But our genius 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.”
II
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 and dunes 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
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 fairy peñas and 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 with rainbow 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.