On Staying at Home

I

THERE are always compensations. Some people do not believe this. I was not sure of it this morning myself when I saw a poster on the station platform; I shall not be sure of it this afternoon if I see a schooner in the Sound with seven masts and a black hull; but between then and now I have been to see Mr. Barboza and we have conversed about biscuits.

One must admit, as he would say himself, ‘That’s not so much.’ It does not seem ‘so much’ when, for a ticket to Brussels, we could see men and women crossing blue streets under green skies, laughing at purple houses. And yet, to find those places, times, occasions that set our spirits most alight — this is living; and it was Mr. Barboza who opened my eyes to the fact.

I must begin at the beginning.

Our town is by the sea. It is gray even in July, gray as foul weather even in the Christmas snows. Sand dunes run high and low along the beaches, and gray-green witch grass tops their rises and their curves. The houses gather to face the open water, and circle at the back around a pond where, in the fall, the scrub oaks turn to liquid fire. At dark this pond is filled with boats whose swordfish tackle is reflected on its surface and silhouetted against the thin-sliced clouds. On one side of us lies the Bay, its round fat shape acknowledging its placidity, and on the other the Sound, stretched like a wedding carpet. Down it come ships as gayly poised as any bride, and they are accompanied by buoy bells, a sound as gracious as a church’s proclamation. Just within range of vision is the lighthouse point. Our town is an ordinary village by the sea.

There are those of us who will always spend part of our lives kicking our heels against some old sea wall, an indigestion on our spirits and its hiccups bringing up fierce, spasmodic pictures of the worlds we have not seen. At such moments memory will take a holiday, and leave in its place a cheap designer, one of those daubers who paint the earth and all that’s in it as if there were no fleas, as if boats had no smells, as if trains always were on time — as if, in fact, going here and there made the world change, the sun shine all the time, and every stick and stone a marvel. In this way distance is accentuated and Eternity draws her running string of time so tight that space for living seems no larger than a bottle’s neck. We sit and kick our heels in hopeless despair that we shall ever get outside our own particular garden gate. Yet perhaps we half enjoy these gusty melancholy winds, until —

‘ Ma’am,’ calls Maria, gleaming, ‘ the crackers ain’t come.’ And we see that we are not going to be let off anything, but must bore ourselves to death finding a way to live.

That is an ordinary case of staying at home.

To-day there were compensations, and they began with Mr. Barboza. Strictly speaking, perhaps the lane leading up to them was something else, — Scipio was coming to dinner and the greatest of Romans likes chowder, — but Mr. Barboza opened the gate to their apprehension. The crackers were his affair.

Mr. Barboza is the baker of Teaticket. He came, together with six or a dozen black pigs, in a Portuguese packet from the Cape Verde Islands. He set up a shop in a raftered barn where there is the smell of mice and moulded hay, and the happiness of his customers is a matter of the deepest emotion to him. Besides bread, Mr. Barboza keeps sundries, and among them are those hard soda biscuits that burn the mouth and rejoice the heart in a perfect chowder.

From the first day that I had noticed his truck labeled ‘Portaguse Bred,’ Mr. Barboza and I had come to an arrangement. I would leave my money at his door and he would leave whatever I required the next day at mine. Sometimes it came by truck and sometimes it was brought by Mr. Barboza’s neighbor, Mr. Manuel Santos, but whatever its method of travel it never failed to come, and we were both delighted. Therefore when I who had made an arrangement, when I who had left thirty cents at his door last evening, had this morning been told that there were no biscuits, I knew that I must go to Mr. Barboza and inquire the cause.

As I slid the car round the circular drive, my eyes were fixed on the flat blue board of the ocean. There was nothing between me and Europe but a patch of grass and one small island. Behind the island ran a thin blue line of smoke. There was nothing between me and Europe but —

Someone was shrieking from the kitchen porch. Maria tore down the drive.

‘Captain Chase just telephoned, ma’am, an’ he can’t deliver the fish,’ puffed Maria, bursting. ‘Cook says there’s no salt pork.’

‘ All right.’ I gave up looking for that steamer. ‘May God help those who have to help the help to help themselves,’ I said. ‘All right, Maria.’ On the way to Mr. Barboza’s I did not see a single tiger lily in a single garden.

I found Mr. Barboza, like Mr. MacGregor, hoeing onions, but the moment I drew up at the door he rushed to attend me. At once I explained.

‘What, you get no bisks?’ cried Mr. Barboza, flinging his arms out in consternation. ‘By fishes! What you mean?’

I explained again, and assumed the sadness the occasion demanded.

‘They did n’t come,’ I said.

