USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > Marion > Lands of Sippican on Buzzards Bay > Part 27
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Tired Mr. Gilder leaves "the house that looks to East, to West", and "the woods that bring the sunset near", for the hills, and Capt. George Luce, and the old soldier Charlton Wing set out on their last voyages.
The young people are having gay parties at Music Hall! "Hot coffee marches", and the girls wear trains! "R. H. D." is climbing a wall in Tangier and crawling up on a housetop next to the prison to be sure he had seen all of it, "shying down money to an old woman jumping up and down in the courtyard, to find that he was on top of a harem."
Riding in Cairo with the consul-general's gold clad out- riders and singing coster songs in the evening "to make the English weep."
But he finds it all rather stupid and writes home, "If I don't have any adventures I shall write essays on art like Mrs. V."
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By Mar. 4, 1893 he is in Malta, "Today Cleveland is inaugurated and I took all the passengers down at the proper time and explained to them that at that moment a great man was being made president and gave them each an American cocktail to remember it by in which to toast him."
At home Postmaster Hall comes out and hangs up the picture of "the President" again.
From a gay circle of artists in Paris where he is seeing Whistler, Pennell and Abbey, with Dana Gibson, Davis writes, "Say you do not mind waiting until the middle of August for me, and when I come back this time I shall make a long stay with you at Marion and tell you lots of things I have not written about."
"I look forward already over the miles and days and months and just see us sitting together at Marion and telling each other how good it is to be together again and holding each other's hands".
He has decided that "instead of being a cafe-chantant singer I should like to be an Austrian baron and own a castle on a hill with a red roofed village around it."
Marion appropriates $18,219 at the town meeting! "Of 36 towns reporting as shown by the Highway Commissioner's report our town pays higher taxes for men and teams than any other of the towns doing the kind of work we do, but we do not advise a reduction in wages."
The oil lights drip, and the stone walls and boulders are crushed and "laid 6 in. thick at 72 rds. at $5.90 a rd".
"Put in 11/2 miles of good stone road!" and out in the middle west somebody is trying out a machine that is going to change the "good stone" roads to black oiled highways.
Hard times in the country, and the selectmen feed 221 tramps.
On July 15, Davis is riding home from a supper Henry Irving gave to Bernhart and Rejane with Ellen Terry in a red cardinal cape made from Irving's robe.
That year a little life goes out on Bird Island and with it the light for the first time since it shone out that night in 1819,
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and Richard Gilder came back to put crimson autumn leaves on Miss Bessy's grave.
"Shadows, O nevermore!
For when passed forth thy spirit it did seem
As if against the black a golden door
Were opened and a gleam
From the eternal Light fell on thy face And made a visible glory in the place."
"I shall never be afraid of death any more", said one when this adventurer set forth from Sippican.
Somebody from Marion with a basket of clams on his back watches another adventurer in Fairhaven as he caulks his little boat the "Spray". "It'll crawl", he drawled, according to Capt. Slocumb's story, but off the Spray went April 24, 1895, around the world to find on the hills of Juan Fernandez high among the clouds, the king of the Island, a Portuguese who had sailed on a New Bedford whaler.
Davis down in Central America comments on the "little strip of mud and water that stopped the meeting of the tides of great oceans and the shipping of the world." Mr. Gilder writes that winter from the editorial rooms of the Century magazine, complimenting the New Bedford Standard on its extra edition.
In a postscript he tells of the Marion postmaster who keeps him posted on affairs.
He speaks of "his familiar and kindly countenance at the little square window through which he dispenses letters, lit- erature, general information and benignity to all dwellers about Sippican".
' "He is everybody's friend and nobody's enemy; he officiates on pretty much all public occasions, religious or secular; nothing is done without him; and no national admin- istration can dispense with his services. His tenure is fixed, no matter what parties or presidents come or go; he greets each incoming administration with a smile and dismisses it with a benediction, knowing that whatever departs he remains. He is as immutable as the old church on the corner; the pump at Mrs. Harwood's or the Split Rock. He distributed cigars, candies
A tin-type - "Elsie and Betty in the Nineties"
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and confidence to statesmen and little children with impartial generosity, and in summer when his mail keeps him on the jump, and in winter when he can unbend in well earned recrea- tion, he is the one unruffled spirit of Buzzards Bay". .
