Читать книгу Captain Abby and Captain John: An Around-the-world Biography - Robert P. Tristram Coffin - Страница 8

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Visitors remember the Maine coast as edgings of fine point-lace, going back, row on row, towards New Hampshire hills or the local mountains which come down to take a look out over the sea. They recall it as wild evergreens, fir and spruce and cedar and hemlock, with feathery white pines behind. The houses are surrounded by wilderness, the forest comes up to the back doorsteps. They recall the whippoorwills singing in the apple orchard at night. It is a fact that Maine is mostly forest still.

But there is a place at the head of Middle Bay, where Brunswick township touches the sea, which has the tamed and trimmed look of old England. The wild is near enough to see. The laces of firs and pines hem the horizon on the west and north and east. But the wild is kept at a distance. The place is wide rolling meadows starred with millions of daisies in June and galaxied with Queen Anne lace in September. The air runs honey with hay making in windrows and hay-stacks. The land looks and smells like Hampshire or Surrey in England. Every so often there is a lovely island of tame trees, and fountain elms interlace their boughs over a house.

The house is more than a house. It is a whole hamlet. It is a mansion, with a housekeeping house, an ell, applied to it behind, carriage houses and woodshed hitched to that, and, last, a barn as big as a cathedral, white, with green blinds, and a cupola to finish off the whole white company of buildings. Everything about these places is exact and exquisitely planned. Each individual structure is so placed as to get the maximum of light and warmth from the sun. Many of the houses are oriented, as churches are. I have measured my own house among these mansions of Middle Bay. The rising sun on May first is centered exactly, huge and golden, in my open front door. These establishments are in L-form, in order to make a corner to hold what little of the South comes this far north. The flower gardens and roses of these houses are always within that L, where the sunshine is captured and hoarded. The side veranda is here, so that old bones may sit in warmth that lingers even into November. The grindstone is always at the bend in the L, under the grape arbor, for coolness’ sake. This brings the wide barn door towards the east, too, so the fine horses that used to stamp here could come out of a cathedral gloom into the full day and begin their progress properly oriented, with carriage wheels radiating the light as they came past the house and went off into the world. It is a geometry which tells you at a glance that people who had fitted their lives beautifully into the laws of weather and wind have lived a long time here. It tells you they were artists in living.

A lot of living creatures had their abode here. There are rooms large enough for, say, twelve children, two hired girls, three hired men, six cows, seven horses, a brace of pigs, and enough hens to keep all the two-legged in eggs. And all these creatures had elbow and wing and flank room. Which is another way of saying that these hamlets mean civilization. They were self-supporting, too. From beef and pork by the barrel, to caraway seeds for the hamlet’s cookies. These hamlets had strawberry beds, they had looms for making clothes, they had vegetable gardens and orchards, asparagus beds, cucumber frames, a Dutch oven, big enough to bake up a whole family for a week, a cistern to hold all the drops that fell on the house roof, a well that went down deep to coolness in middle July, long shelves for butter crocks and preserves in the cellar, a woodhouse, and a dark pantry for milk and cream. Mine has even a hop vine. But then, my Middle Bay house began in the eighteenth century as an inn for thirsty workmen, hot from the shipyard up the cove. These houses were weaving, baking, poultry-raising, meat-curing, fruit-raising, horse-driving, farming, fishing, as well as shipbuilding centers. They were all-round places. And they raised good round families—families of six, ten, twelve good citizens in short clothes, and a lot of marginal boys and girls, children of the family retainers by furrow and wave. Not to mention colts and chicks, piglets and calves with morning stars on their foreheads!

These hamlets were high green islands in rich clay farmland, each decently distant from its neighbors; they raised the kidney beans for Saturdays and Sundays, and the pork to go in them, the currants and apples for jellies, and the flour for the edgings around tarts filled with home-grown strawberries; they made their own butter and smoked their own herring; produced their own milk and cheese; and grew their own clothes. But they were not farms. They were greater than that.

If you walk up their long lawns and go in under their porticoed doors, you will see at once that they are also town houses, furnished from the whole circumference of the globe. For the residents here were Yankee farmers who went to sea and traded with the world. The carpet in the front room was brought from Brussels, the matting in the bedrooms was woven by the Malays, the colored prints are from Genoa and Pisa, the dishes in the pantry are from Birmingham and Limoges, the tables in the parlor are Sheraton and Hepplewhite, the convex mirrors are from Paris, the porcelain doorguards are from Holland, the vases are from Canton, the pampas grass in them from the Argentine, the marble figures of lovely ladies and human hands on the mantel are Carrara marble, and the seashells are from the far islands of the Pacific Ocean. The rooms are full of loveliness and usefulness wide as the world.