Mr. Barboza’s eyes grew wide with regret, his military moustaches drooped, his hands drooped to his sides, his chin drooped on his chest, his light olive skin lost its red glow. Mr. Barboza, in spite of his figure, is a handsome man. His eyelashes are half an inch long; he looks more like an Italian than a Cape Verde Islander, though you could never take him for one, as he is as shy as a bird, — a rather round bird, — and hops about in much the same manner; but when he is disturbed he turns quite green.

‘Too bad,’ said Mr. Barboza deeply. ‘Gor — too goddam bad.’

Here we paused for a moment as if overcome.

‘Where are they?’ I finally asked.

His eyebrows and hands went up to his hair.

‘ I give one — two — box to Mr. Santos las’ night,’ he answered. ‘New bisks, good bisks. You not get?’ he said, like a bird that has pounced upon a worm. I shook my head. There was another pause while he gloomily stared at the flour bin.

‘You wait,’ he said suddenly. ‘I go see him. I go see Santos.’

I had only just time to ask where he lived.

‘Not so far,’ said Mr. Barboza, his voice ringing happily, leaping into his Ford truck; ‘not so far.’

There was a great din of turning, grinding, hiccuping, as he whirled off, to stop, before he was well started, at a red barn not a hundred yards away. He came back in the same fashion and beamed at me through the fog of dust he had created. He was cheerful but puzzled.

‘Santos he say he lef’ bisks.’

‘But where?’ said I.

‘Thaz right,’ agreed Mr. Barboza sympathetically. ‘Where? He don’ know — I don’ know.’ He scratched an ear. ‘You not get?’ he asked, giving a final peck to the worm.

‘No,’ I said firmly. We paused again.

‘You got hotel where you live?’ asked Mr. Barboza at last, tentatively.

‘Why, yes,’ I answered.

‘Santos he say hotel maybe.’

‘Well,’ said I, brightening, ‘I’ll go to the hotel and ask.’

But this was ill-advised, for it threw Mr. Barboza to the bottom of a pit.

‘No good,’ he said darkly; ‘gone — they eat.’

It seemed, then, that there was nothing to be done. I turned to go, but Mr. Barboza detained me.

‘I give you some more,’ he said, coming up as radiant as a sun, ‘for notting.’

I agreed at once, but not, of course, ‘for notting.’

‘It was Mr. Santos’s mistake,’ I said; and I pressed thirty cents into his hand. He looked dismayed. He turned the coins over in his palm, to have time to think out the meaning of my words, and when they were clear to him he put the money gently back between my fingers.

‘Oh no,’ said Mr. Barboza. ‘Oh no. You get no bisks, I tak no money.’

He took down several boxes from a top shelf and then ushered me through the door.

‘You bring no more money,’ he said joyously. ‘I don’ need. I give you t’ings, one — two — maybe t’ree times a week; sometime you give me somding, after one week, a mont’, a year — ten cents, two dollaz, whatever — ’ There was a shrug of the shoulders and outspread endorsing hands, while I nodded. ‘Thaz all right,’ he called, as I got in my car, ‘thaz all right’; and he waved me out of sight.

Thus I rode off, and I passed on my way the green truck gardens and strawberry, fields filled with men and with women in large ill-shaped straw bonnets. On my way over, I had not seen a single tiger lily in a single garden, but now there were these pickers in the strawberry fields, some with bright blue aprons, some with colored scarfs, some with yellow kerchiefs, and at the side of the road crate on crate of scarlet berries. There was besides a porch with honeysuckle; there was a bluewheeled cart; there was a Portuguese baby, as naked as the moon.

II

When I got back to the village, I slowed down opposite Captain Chase’s path, and I saw at once why he could not deliver my tautog. He was having it out with Mrs. Phinney.

There is a feud in our town. It has to do with lobster pots.

One morning of quiet July weather, Mrs. Phinney, who keeps a house for summer boarders, took a stand against lobster pots. She refused to let her lawn be used for airing them. She said they stunk. They did. But Captain Chase, who owned them, said: ‘An’ what if they do? It’s a confounded better smell than some o’ them summer folks bring with ’em. Talk about perfoooom— Lawbster pawts! Lawbster pawts ain’t in it!’ To which Mrs. Phinney had replied that it was not for him to interfere with trade, whatever smells he might prefer.

So it began. This morning it continued. They stood and shouted at each other, she leaning over the piazza railing, and he propped against the rail of the wharf at the bottom of the lawn.