Sippican is very modern with safety bicycles, tricycles, and tandems! Some of the mothers are shocked to hear the young people shouting the new songs. They had grown up with "When you and I were young, Maggie" and "Darling I am growing old" and other songs in the back ground, "Ever of thee I'm fondly dreaming." Songs full of the feeling of "yews" and tombs, and lost loves and death, plaintive and sweet like the sound of their old pianos. The inhabitants of this world of song and story seemed to be always in a lovely sad garden walking, with ladies swooning and gallant sidewhiskered swains kneeling, respectfully kissing their hands, and all ending in pale death and the tomb.
Shocking youth called out now "Mamie, come kiss your honey boy", and "You'll look sweet, On the seat, Of a bicycle built for two!"
Down in the little house on Main Street Davis is working on "Soldiers of Fortune" which he sells to Scribner's for $5,000.
There is much excitement over it in diplomatic circles, and it was even said that Cleveland wrote the Venezuelan mes- sage because of it, and that war was coming because of it.
The patient President was like a runner hampered by the sticky mud of business depression and strikes, and pricked by the poison darts of party politicians. "I have sometimes doubted if I could carry the burden to the end", he wrote Mr. Gilder.
Davis is at Buda Pest staring at 1500 Hungarian nobles in their 1000 year old costumes, gold and silver cloth, gold chain armor, bear skins, leopard and wolf skins, with their horses shining with gold trappings studded with jewels; and then he is writing from Cuba of the people dying in Juares, a town as big as Marion. "Think of that", he writes, "six people dying in Marion every day during July and August."
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In 1896-97 he reported the Coronation of the Czar at Mos- cow, the celebration at Buda-Pest, the Spanish Cuban war and the Queen's Jubilee, and had begun Capt. Macklin.
Thomas Beer in the Mauve Decade says,
"The nineteenth century had been prolific of parades and ached in its last ten years with them."
"A tall young Philadelphian saw much of this tinselled movement." "He was expensively hired to tell the world about Nicholas Romonoff settling the crown of Russia askew on his thick head in a torpor of incense and in such a reflected dazzle of golden cloth that Richard Harding Davis's eyes reddened."
Davis writes his mother about the ninety correspondents clamoring to get in with only twelve cards of admission - "There is not a wire we have not pulled, or a leg either - dashing about all day in a blue night gown, leaving cards and writing notes and giving drinks and having secretaries to lunch, and buying flowers for wives, and cigar boxes for hus- bands, and threatening the ministers with Cleveland's name."
Quite like the old adventurers from Sippican getting a cargo for their trim clipper ships lying out in the harbor.
He sees the Czarina, his "Princess Aline" much more beau- tiful and more sad-looking than ever; but a "Russian Prince who spoke English perfectly but who was politely insolent with his 3 diamond eagles on an astrakan cap, a white cloak, a grey uniform, rows of medals" "surrounded by eight servants who bowed at him all the brief time he talked over our heads," irritated him, and he ends up "I wouldn't do it again for $10,000".
He goes from the Balkans and eating goat's milk with the Greek mountaineers, to write from Florence in May 1897, "I have been twenty years trying to be in a battle and it will be twenty years before I will want to be in another.
At the Queen's Jubilee in June, he says he was "too mag- nificent for words" in his "beautiful steel sword and a court hat with silver on the side and silk stockings that I wore at Moscow and pumps with great buckles."
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Home again; and up the village street where the houses hug the sidewalks "as close as if outdoors were small' through the sunshine and the shade comes the pageant.
He waves his pencil, this young adventurer, in the low vine covered room, and in and out they wind their way, the little round-faced Queen with gold coach and outriders, and bronzed men, and long rows of glittering figures, with horses champing and pawing, and bands playing!
A long procession of the great ones of the world, the suc- cessor of Peter the Great, the "divine Sarah" herself, ladies-in- waiting, kings, soldiers, white skirted Greek brigands, appear and disappear, conjured up by the brilliant young mind from the glittering world of romance he has passed through.
There the scenes grew bright under his pencil and "Ben- jamin" and Mrs. Bowditch stole quietly in and out.
