more than you can be alone. There's always something else."

She was right: there was always something else.

"Has it ever occurred to you," I asked her, "that we are all very interesting people?"

"Yes," said Bella, "it occurs to somebody nearly every day."

"And you take it for granted, don't you?"

"Yes," she said. "Everybody takes it for granted."

"I wonder why," I said. "There isn't any reason. Somebody must have been fascinating once. It may have been our great-aunt Sarah. She used to hook rugs and pick up pine cones. I wonder if our great-grandfather was fascinating. Somebody must have been."

"What's the matter with you?" Bella asked.

"I'm trying to get things into some sort of order," I said. "I'm trying to find out what the matter is with all of us."

Bella gave my arm another shake.

"Somehow we don't work right," I said; "no one except Clothilde. She's the only one who seems to go."

Bella's voice grew sharp. I could see her intent white face turn toward me in a startled profile.

"What have you been doing with yourself?" she said. "What are you thinking about?"

"Thinking I won't be able to sleep," I said. But I did not tell her why. She would not have understood the preoccupation which comes of balancing this against that before you set it down on paper.

If you try to get back to the beginning of your existence, you find that all subsequent action has been built upon the shifting sands of unsupported fact. You start with a lot of erroneous impressions supplied by your own untrained observation or foisted upon you by your elders. Then years later you discover that you never knew those elders at all, no matter how long you were thrown with them during the formative years of childhood; and finally the day comes when it is too late even to try to know them, when the blank façade of the generations stands before you to demonstrate the tragic impossibility of passing on experience. All that is left for me at present is to guess about the shady forms I used to see at Wickford Point, whose portraits and daguerreotypes are now in the little parlor, and whose carpet bags and boots and parasols used to be up in the attic until my Cousin Sue in one of her spells of economy sold them to an itinerant antique dealer.

When I was a child it took a long while to get anywhere, if you started from Wickford Point. When Charles, the black mustachioed French Canadian coachman, used to hitch my grandfather's bay pair to the light phaeton, it took an hour and a half of good smart trotting to get to town. That innovation, the trolley car, was just appearing, and occasionally as a treat we were taken on it for a ride. To reach the carline, it was necessary to take a walk of nearly half an hour, first through the east orchard, then through the lower pasture, then through the white pine grove, then through the swamp wood lot, and thence across Bowles's field, where the bull was, and through the Teach farm. You waited by the Teach stone wall for the trolley car, because it would stop at a white post across the main road. It was generally necessary to wait for quite a while. You could hear the car a mile away on the hill by the Newell farm; then the sound would die away as it stopped at Hoskins turnout; then there would be a hissing of the wires, and it would finally appear, reeling drunkenly on its uneven rails. That memory now is almost archæological, for those country trolley lines, which were once considered such a prime investment, are now as extinct as the bustle. Yet Professor Edward Channing once said in a school history of the United States that the trolley car was the most useful of all inventions, since it brought so much pleasure and freedom to so many people. What is the use in trying, if the history books are wrong?

In those days at Wickford Point we were living on the comfortable tail-end of the Victorian era; but Wickford Point was so far removed from contemporary contacts that much of it was still early Victorian. Life still proceeded in the grooves worn by things which had happened before my parents were born, and those grooves are what I am trying to remember. My great-aunt Sarah never allowed the two huge brass kettles, used formerly for making soap, to be taken out of the kitchen closet. There was a tinder box on the table in the small parlor with which Aunt Sarah sometimes started the fire, because, she said, the sulphur matches smelled badly and the noise they made was startling. One was always sparing of the matches because they had once been novelties, and when the fires were going we always used paper spills to light the candles. One of the branches of the great elm by the front door was twisted because Aunt Sarah's mother used to have a pig hung from it in the winter. In the winter, as long as she was able, Aunt Sarah always put a few embers in the warming pan before she went to bed, and made tea from a kettle hung from a crane in the fireplace in the back parlor. She also had a collection of herbs in the long parlor cupboard.

