USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Marion > Lands of Sippican on Buzzards Bay > Part 24
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"The unfriendly inn suggested dreadfully (he despised the practice) an early bed-time, seemed to have no relation to anything, not even to itself; but a fellow tenant of whom he made an inquiry told him the village was sprinkled round."
"He walked some distance without encountering a creature or discerning a habitation; but he enjoyed the splendid star
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light, the stillness, the shrill melancholy of the crickets, which seemed to make all the vague forms of the country pulsate around him; the whole impression was a bath of freshness." James must have walked down past Capt. Henry Allen's towards Nye's wharf.
"They went back together to the village, in which he at last began to discover a certain consistency, signs of habita- tion, houses disposed with a rough resemblance to a plan. The road wandered among them with a kind of accommodating sinuosity, and there were even cross-streets, and an oil- lamp on a corner, and here and there the small sign of a closed shop, with an indistinctly countrified lettering. There were lights now in the windows of some of the houses."
He writes "of the inhabitants of the little town, who ap- peared all to rejoice in the prefix of captain. They were retired ship masters; there was quite a little nest of these, two or three of whom might be seen lingering in their dim door- ways, as if they were conscious of a want of encouragement to sit up, and yet remembered the nights in far-away waters when they would not have thought of turning in at all.
Marion called itself a town, but it was a good deal shrunken since the decline in the ship building interest; it turned out a good many vessels every year, in the palmy days, before the war. There were ship yards still, where you could almost pick up the old shavings, the old nails and rivets, but they were grass grown now, and the water lapped them without anything to interfere. There was a kind of arm of the sea put in; it went up some way, it wasn't the real sea, but very quiet like a river; that was more attractive to some - .
Even under the mantle of night he himself gathered the impression it had had a larger life, seen better days". "Prin- cipal street darkened by immense old elms which made a blackness overhead. There was a salt smell in the air."
The next day
"He made the reflection, as he went, that to see a place for the first time at night is like reading a foreign author in trans- lation. At the present hour - it was getting towards eleven o'clock - he felt that he was dealing with the original. The
حاط حسان
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Harbor Road - "Down which Henry James walked to Nye's Wharf"
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little straggling, loosely clustered town lay along the edge of a blue inlet, on the other side of which was a low wooded shore, with a gleam of white sand where it touched the water. The narrow bay carried a vision outward to a picture that seemed at once bright and dim - a shining slumbering summer-sea, and a far-off, circling line of coast, which under the August sun, was hazy and delicate. - It was a town where you smelt the breath of the hay in the streets and you might gather black- berries in the principal square. The houses looked at each other across the grass - low, rusty, crooked, distended houses, with dry, cracked faces and the dim eyes of small-paned, stiffly-sliding windows. Their little door-yards bristled with rank, old-fashioned flowers, mostly yellow; and on the quarter that stood back from the sea the fields sloped upward, and the woods in which they presently lost themselves looked down over the roofs."
"The hazy shores on the other side of the water (they seemed powdered with silver, a sort of midsummer light), suggested to him a land of dreams, a country in a picture."
The hero proposed to the heroine in "an ancient ship yard, which was now a vague, grass-grown approach to the water-side, bestrewn with a few remnants of supererogatory timber."
Afterwards they walk "Along the waterside to a rocky, shrub-covered point, which made a walk of just the right dura- tion. Here all the homely languor of the region, the mild, fragrant Cape-quality the sweetness of white sands, quiet waters, low promontories where there were paths among the barberries and tidal pools gleamed in the sunset - here all the spirit of a ripe summer afternoon seemed to hang in the air. There were wood walks too; they sometimes followed bosky uplands, where accident had grouped the trees with odd effects of style, and where in grassy intervals and fragrant nooks of rest they came out upon sudden patches of Arcady."
The heroine often met the hero at "a bend of the road which lost itself, after a winding, straggling mile or two, in the indented, insulated 'point' where the wandering bee droned through the hot hours with a vague, misguided flight." Down
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by Capt. Henry Allen's and the Ebenezer Holmes farm and on to George Bonum Nye's fields and wharf, James sauntered with a book in his pocket, sometimes going out in a little boat fishing near the shore, sometimes lounging about "in the pastoral land which hung (at a very moderate elevation) above the shore", where he "lay under whispering trees and kicked his heels."