‘Sure I got your tawtawg,’ said Captain Chase to me, without moving. ‘An’ what’s more,’ he yelled to Mrs. Phinney, ‘I don’t believe they’d be able to notice nothing beyond theirselves. I set next to one uf ’em t’other night at t lie movies, an’ I know I could n’t; no sir, not though there was one o’ them Greek banana sellers settin’ right next t’ me; and he’s the smellingest fella in town.’

‘You must ‘a’ neutralized each other,’ shouted Mrs. Phinney.

‘I ain’t a-goin’ to move ’em,’ shouted the Captain, regardless. He turned to me. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘ wa’n’t I here ten years afore that harpin’ piece o’ sea wash, and ain’t them lawbster pawts been stinkin’ for ten years?’ And he asked, illogically, to know what was eating Mrs. Phinney, that she should hold her nose at this late date.

‘I’ll get the cunstable,’ said Mrs. Phinney.

‘Aw gwan! Cunstable yerself,’ said the Captain, and winked at me.

The constable in our town is just Ben Bartow dressed in uniform, and that only on Sundays. The rest of the week he sits in the room over the fire house and chews tobacco. Most evenings Captain Chase chews with him.

Mrs. Phinney knew this as well as we, but, as she said, she hoped Captain Chase would see reason before she had to do something.

‘Sumpthin’!’ ejaculated the Captain, and cursed ‘these goddam nosey women.’

‘What’s “sumpthin’”? Would you take my pawts?’

‘They’re goin’ off my lawn,’ said Mrs. Phinney.

‘And it would n’t be no good askin’ you where they was, neither; you would n’t know — o’ course not!’

‘But I would n’t be sorry they’d went,’ called Mrs. Phinney sweetly.

The Captain spat into the green harbor water. ‘Yuh can’t keep lawbster pawts hid,’ he said, complacently. Mrs. Phinney sniffed.

‘Can’t yer?’ was all she said. As I looked at her, I thought that Captain Chase might be mistaken. Perhaps you could keep lobster pots hid if you were Mrs. Phinney. But he, at any rate, knew how to take advantage of a respite.

‘Oh — them tawtawg,’ he said to me. ‘Ketch a-hold o’ that line an’ pull in the trap. I’ll have ’em skun afore winkin’.’

I left him kicking the cracks in the wharf planks, one eye on the boardinghouse door. It is evident he does not trust so sly a piece of sea wash as Mrs. Phinney, and I wondered, as I went on for the salt pork, whether when night came he would see fit to sleep with the lobster pots, and whether after that — but Mrs. Chase can look after herself.

It is only a step from the Captain’s to salt pork. It is around two interesting corners: one where a parrot is hung, and the other where the tugs lie in for storms, and give their long-drawn whistles of farewell as they go out to join their barges. It is a dangerous corner, this, but luckily to-day the lighthouse has no storm flags out.

I said: ‘Good morning, Mr. Calhoun.’

He said: ‘Mornin’.’

‘Nice day.’

‘Fine, fine,’ he answered. ‘Was you home last week?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘Some blow, wa’n’t it?’

‘Some blow,’ I agreed.

And there our conversational bark is wrecked, for everything that can be said in our town about that blow has been said unto the third and fourth generation of them that saw it.

III

Nevertheless, as I waited, the storm stood before my eyes. Only last week — and I might have been in Aden, where it never rains; or in the New Zealand caves, where it never blows; or in California, where there is never any bad weather at all; but there are compensations, and so I was only far enough away to enjoy the sight of the kitchen steps being blown into the sea.

Nor could I have got back in time, for it took us unawares. There was no commotion for the morning. The skies had emptied themselves in placid buckets. Who knew that the wind watched in abeyance? One said, ‘Only the end of the drought/ One heard ‘God bless the rain’; and one saw Sally Bates rush out to gather mushrooms on her lawn before they could be waterlogged, but noticed no untoward buffeting of skirts. These were no heralds. Oracles consulted as to the weather spoke as follows, it is true: —

‘I dunno no more’n you.’

‘Course you do.’

‘Don’t neither. What yer want to know fer? Goin’ some’eres with yer feller?’

‘Yes, picnicking.’

‘You won’t go on no picnic.’

‘Why not?’

‘Cause I’m tellin’ yer.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘All right — I don’t; but you wait ’n’ see. I hope that feller er yours can swim, and swim good too, cause he’ll need it. Say, what’d yer ask me for?’

True, too, that the barometer sank like the spirits of a hypochondriac, and that the papers had prophesied a ‘tropical disturbance’; but who believes in oracles or barometers or papers until afterward? No, I should have missed that storm, for it was not until noon that the man who pulls the siren on the engine house realized that nothing could be heard but the scream of the wind. By that time the whole air stung and sang.