At the age of eighty Aunt Sarah was a good hand with an ax. As a little boy I have watched her go into the woodshed, take off her shawl and poke bonnet and mittens, and cut short sticks for the parlor fireplace. At such times she used to regale me with an anecdote. Years ago when she was there in the woodshed splitting logs, the ax slipped and cut a deep gash just above her knee. She walked to the house, got out her oval sewing basket, threaded a needle with her best white silk thread, and sewed up the wound herself.

"Yes, yes," said Aunt Sarah, "it was the only thing to do. Who else was there to do it?"

A great many adults seem to forget how easily they accepted things when they were young, when, from the distance of their maturer years, they pity small children who must face a series of adjustments. Usually they are entirely wrong, at least according to my experience, for childhood seems capable of adapting itself to nearly any situation that does not entail fear or physical suffering. Thus when my parents died and when I was sent to Wickford Point to live with my great-aunt Sarah and her niece, my cousin Sue, it all seemed natural by the time a year was over.

I must have accepted Wickford Point in the same way that philosophers accept the universe, and I adjusted myself without a thought to the local peculiarities, including those of my great-aunt Sarah. My cousin Sue informed me later that Aunt Sarah was not what she used to be even before I was born; and it may have been, when Aunt Sarah and I became acquainted, that her mind was failing, but I was in no position to judge.

When it came to more practical matters I was obviously incapable of understanding them, nor should I have cared to analyze such ties as family relationships. Those are facts which dawn upon one gradually, and I suppose a great many of us never get them straight. For instance it was a long while before I came to realize that a gentleman named Samuel Seabrooke, who was my great-aunt Sarah's father, and whom I looked upon as her special property, was my own great-grandfather. It was later still before I got it clearly in my mind that my own grandmother was Samuel Seabrooke's daughter and just as much Aunt Sarah's sister as my great-aunt Georgianna, who died before I was born. Later still I discovered almost by accident that Aunt Sarah was a spinster, and that Cousin Clothilde and Cousin Sue were my Aunt Georgianna's surviving daughters and my father's first cousins. I never really understood how the Brills entered into our common picture until I was fourteen. Then I knew, only by fitting facts together, that John Brill, who in later years became the poet and the Wickford Sage, used to row frequently across the river to pay his respects to Samuel Seabrooke's three daughters, but that nothing had ever happened until John Brill's son Hugh, following his example, rowed across the same river a generation later and met my cousin Clothilde; and that was the beginning of all the Brills. When Hugh Brill died, Cousin Clothilde married Archie Wright and naturally she took his name, but as I said before it always seemed to me that she was still a Brill.

It all appears simple enough now, once it is in black and white, but when I was a boy I accepted these people, living and dead, as inevitable figures in a legend of creation that was not unlike the Grecian myths. Sometimes it seemed to me that I knew as much about the dead as the living, for I heard about them all from Aunt Sarah when I came to Wickford Point. Her mind may have been failing, but I still am not sure. It was not dotage which had assailed her so much as a natural alteration of her mental processes. When she was an old lady she had simply developed an ingrowing preoccupation with affairs that were not contemporary, and also an increasing predilection not to look at the present. She may have been a difficult liaison with the past, but she was the only one I had. A stray word of hers, a dreamily acid allusion, are now all the means I have for explaining the ancient vigor of Wickford Valley, and for explaining the actions of those who descended from it. Nevertheless five minutes with Aunt Sarah were worth a hundred pages of Allen Southby's novel; and what was more, even if Allen Southby had seen her, he would not have understood her, for she was not words but the past itself, and all of Wickford Point had meaning when Aunt Sarah was alive.

When Aunt Sarah was seventeen she was a liberal with dangerous radical tendencies, and, like most of the liberals in her day, she exercised her trouble-making qualities in the abolitionist movement. The town, being made up principally of merchants, many of whom were interested in cotton, was on the whole pro-slavery, but the cultural environment of Wickford Valley had become different from the town. Wickford Valley inveighed against mercantile crassness, purely out of self-defense perhaps, and resorted to self-righteousness. Thus Aunt Sarah in her lifetime never would allow liquor or cards in the house, although her brother, Horace, used them both. Incidentally, her brother Horace came to an unpleasant end in an altercation with a gambler in the San Francisco Gold Rush. It is odd how easily one gets off the subject, speaking of the family.