He even wandered through the graveyard "among old mossy head-stones of mariners and fisherfolk." He has one of his characters say that she thought "it must be pleasant to be there when one had died."
Old Sippican! "A sweetness begotten of low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly blue" wrote Henry James.
Mr. Gilder entertains James and writes letters about Rob- ert Louis Stevenson. In the chapter called "Marion Days" in the Gilder Life and Letters, there is the following letter written to Talcott Williams. Mr. Gilder had just seen Stevenson. "He looked at me with a quizzical expression, and said, 'I don't know but it was you. Yes', he said, 'I think it was you'."
They have decided that it was July 1879 that Stevenson was looked upon coldly by the Scribner staff.
"""Hurrah' said I, 'that lets me out' and I jumped up in great delight for as you know I was in Europe from March 1879 to June 1880."
Then he adds
"Between you and me and the lamp post I have no doubt I would have made the same answer to him as was made what- ever that answer was. He brought no manuscript, and simply wanted to write for the magazine."
He writes again
"If you think me restless what would you think of him? Pacing the room! Sitting down only for a minute at a time. How very interesting he was!"
"Never mind Mrs. Stevenson tells me that if I had seen Louis I would have turned him out! She says he looked the
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part, and every body did turn him out! Was it a dig or a com- pliment when she said likewise I reminded her of him!"
Gilder writes in the old Clark house. Down in Rufe Smith's blacksmith's shop where you might unearth a harpoon from under the pile of wheel rims and horse shoes and rusting iron, a circle of "setters" guffaw at old Rufe, standing in his black apron, spinning yarns. Mr. Pomeroy describes him-
"A man he was of giant frame;
Of Goths or Anakin he came. His arms could swing prodigeous weights,
His shoulders carry Gaza's gates: He stooped as if to ease his power And stood like Pisa's leaning tower.
The story teller of the village!
A whaler had brought a great tortoise shell to Sippican and in Rufe's memory that shell "brought from Southern seas- The Isles of Cannibals and ease" still lingered, and he tells of the days when it was used as a ferry-
"her steady course she plows Betwixt Nye's wharf and Henry Dow's
But the most famous story was that of Rufe's fast horse! He goes "to 'Mattapois' for pigs!"
"Behind us as we started back" says Rufe
The dust was deep, the wind was south;
The thunder grumbled down the bay; The lightnin's flash was thereaway We didn't travel slow nor fast 'Till red-roofed Cannonville was passed,
When, by my soul, I got a scare That shook my teeth and raised my hair. The thunder busted over head As if 'twas sent to raise the dead; An' Dandy, laying back his ears, Jumped like a yoke of frightened steers An' went as if a red-hot goad His flanks was prickin' all it knowed.
I dropped the reins and throwed the whip
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To ketch the seat with double grip. An' watched the horse as on he tore, With rain behind and dust before. My breath was gone from Cannonville Clear to the bridge t' Macomber's Mill.
Like wus'n fever-ag'r I shook.
All through the woods t'was black as night -
Only the flashes gin us light, An' sparks that flew from Dandy's hoofs
Like hail-st'ns dancin' on the roofs.
But when she slewed at Braley's corner I guessed the go-cart was a gorner. It seemed as ef capsize we must, An' drown in mud or choke in dust.
I call it sence the Cape o' trouble, 'Twas wus'n Hatteras to double; But spite o' fate we pelted on. House after house went screamin' by;
The little wagon seemed to fly An' in a jiffy fetched a lurch As we was roundin' at the church, That twitched my heart, and jerked my breath,
An' made me think the thing was death.
Hear what I say an' don't forget Not by a drop was Dandy wet;
The dasher an' the seat was dry, An' drier'n any bone was I:
But at the shop I turned to find The pigs was drown-ded in behind!"
And a dark eyed poet wrapping his cape around him stops to listen at the loud laughter, a little whaler comes in at the grassy wharf, and Capt. Bill Hathaway and Capt. George come in with a catch of 445 fish." "Very good! Very good fishing at Bobel," writes Captain George!
"My dear!" calls a puritanical old aunt to her young niece, "I know the March from Norma, no matter how slowly you play it. I do not consider it a proper tune for the Sab- bath Day!"