"Why," said Mrs. B. "He would walk up and down and then sit down, and sometimes he stood up and wrote." And then the little house, quite as in the days of its sailors, wouldn't see him for a time.
He was off to the far shores of the earth, "And where is he going now?" said the village!
Down in Key West with "the palm leaves cut against the glaring blue sky like giant petals of tin", and by June 1898 he is comparing the Rough Riders with soldiers he has seen in Gibraltar, Egypt, France, Russia and Germany. To his father he writes:
"I suppose you are back from Marion now and I have missed you. I can't tell you how sorry I am. I wanted to see you coming up the street this summer in your knickerbockers and with no fish, but still happy - I hope Mother will come up and visit me in September and sit on Allen's and on the Clark's porch and we can have Chas. too. I suppose he will have had this holiday but he can come up for a Sunday."
The guns and the bands are sounding in the Spanish American war, and Dooley is telling his friend Hennissy what Roosevelt is saying about it.
"At this time it became apparent that I was handicapped be th' presence ir th' Ar-rmy' - a number of days was spint
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be me in reconnoitring, attinded on'y be me brave an' fluent body guard, Richard Harding Davis."
The "fluent body guard" comes home and gives the only lecture of his life in the white meeting house on the corner, on his experiences in Cuba.
He had just come home and he said to a reporter, "My promise to talk on the war in Cuba has been elaborated into a lecture and advertised with three sheet posters. The only feature worth attention is the reproduction of a remarkably good collection of photographs loaned me by army and navy officers and war correspondents."
From an old scrap book of newspaper articles collected from the N. B. Standard, Mercury and Boston papers we learn that "The girls of the village wondered as they sat in the old church and looked at the speaker, how their beaux would conduct themselves under fire, and Angelina was wishing Edwin had a face and figure like a Praxiteles and would write stories which she would sit up all night to finish."
One reporter said that Davis "would make a poor bargain for himself if he was paid to talk on time".
He read at a "fearful pace for a few minutes". "He crowded material for a $500 article in the first five minutes".
When the map of the Santiago battle ground was thrown on the screen he said that the map was his own and "like no other map ever made."
He pleased Sippican by constantly comparing land and water with home. "At this point" he said, "torpedoes were as thick as oysters in Sippican inlet".
He said there was "nothing to prevent a Spanish Torpedo boat from running out and sinking four or five ships while they were spread out over the sea at such distances that the vessels in the rear were lost sight of for 14 hours at a time and we never knew whether they had been blown up, or sunk or had become disgusted and gone home. At night the fleet was as brilliantly illuminated as Brooklyn or New York with the lights of the bridge included. It looked like 34 Fall River boats bunched together and with every light turned on". He quoted the Englishman who looked down from the gallery
ك محددة
Plummer Handy - "I'm goin' Clammin'!"
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upon the House of Representatives and exclaimed "God takes care of drunken men, sailors, and the United States".
Marion felt that its own correspondent was telling the story comparing far away points and islands with Nye's wharf and Ram Island.
The Captains appreciated the story about the cigars on Admiral Cevera's ship.
After the Admiral was brought aboard Capt. Bob Evan's ship and the surgeon was attending to his injuries, Evans offered the Admiral a three cent Jamaica. The Admiral drew forth two damp Havanas.
"Good", said Evans, "I haven't had a Havana for eight weeks."
When the Admiral said that there were 12,000 on the Vizcaya, "If I had known that I wouldn't have sunk her", said Bob Evans.
The Spanish American war had hardly touched the village, and this talk made it real. Everybody sang, "There's a hot time in the old town tonight"; but like the Klondike rush, it was all far away. They were busy improving the town; a few faces turned towards the gold fields, but it was a busy prosperous time in the village. The selectmen were congratulating the town on the excellent state of the roads.
Davis is busy in London again. He wagers with Somers Somerset that a 14 year old London district messenger boy, he had employed, could carry a message to America, beat the mails, and "express no surprise" at the errand.
Of course it leaked out, the reporters made a great story of it. "Jaggers" did 8400 miles in 18 days delivering letters to Davis's family in Philadelphia and to Miss Cecil Clark in Chicago. When he arrived back in London he "was made much of, and given a gold medal by the Duchess of Portland and was presented to the Queen at a garden party."