It was after lunch, and I had gone back to the goat house to finish a piece of writing. The goat house is a small structure in the middle of the west lawn. It used to be used for Mr. Bang; it was for him that the red and yellow curtains were hung. I do not remember under what, æsthetic influence this necessity arose, but I do know the effect they had on his digestion: he died — which is so contrary to the tradition of all good goats that in a moment of disillusionment they were abandoned, and Mr. Bang’s abode was turned over to me. I imported a desk, a chair, and a laundry table, and at two o’clock every day I retire, helped away by the superstition that I am going to finish a piece of writing, and that anyone who disturbs me will do so at his own risk. This is a necessary precaution; otherwise someone might discover that there is a rose vine blowing in my window, that the laundry table is as covered with crosses and squares as a telephone booth, and that I keep Jane Eyre in a drawer of the desk. I had gone back after lunch to finish Jane Eyre.

For an hour the goat house had shuddered at intervals with great shattering sighs, like a child that has been weeping; but one does not pay much attention to other things if one is reading about Mr. Rochester. Suddenly into the middle of Yorkshire came the conviction that if I did not leave at once I and the house would be picked up and hurled into the sea. I was so sure of it that I did not even wait to save the piece of writing that somehow never is finished. I wrapped my coat around me and ran. Outside the door I stopped to look about me for the place where I lived. It had disappeared. But it had left behind a sort of ghost surrounded by a lake. I dashed for this and, finding some steps, tried to get in by a side door, but was knocked off and whirled around the corner, wondering, as I went, if there was any object except a rose bush between me and the low sea wall. Luckily there was a comparatively quiet place around that corner, and I was able to stop my feet from moving, one after the other, irresistibly into the sea. I went in while I had the chance, with some vague idea of getting dry, but it was just as bad inside. Every window oozed and streamed, and the north-side closets were letting in trickles of water on to favorite hats. So I went out again.

The world had turned to a tempest of biting water, and I stood on the steps to watch the earth dissolve. I saw the balcony railing blow off, then the kitchen steps and the lattice, then a tennis-court post, and then, to relieve the tension, a jesting pair of corsets hurled themselves down the drive. They had apparently come from across the Bay, for no one could be got to claim them then or later.

Still there was no alarm. It was not until I looked for the white fleet in the harbor that suspicion began to rise, and after that it was too late. It was not there. Our particular part of it had gone with the rest, taking anchor, mooring, chain, and everything with her. She settled on the rocks at the mouth of a tide rip for a few hours, but finally sank, and was hauled out next day, with three great holes gnawed in her side and the rest of her wrenched and torn.

It is as well to have the worst happen at once. We may then enjoy the irresponsibility of having nothing more to lose. I set myself in the path of the wind to see what it would do to me. When I got to the village it was waiting. Trees were down and telephone poles; roofs had been torn off; north windows had collapsed — these did not matter. Dread was mounting like a wave and minds were becoming motionless for fear of thinking, for the village was waiting. It had seen this sort of thing before.

I found myself at Captain Chase’s pier. Captain Chase was going out. I could not believe it, and there was no way to ask — he could not hear; but he was in the L. & M., starting the engine. I looked at the harbor. Each wave, as it started to unroll itself, was picked up and flattened out. It must have been on some such day as this that Christ essayed to walk upon the waters, for most of the weight of a moving body could have been held up by that wind. Someone appeared at my side. There was news — news that a man and a girl had gone picnicking and had been seen clinging to an overturned skiff somewhere, and Captain Chase was going after them. Two men ran by us. At the beginning of the pier they stopped. Is it possible to walk a tight rope in a hurricane? But they did it. We saw the L. & M. disappear.

After that, rumor ran riot. Three men had gone adrift. There was a schooner on the rocks. A man in a rowboat had tried to go out to secure his mooring and had been blown out to sea. These were the dark things just behind the wind. But there was that hint of gallantry before. Not one of these rumors was left unsounded, and any one that held a chance was chased beyond the wall of flying spray. Women with faces lean and rutted like the gutters that the sea cuts into the land, with lank damp hair like seaweed, watched from their windows. But even the spirit of Christ in jeopardy, as has been well displayed, cannot save fools from their own destruction; and some of them were drowned. The L. & M. came back with an empty, overturned skiff and three men, cursing.

The evening lay deep blue, after. The sun, departing, left its burning scarfs behind — no wonder, either, since their torn and ragged bits unfitted them for the tidiness of morning, unfitted them for any use except what fancy might construe into the pall of Nature for the ones she kills. The harbor water, quieting itself, gave out no other sound than the splash-chunk, splash-chunk of rowboats on a nearly level sea. Across the Bay, dim-white like ghosts, were shapes against the black performance of the rocks.