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The Aunt retires to her Christian Herald and the weekly Talmage sermon, and the niece looks out of the window at the bright day.
But there is laughter at the Studio, boats venturing out in the harbor, some bold young people walk out of the ceme- tery towards the shining bay, and a deacon of the church bun- dles his brood into the carry-all and goes driving over the sandy roads, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the Sab- bath breakers in the harbor.
"Oh" writes Richard Gilder, "let us be as happy as we can while we may be in this mortal world - and above all let us be as good as we may be - and as kind".
The winter comes with one coaster at the wharf! and then the Spring town meeting with the captains thundering across the town hall "It's time to call the hog on appropriations!"
There is a mild speculation in land, and two or three more summer cottages are built. Times are improving in the sea villages.
A Poet and his friends live in Sippican for a decade!
They have come, a group of dazzling players in gorgeous costumes, singing gay songs, trooping onto a dull stage of grey walls, with silent figures standing watching, with a stern eyed mentor somewhere behind the scenes! And the grey walls dis- solve into the green and scarlet and gold of out-of-doors!
The sky grows blue, the water silver, and the watcher sitting on a high throne above is seen to be "a Father bending near."
CHAPTER XVII
"THE PRESIDENT" IN MARION
"For into the hands of one of humble soul Great trust was laid, and he that trust fulfilled."
GILDER.
Suddenly, it seemed, instead of a cluster of tiny brown creatures poking about over a few miles of sand and forest on the edge of a mighty continent with its spread of rushing rivers, towering mountains and vast lonely plains, there were innum- erable groups of humans called towns and cities, linked from the Western and Eastern oceans by a network of steel lines over and under the earth.
Moving, restless millions, and every tide that lapped the edges of the continent brought more. Jabbering, gesticulating, scrabbling on shore to plod and plod patiently until the villages grew into towns and the towns into cities, and where ever a railroad train stopped for water, there grew business blocks and proud avenues like some superior growth of cell life.
Vast territories and states like kingdoms, and in charge one man who sat steadily fishing on a ledge in Buzzard's Bay, almost in the shadowy path of De Rasiere, almost where the guns of the Nimrod lay under the waters of the "Lands of Sippican".
Grover Cleveland, who was twice chosen as leader of these United States of America!
One September night in 1882 he stands quietly on a balcony in Buffalo, with his loyal people shouting and bands playing. A hush. "I can but remember to night, when I came among you, friendless, unknown and poor", he said. In No- vember he is writing his brother William, "Do you know that if mother were alive, I should feel so much safer? I always
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thought that her prayers had much to do with my success. I shall expect you to help in that way."
Two years later Richard Gilder writing from Marion to Bishop Potter said of Cleveland, a stranger then to him, "As President I believe his administration would make an era in the history of the country. His election would be a positive good in carrying on sympathetically and fairly the great work of governmental reform."
At 47 years of age, the 22nd President of the United States stepped into a world where greed was walking rough shod over the backs of the workers, and he writes, "I know I am honest and sincere in my desire to do well, but the question is whether I know enough to accomplish my desire".
There had come a vision to the toiling fathers and brothers, a vision of a shining life in the sun for the workers of the world; labor blindly thrusting out a gnarled hand was trying like a gigantic infant to grab shadowy objects - alas! only to mar and break.
A strike! There were 1411 in 1885-86.
Buildings! Street railways! Tools hung as though in mid-air by a mob of Americans underneath throwing their coal and oil, and at last bread away, blotting out the sun of comfort and happiness for the women and children in the little homes.
"The President" watching sees instead of a shining angel leading the workers to glory with its gleaming sword, a hideous giant with iron teeth stalking through the land, crunching everything lovely in sight, children's dolls and little bride's sewing machines, and at last there is nothing left but soup, fed out in thin substance to set jawed men and white faced mothers and children.
And the "travellers" that the villages fed after the war, turned into "tramps". Discouraged, down-at-the-heel, some- times bare footed, they ate their crackers and cheese in the "tramp-house", or sat on back doorsteps, or at kitchen tables with cups of hot coffee lifted - some brazen, some with wistful sad eyes like dogs without a master.
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"Weren't you here about a month ago?"
"Yes mum, but I couldn't get no work on the Cape!"