The rooms themselves are as nice a balance between usefulness and beauty as men have ever hit upon. For they were planned and built by ships’ carpenters, and those men knew how to handle form and light well and fit them serviceably into the weather and the years. They were not architects. But they had learned the principles of architecture by making wooden shapes that could cleave storms apart and ride tall and graceful on the high old seas. So the porticoes and balustrades are pleasing to both eye and mind. Their mantels are exquisite central points in the rooms they made. They are fluted like a Parthenon pressed flat, they are scalloped into right lines of waves and winds. They are proper temples built around the central fact of life, fire, warmth. The windows and doors and panels and wainscots grow out of the rooms they are in. They carry on the white symmetry of the fireplace around the walls. There are nine houses in this Middle Bays settlement. Each house has at least ten rooms. Most of these have fireplaces, with mantels. And none of these are alike. But all the rooms are a delight to look at for their honest loveliness. The light comes in the right way and shows right designs. These designs were made by hand, out of good square Yankee heads. They were made by Yankees who had a Euclidian passion for usable, good-looking shapes. My own house happens to have in its closets—and every bedroom has its clothes-press—mahogany pegs, whittled out by hand, curved over like a Greek vase or Middle Bay wave as it breaks, to hang the clothes on. Even the sheds and barns are full of a loving sense of right patterns. There are forked fir boughs, stripped of bark, to hold up the collar-and-hames and the dung-fork. And on top of the barn, on the cupola that was inspired by a Chinese pagoda some sea captain saw, is the crowning point of these hamlets whose life depended upon the winds and the weather, the long white arrows, barbed with carved wooden feathers which let the blue sky through and are lighter for that, the weather vanes which pointed at the wind through the days and nights of a year, of a lifetime, of years after the builder’s lifetime was done.

I like to think that houses have a lot to do with people’s lives going on in them. I like to think that a lot of the good sense, plain piety, tenderness and trust of wives in their husbands, and silent devotion of men to their wives and children and their hard work, came into these Yankee people of Maine from the mantels, the panelled doors, and the sunny goodness of their wide, square rooms. Their rooms are beautiful by elm-leaf light, beautiful by the bare sunlight of Winter, by the soft light of the moon of April. Make no mistake. Such geometry means civilization.

It gives a man strength to live in rooms so large and well-made, in these days of crowding and hurry and bad manners. I thank the Pennell family for a lot of the good feeling, these past twenty years, which has led me an easy way to poems and peace. For every last one of the houses I have been describing, as well as the one I occupy at present, was built by the Pennell family.

The Pennells were sufficient unto themselves. They built their own schoolhouse in the middle of this shire of theirs. They chipped in and owned a share in the schoolteacher who came here to instruct sea captains and shipbuilders when they were still damp behind their ears. They had their own graveyard, even, in a corner of their shire, flowered around with cinnamon roses and flowering almond, for the shipbuilders and captains who had finished with hammers and the sea.

But the real monuments of these Pennell people are these houses on this tamed land of Middle Bays. Every house you see here is theirs, save one. That is the square, plain house I have my sunsets behind, the one on the hill, color of the weather, with no elms around it, an eighteenth-century hostelry for the sun as it goes home for the night. But that house was built by a family that had good sense enough to marry in at once and often with the Pennells, the Giveens. The Giveens didn’t go in for fancy things, like elms around a house. They were closer to the plain earth and the plain sea. Every so often a volatile Pennell went over to the sunset, went over courting at the bare house on the hill, to give his children a dash of the thick blood the Pennells sometimes lacked. The Pennells renewed their strength like the giant Anteus by touching the earth there. So the Giveens are really in the family. And I count their house as a Pennell one.

I do not know of another place in America where the unity and goodness of a family are so plainly seen.

All the Pennells who built these places a century or more ago are gone from all but one of the hamlets. The older ones sleep in the graveyard here. The younger ones lie under the songs of the Bowdoin pines in the town cemetery. Their children are scattered to the four winds. Some of them followed wooden ships as they ebbed away to other places, even to San Francisco. Their other children, the ships of many tons, are gone under the sea. Their wharf and ways are a ruin of stones and rotted wood. But their houses remain to show they were here once and built a good chapter in the history of our country.

I am going to turn back through the pages of that chapter now, to the time when the Pennells’ Wharf Road, so quiet and empty now, was smoky with oxen and men in full beards, when the quiet cove right under one of the loveliest of the Pennell houses resounded with the sound of hammers and axes, when the annual family ship was on the ways and the hum of work drowned out the bees and the thunder of a Maine Summer. The hamlets under the elms swarmed with children then, and this part of Brunswick was very much alive with a life all its own.