During those days of the early 1850's, when the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced, it seems, from what Aunt Sarah told me, that Wickford Point was a station of the Underground Railroad, and that fugitive Negroes had a way of appearing there suddenly at night in boats or in the back of covered wagons. They were customarily kept down cellar for a day or so in what had once been a wine closet under the brick arch which supported the front parlor chimney. At the proper time Aunt Sarah or her sister Georgianna or my grandmother, aided often by some sympathetic house guest, placed these visitors in a boat and rowed them across the river to the cow stable of the Brill farm. After this they continued their way north by way of Exeter, and sometimes wrote back bread-and-butter notes telling of their safe arrival in the province of Quebec. Aunt Sarah used to keep a package of these letters in the Moorish cabinet which her father had brought from Spain when he was an agent for the Bosworth firm in Boston. Until her last years, she never threw anything away.

It seems that one evening when Aunt Sarah and my cousin Clothilde's mother, Georgianna, were alone at Wickford Point, the Kennedys' hay wagon came down with a packing case that had been left on the main road by a carter from Boston. Mr. Moses Kennedy, who was a Quaker with correct sympathies, helped the girls unload the box in the south hay barn. Aunt Sarah went to the shop for tools and Aunt Georgianna hurried to the kitchen to boil some cracked cocoa. When Aunt Sarah and Moses Kennedy opened up the packing case they found a Negro man inside, just as they had expected, but the case had come from Boston wrong-side-up; the Negro was quite dead.

Under the circumstances there was only one thing to do. The body must be buried at once without publicity. They discussed the idea of getting Mr. Wade, the Congregational clergyman, but decided against it because Mr. Wade might talk. Instead Aunt Sarah called to Georgianna to bring from shelves in the back parlor library their father's copy of The Ship Master's Assistant, which contained a service for burials at sea. Moses got a shovel and a mattock out of the tool shed and dug a deep grave in the new orchard. There was some dispute about reading the burial service, which had the Popish taint of the Church of England, but all three of them agreed upon it eventually. It was dark by then. Aunt Sarah got a ship's lantern and held it while Moses read the words. Then they laid the sods back carefully. Of course it was important not to mark the grave.

A long time later the incident became transiently famous when an account of it appeared in the collected verses of John Brill, the Wickford Sage. I remember two lines of the poem, not very good ones either.

They laid him away with a prayer and a tear.

The valley earth was his only bier.

Aunt Sarah always said it was a very beautiful poem, but then in her opinion the Wickford Sage took his rank with the greater Victorians. Years later there was some talk of putting a stone at the head of the grave.

"But can you imagine," Aunt Sarah said, "when they asked me where he was, I couldn't remember? The exact location had completely skipped my mind. Well, well, it probably doesn't signify."

It probably did not matter to her, but it did to me when she told me about it. I gained the distinct impression that there was a ghost in the new orchard, not a hostile ghost but a definite presence which was near me when I went to cut sticks for throwing green apples.

It is curious to reflect that most of the dogs that died on the place had their tombstones, but not Aunt Sarah's fugitive. Aunt Sarah's father was the one who started the dog cemetery near the south rock by the river. When a water spaniel, which a business acquaintance had sent him from London, died in 1822, he had a stone cut with an appropriate Greek quotation:—

To Perseus, gallant but gun shy.

Following Perseus were the dogs of that lost generation, somehow more real to me than many of the human beings they had followed. Their names reflected the romantic, scholarly instinct of the period—Lycidas, Byron, Portia, Werther, Giovanni, Unity and Keats. Some of the rougher stones had been cut by hand in the toolshed when there was no money at Wickford Point.

Once I told Cousin Clothilde that we should do something about the only human being buried on the place.

"I really don't see what there is to do," Cousin Clothilde said. "You don't know what his name was or when he died. After all he was an absolute stranger; besides I doubt very much if the story is true. Aunt Sarah was a little queer in the head when you knew her. Besides I never did get on well with her. She was always moving about, always doing something."

No one with the exception of myself ever seemed to be interested in what Aunt Sarah must have been once. It was only taken for granted that everything about her was peculiar.