And Elizah Braley fed 60 for $7.80, and "Hadley and Handy's" and "Ellis's" store furnished supplies, crackers and cheese at cost, and the days grow cold, and the town repairs the "tramp house" at a cost of $4.71, and buys "1/2 cord of limbs for $1.50".
An honest old fashioned American in the White House trying to solve the problem with thousands of office seekers like hornets buzzing about his head.
And Grover Cleveland came to the Lands of Sippican on Buzzard's Bay!
Not Henry James, nor Richard Watson Gilder, but Capt. Emerson Hadley was really the means of his coming.
What a feather in the old captain's cap, and what a thrill for the "Old Landing" to be the scene of the opening of the story.
It begins in this fashion!
A beautiful lady came!
Marion woke one morning to find itself on the front page of the newspapers of the country.
It came out of a clear sky - the news!
Of course, the village people knew that a famous Arctic explorer, General Adolphus Greely, who because of a friendship between the then Lieut. Greeley and Capt. Emerson Hadley, was occupying the Captain's house at the "Old Landing" for the summer. Gen. Greely had been, like the whalers, in the crashing waters of the Northern seas. He had established ob- servation stations for the U. S. Government towards the North Pole in 1881, climbing higher and higher on the globe until Mother England, who had held her high position on the map since the Pilgrims landed, saw the line changed by her bust- ling offspring.
The tall, dark, distinguished visitor with his back ground of hard days in the Arctic, of losing men amid cracking ice and iron waters and suffering, was the kind of a man the captains understood. He was their sort, and although they
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Mr. and Mrs. Gilder, Mrs. Cleveland and her Mother, and Joe Jefferson
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joked about knowing what the weather was going to be now- a-days, seeing the chief Signal officer of the Army & Head of the Weather Bureau was in the village, they respected him as an adventurer like themselves, and it was natural for him to be living in Capt. Emerson's house at the "Landing".
But the bride of the President of the United States to come to the "Old Landing!"
Somebody drove down to tell the exciting, incredible news!
There it was in the papers! There was a great rubbing of spectacles, and running over to the post office on that Aug- ust Day.
In the Evening Record of Boston they read a dispatch from Newport.
"It is stated by the Old Colony Station agent that Mrs. Cleveland, wife of the President, arrived here this morning on the Fall River boat and went through that city, taking a spec- ial car that was waiting there to convey her to Marion. The officials say there is no question about Mrs. Cleveland having passed through."
And the reporters dashed to Marion!
Like locusts they descended! Buggies, carryalls, trains and bicycles, and on August 3 they are sending the item to America's four corners.
"The fact that she arrived in this beautiful and retired little nook of the Massachusetts coast; and is now quietly domiciled here as the guest of General Greely of Arctic fame is now well known thanks to the omnipresent vigilance of the press."
Friends wrote letters in those days, and the letters that went to warm, dusty Washington gave glimpses of the woods, the sea, and the villages of "Sippican", and the "Old Landing."
"The President" must stay at the capital, but there was no reason why his young wife should bear the heat and discom- fort. The interest of the country was focused on the lovely bride, and "the hail, Marion" went over the country.
Where is "Marion"? What is "Marion"?
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The charms of the village were published to the world.
One enthusiastic reporter gave it "hills and dales", and another wrote about the natives of Pilgrim birth, who had their coat-of-arms on their wheel-barrows even, and family por- traits hanging in their halls, and another gave everybody dialects that were never heard on land or sea in the known world.
Marion woke to find it was one of "nature's sequestered breathing spots" amid "sighing pines, blue waters, and wild flowers", "consecrated by the prayers of the Pilgrims." Called "a tiny wedge of land set into the coast between Wareham on the right or East side and Mattapoisett on the left or West" with wooded lowlands traversed by dim, sweet-scented wood- land roads, completely arched over by an unusual and very beautiful mixed growth of pines and oaks; beautiful wild flowers hid in the depths of these woods and pleasanter, more romantic places for walks or drives can scarcely be imagined."
"Its remoteness from the large cities will prevent its ever being crowded, however and it will probably always re- main what it is now the chosen summer home of a very few people."
"There is a certain delicate flavor, we might say about the place which is all pervasive, yet extremely elusive when one tries to focus it on the point of one's pencil" - "fine with the fineness and mellowness which comes of its 200 years."