People stood on the street corners, that evening, and talked. Every road was blocked, every garden and lawn a blackened ruin. Wires were down, back yards were under water, everything was to be done, but they stood in huddled groups, talking it over, and for days afterward there were still little knots of people standing at the street corners, talking it over.

I started home casually secure about my lot. Do wanderers discover more in wandering?

IV

For all this, I cannot recommend Mr. Barboza and Company as a universal panacea, because, since they are in our town, they cannot possibly be in yours, or his, or hers, or theirs. I only bring them forward as a patient does the medicine that has done him good. But at the same time I have a suspicion — though it is one I hate to admit — that not all the interesting people, nor all the curious people, nor all the delightful people live in our town — nor all the grass, either, nor all the sea, nor all the flowers. Indeed, I have so frequently suspected that they lived in someone else’s that more often than not I have gone myself to see; and so will you, having been earnestly told and earnestly believing, in spite of the song of the bear, that the Magical Chance lies over the mountain.

Yet — mark you — adventure is no more than a gloss of the mind. We are never shown a thing as it really is when the artists take us here and there. We are shown only the form to which it has melted in the fire of their minds. For of what is Romance made? Not always petticoats and pantaloons, nor half so much of actual love as of evanescent laughter, nor of salt tears for absent kisses as of phantom pain to see the beauty of the stars in water. ‘ Dust and a faint wind’s burthen,’ or a star, columbine, caps of snow on the ends of branches — these are life. We have been made to believe too long that it was something else, something tangible, connected with women of the streets and railway posters calling us to Spain. Young boys believe it still and think they are seeing life by seeing gambling hells and brothels; young girls imagine they have got to it at last in night clubs. These experiences are merely discoveries that there are various ways to carry on existence. One could touch reality as closely by driving down a village street in Maine. Both ways of life are real enough, and information concerning them a useful thing to have, but not if translated into the supposition that the limits of crudity and sordidness, extremities of poverty and dullness, are living, made vital and bare. For life in its essence is no more than the power to live. Our experiences are the superficial aids to stimulation, but the variety of their colors depends not so much on where we go and whom we see as on our ability to endow people and places with meaning.

This afternoon I went to the beach. Now and then, suiting my mood to the sun’s dictation, I tried the green water. On one of these expeditions I became omnipotent to save a ladybug from drowning, so I took her ashore on the end of my finger and we lay on the sand to get dry together. Then, as the lady came to life with a vague, ecstatic movement of her wings, I knew I was a god, working creation, whereupon I slid my head on to an outstretched arm and contemplated the things My Majesty would make; for the world is no more than a map of our own dimensions.

I would first buy a house in a town in a valley, and there I would stay at home. There would be no roses over the door, — for roses are the fashion in suburbs, — but flank on flank of hollyhocks. Somewhere would be a pond, fringed with idle grass, and here and there a tree; ducks would take their pleasure in the pond, and geese would form battalions and execute manœuvres from the kitchen door. It would be a white house in a green field, and from every side would rise the formidable hills. Inside there would be books from floor to ceiling, and one chair, one bed, and one person. I would live there in the quiet. I would write a little, and dream a little, and read all night. But I would never ask a friend to come to stay, and I would never climb beyond the first field wall, for there are voices out beyond the hills. I would not let the sea set music to their calling, for, once they ring themselves along the air, peace whistles down the wind. I would not have them coax me to forget that there is a price to be paid for horizons.

No small price either. It begins with discomforts, disappointments, and disillusions. It runs all over the pages of our more material hopes and dreams and blots them out. It ruins forever our chance of brownstone-house success. On no other conditions will the high road or the high sea accept us as its own and give us any adequate return; and even so there will be more than one descent from the mountains when our lives have turned to ashes in our mouths and the taste of freedom is as bitter as loneliness can make it.

I would not be thus tormented. I will lie on my back in the valley and watch the grass move on the tops of the hills. I will laugh and pity its restlessness. I will have stilled those voices whose breath makes it stir, for have I not found compensations? Smallvillage life is ordinary dough enough, but if the cook has clever hands the bread will rise.

And yet — I cannot keep the moon from shining.

Some night, when the dew drips silvery and large, I should go out again upon that path of pale-blue steel and take a fever one more time to add a useless fuss of exploration to the world. The reason? To be remembered by, like what’s beneath our graveyard stone? But what’s remembered? Who remembers? Oh — the reason? There is a road, and we would walk it. There is a smell of seaweed from the sea — that’s all.