To his mother Davis wrote that he regretted having sent the boy on such a journey "especially as the papers have made such an infernal row over it."
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The village is welcoming many new things in 1900. "We note with pleasure the addition of valuable residences to our town and confidently expect many of their owners and others who have houses here a portion of the time will soon become permanent residents."
They are voting 8 hours a day for town laborers, and, are to "see if the town will pay $2.00 a day for a day's work on the highway."
A rate of $10 on $1000 would give $10,522 on present valuation, but they may be obliged to raise the rate to $14. Paid for schools $2629.32, Schoolhouse repairs $278.98, and general appropriations for roads and bridges was $3,000.
Extravagant! and captains roar again at each other across the town hall. "Time to call the hog on appropriations!" All kinds , of machines appearing, and Sippican holding off steel tracks to be laid along the water front on petition of the new development, the New Bedford and Onset Street Railway.
A proud little town with its 11 miles of macadam, and the State Highway Commission calling it "a banner town; and the school committee advising that from the 1st grade History be begun by studying "early local history, the first settlers, who they were, why they came, in what part of the town they lived, their houses, their schools, and industries, their neighbors, the Indians" - "interesting historical events and local traditions."
But a trolley road!
There had been some objection to changing the winding sandy road that wound down to Nye's wharf past Capt. Henry Allen's!
And now! "Marion's beautiful drives defaced by trolley poles" said Bishop Brooks' brother, the Rev. John Cotton Brooks, who had been a summer resident of the town for 22 years. "Marion is unique".
New Bedford and Onset !! "Who wants to go to Onset", said Mr. Brooks witheringly!
Hosea Knowlton, the Attorney General of Massachusetts, in his speech to save the quiet of the village, made a prophecy of his last days. In speaking of the restful charm of the place
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he said that he hoped the last sound he heard would be "the lapping of the waves on the shore here at Marion".
The opposition to the road was very bitter. One lover of the town offered to buy land in the Center that the road might lay its tracks through the village of Rochester!
One lover of the quiet from St. Louis said among other things "It was never intended by God or man that there should be a factory in Marion."
And then the reporters got sarcastic!
"There is a senator busy interpreting the designs of the Almighty in Cuba, Porto Rico and the Phillipines and South Africa, India, and China - In view of this all but universal silence concerning God's will in our own country we are glad to find one man who recognizes the Almighty purpose right here in the state of Massachusetts, county of Plymouth, and town of Marion" - "But when he talks about Deity and the inten- tion of Omnipotence that no factory shall ever desecrate the soil of Marion we can but bow with bated breath in the presence of the only man in Massachusetts who has been admitted to consultation with Divine Providence concerning factory sites in the Old Colony."
One rhymer put the matter
"Unique, divinely planned for the elect, God's chosen Summer - Marionites."
"Marion turns its back bluntly upon its neighbors and positively refused to let them play in her back yard or slide down her cellar-door for fear they might drop in and make a visit. And Marion doesn't care to be visited save by the elite."
In Gilder's day a reporter wrote of
"The Marion crowd in general". "They would rather the place grew passe than popular and more than all things they pray that it may never become a resort for excursionists."
Another war called Davis! In Jan. 1900 he and Mrs. Davis were off, and about the time the old sailors and store- keepers and others are thundering at each other again across the corners about candidates for town office, and the railroad, he is sending a letter from Ladysmith.
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"This is just a line to say I got in here with the first after a gallop of twelve miles". 15,000 miles he has travelled from home to see Ladysmith relieved, and he writes "the wonder grows not only that it was ever relieved but that it was ever de- fended".
He summed up his impression of the Boer War, "I found that I admired the farmers", he said regardless of the open hostility of his English friends, "I found that I admired the farmers"; so he came home after both he and Mrs. Davis had "slept on cold ground, had cooked their food on sticks and drunk out of the same cups as the Kaffer servants."
He found the great trees of the "Cathedral Pines" around the Gilder studio had many of them been sacrificed for the steel lines that crept along a new road past Tabor Academy and the Library and Tabor Hall towards Wareham and Onset.