Poets burst into song:
"Far up from the shores of the gull and the gale The suns best charms beguiling
With it's forests deep and it's pleasure sail Lies Marion harbor smiling.
With it's ancient town and it's regal crest And it's woodland slope far-reaching This earlier wave of the Pilgrims West All nature's love is teaching."
The truth was " a beautiful lady" was filling the village with romance.
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"In recent days the quaint old town Has gained a highly prized renown; For hither comes a lady true As age of chivalry e'er knew --- One who commands without command The first and fairest in the land."
The restfulness of Capt. Hadley's estate in those days, with it's picturesque pine grove, great ledges of rock, high hedges, and expanse of lawn was one of the reasons for Mrs. Cleveland's stay. It was secluded, quiet.
Reporters dogged any footstep that might lead to any one who would know anything about the Greely plans for the day. They pried into town affairs, "family quarrels"! It didn't take them long to find that Mrs. Elizabeth Taber was the auto- crat of the village.
"It may be whispered confidentially that there is a deadly feud between the "Old Landing" and the "Lower Village" and the former is immensely elated by the presence of Mrs. Cleve- land, the wife of the President of the United States."
Mrs. Taber, sitting high in her outpost in Tabor Hall writes into her will $20,000 for Sippican lower village"; but "Love- ly Mrs. Cleveland" said the head lines of a special dispatch to the Boston Herald!
"Capt. J. E. Hadley is delighted to say the least to have the honor of entertaining the first lady in the land. He has furnished her with a horse and low phaeton belonging to his wife."
The first drive down to the end of Charles' Neck was tele- graphed to almost every town in the country that issued an evening edition of its newspaper.
"The bathing house used by Mrs. Cleveland was kindly furnished her by Hon. Geo. Delano, a staunch old Democrat who has been the candidate of his party for presidential elector at every election for a long time. His residence bears the old Jacksonian title of 'The Hermitage'."
For the first time the name that hailed so well across the water was questioned.
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"With 26 Marions in the U. S. why did they change the old Indian name of Sippican!"
A movement was launched to take back the Indian name, but the older people stopped that quickly.
Sippican! The name that had been held up to derision! The fight of the old Rochester villages wasn't far away to them!
So the reporters turned to other matters.
The boat races were flashed to the ends of the wires.
Capt. George Luce gave up tautoging for an afternoon and acted as one of the judges.
More reporters descended and one reads - "This uni- versal interest in Mrs. Cleveland, and her sayings and doings down to minute details, taken not as idle curiosity but as an indication of the warmer interest and real regard which the people have for her, for surely no woman in our land was ever more universally beloved than the present mistress of the White House."
Saratoga trunks arrived for the week end and crowded the "Bay View House" which immediately planned the great future of the "Sippican Hotel". All the spare rooms in the village were taken-army officers, politicians, society women with "20 pairs of high heeled slippers."
One watchful and energetic Maunchausen had 800 people gathered on the "Hermitage" beach to watch Mrs. Cleveland take her dip in the sea.
That first Sunday, crowds gathered at St. Gabriel's Chapel (Sippican Seminary made over) but "the first lady" quietly walked into the Congregational Church with General and Mrs. Greely and Miss Anna Dawes.
She had on "a black silk creation with sleeves and V shaped plastron on the front and back of the corsage of jetted lace and wore a small black bonnet."
The party occupied Capt. Geo. Luce's pew "a prominent one suitable for such distinguished visitors."
What a change for Capt. Hadley from roaring seas and hoarse chantings! "She lets me in the piazza door herself sometimes when she sees me coming" he said. He came to
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call one day when the horses weren't ready for a drive to Matta- poisett. He offered to go out and harness them himself. Mrs. Cleveland laughed and said, "Oh, Captain, I can come out and harness my own horse if it is necessary."
And the gallant old captain answered, "Well, we could cut the harness up for souvenirs afterward."
And the story went over the country!
At the capitol the President is wrestling with great prob- lems, with the country on the verge of a panic.
Gilder writes -
"His test - to build a wall - Gainst the base partizan's ignoble greed"
"Or will he fail or triumph? History lays
a moment down her pen. A nation waits-and prays."
"The Tariff?" Friends say, "You might touch on it!" but the famous message is slowly shaped, that, for the first time in the history of the country, was to the people.
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