Marion, Mass., May, 1901.
"We arrived here last night in a glowing sunset which was followed by a grand moon. The house was warm and clean and bright with red curtains and open fires and everything was just as we had left it, so that it seemed as though we had just come out of a tortuous bad dream of asphalt and L-roads and bad air. I was never so glad to get away from New York.
Outside it is brisk and fine and smells of earth and melt- ing snow and there is a grand breeze from the bay. - I want to bottle up some of the air and send it to all my friends in New York. It is so much better than hot house violets".
And the famous dogs rush up the woodland roads. "Jag- gers" the great bull dog, and the famous "Kid" of the "Bar Sinister" commenting as he follows the tall figure on horse- back, "as for me I go hurrying around the country to the bench shows winning money and cups". "Jaggers" the little messenger was in the village for a time until he grew homesick for the streets of London. "Twenty years from the time when Davis sat discouraged on the City Hall Park bench he signed a contract for six stories at the highest figure ever offered an American author to that time," his brother writes.
And the old sailors still tell their stories too, in old Sippican! Something must remind a sailor of far away scenes
بدع:دي ٨ تهلر أباليت فـ
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and then he talks. Questions bring nothing from those grizzled old seamen. They look at you blankly. A tidal wave and twenty crests of breakers on the Monterey Coast, brings a letter from one to his young daughter on the Pacific Coast. It is Roy, the gay young Ensign, now a grave father. "Speaking of the waves", he writes, "I know something about them as I was two voyages on the East coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean at a place called East London. It is a bar harbor and vessels have to lay exposed to the full force of the Black South Easters. We have our anchors buoyed and shackled when riding out a gale ready to slip our light spars all down, sails furled with gaskets ready to cut - so if another vessel is going to drag afoul of you you can slip your cables and get underway and claw off shore if you can. If not try to get at the deepest water near shore and take your chance which is one in a hundred.
The first time I was there, there were ten vessels a- shore and I believe about seven saved from the lot. It is awful, especially in the night. Everyone on deck hanging on and trusting to our tackle to hold - when you see a rocket go up and know that some poor fellows are doomed, and then another and another - and in the morning not a sight of them left - broken up into kindling wood.
The last time I went there I had patent gutta percha riders -the chains taken off the windlass and besides the riders had a spring hawser the length of the vessel bent on the chains and still I am here writing this. I dragged in one of the gales to a pretty bad fix but the anchors held on and the next day it moderated but the signal station had signals for another gale, and as I had no show to ride out another gale or to get to sea in a gale if I had to go, I thought I would try it when I could carry some sail and I picked up my anchor and skipped to sea, and it was a terrible night, flooded with seas all night long.
When I got back to anchor several more vessels had met their doom.
When I arrived on my second voyage there, after we came to anchor you couldn't stand on deck, had to hold on to the rail and when the Life Boat or Surf Boat came alongside to see if any one was going ashore, they had then on board, seven
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captains besides the crew and in going ashore, there were nine drowned from her rolled over by the surf. The captains and the second mate from the bark, nearest me, were drowned and afterwards that Bark went ashore and all hands were drowned. I felt very bad over that as we had agreed to help each other discharge - that is, when he had a lighter to load I would send a boat with men to help him - and he do likewise, and it was to be his last voyage - when he got home he was going to stay ashore. He was lost before we had a lighter."
And then he adds in conclusion
"Reading your letter reminded me how very disagreeable the sea can be."
And Josephine, the school teacher, grown old, no Mrs. Taber for whom to sew, sitting calmly at her window looking blandly out at the Main St. of the village as though she had never been out of her dooryard, astonishes a young neighbor by remarking that she was reminded of an experience of hers on a treacherous coast, when she was carried to dry land through the surf by a big black savage.
"Weren't you afraid?" asked her big-eyed visitor.
"No", said Josephine, "there we were, and it was the only way to land."
"Well", she went on, "you can't always tell, that most awful looking savage was the mildest creature;" but on the other hand when she was with her husband, Timothy, when he was ship keeper on a ship in N. Y. harbor for a time, they were along side of another ship, and when her husband went ashore, he often left her in the care of a nice appearing man who seemed to be always about the docks and on the next ship most of the time.
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