THE CAPE
If you come from the Firelands in the Middle West, if you discover Cape
Cod, if you fall in love with a little empty ninety-five-year-old house
there and buy it, with its three acres of pines and locust trees and
arbutus and rose bushes--then you long to go to see it after the deed is
filed. It may be the dead of winter, but you want to go. You do not want
to be merely a "summer person." The sea is rocking with a February gale,
and the rain drives over the dunes in slanting gusts. But you go
cruising down the Cape in the evening train, disembark two or three
stations short of Provincetown, make your way up your lane, unlock your
door, light a fire in your stove, set a lamp in your window, and feel
that the house has been waiting there all its ninety-five years, for
you.
If you are generous with your share of the world, you invite your
friends.
In just this way, our friend from the West filed her deed, built her
fire with driftwood and pine cones, set her teakettle on the stove, and
sent for Barbara and me to come.
We had known Cape Cod in summer, with its blueberries and its
sailing-craft, its wharves and artist-colonies and ocean breezes. But we
had never seen it in winter, with snow on the sand-dunes and the wind
flying over with sleet and rain.
An old house with seafaring memories knows how to behave in a storm. At
high tide, our house sits up not so very far above the level of the sea.
A little Ark on a little Ararat, it was built nearly a century ago by
Jonah Atkins for Noah Smith; Noah and Jonah--surely names of men
equipped to go a voyage. The lumber for the house had to be brought by
ship from Maine, thrown overboard off shore, rafted up to the land in
time of high-course tide, spread out on the hill to dry, and then set
solidly together, and pegged. Jonah Atkins made his wooden pegs to stay.
The gale while we were there blew great ships far out of their course at
sea, but there was not a shiver in the timbers of our roof.
We took the first stormy day to explore the house. To an inlander there
is something magical about discovering seafaring implements and deep-sea
fishing-gear of any kind about a house. You expect to find such things
on ships and wharves; but when you find them high and dry, stowed away
under rafters, they rouse your anchored spirit like a ship-ahoy. The
corners under our roof were as full of treasures as a ship-chandler's
loft: all sorts of stowaways that had been hidden for years in
out-of-the-way nooks; a clam-fork under the eaves, for instance, and a
net-shuttle on the sill. Up in the porch-attic, we found a wooden cradle
becalmed under the rafters, left there probably when the last little
Noah Smith grew too old to voyage in such small craft. Something
glittered in the shadows under the hood of the cradle, and Barbara
reached in to explore. She brought out a large globe of heavy glass--not
a fish-globe, with an opening, but a perfect sphere. We all ventured
guesses. It could not be a receptacle or lamp-accessory of any kind, for
there was no entrance or exit to it, except a tiny pin-hole clogged up,
at one point. Was it an ornament, or a toy, or a great lens of some
kind, or perhaps a globe used by some old-time crystal-gazer? We found
out later that it was a net-float--a glass buoy to bob on top of the
waves, holding up a corner of the net at sea. You find them sometimes on
the beach after a storm. An old glass net-float dry-docked under the
hood of a cradle--we put it back where we found it.
One of our fence-posts was made of a piece of a mast, our clothes-horse
of teakwood washed ashore after the wreck of the Portland, our stool of
wreckage from the frigate Jason; and on the end of the string to which
our back-door key was fastened, there hung a large snail-shell, like a
seal on a fob.
But the most nautical of our possessions was the carpet on the floor of
our kitchen; a carpet made of an old sail cut square and spread smoothly
and painted gray--an old sail with all the wind taken out of it, spread,
not this time for Java Head or Lisbon, but for our kitchen floor!
"Now," said our hostess, calling us to the window, "perhaps you can
understand why they call this place The Point."
We looked out. The whole ocean was crowding up the valley,--foam and
gulls and driftwood and all,--flooding the bed of the Pamet River. The
marsh-grass and the bottom-lands, which had been solid ground two hours
before, were the floor of the ocean now; the familiar winding channel of
the Pamet, with its fish-weirs, eel-traps, and boundaries all submerged.
"Isn't this a sea-going promontory?" inquired our proud freeholder, as
we watched a sea-gull flap its way up against the rain, alight on the
water, and swim toward our territory over the gusty brine. "This, you
see, is high-course tide," our friend went on, with that double vanity
that comes from being the possessor of a new estate and a new
vocabulary. "But it never makes in beyond this Point. The Indians used
to have their wigwam here before the house was built."
Barbara and I instantly adopted for our own permanent possession the
sea-going promontory, the gulls and the high tide sailing up around our
premises, and the house itself.
[Illustration: "The Ark"]
During our sojourn on the Cape, we learned just one thing that we can be
sure of: You should never make any general statement whatever about Cape
Cod. If you do, you will find your statement disproved by the next turn
of the tide, or turn of the road. You mention the fact that Bartholomew
Gosnold discovered it in 1602, naming it Cape Cod because there his boat
was so "pestered" with codfish. And a well-informed friend will set you
right by explaining how the Vikings discovered it some six hundred years
earlier. Or perhaps you are interested in weather-vanes. After
inspecting them on all the barns down the Cape, you say that all
weather-vanes here are codfish; some flat codfish, some solid, but all
cod. Instantly you look up and see a beautiful swordfish afloat over the
roof of your neighbor's barn. Perhaps you see Barnstable in midwinter,
with its marshlands and shores packed with cakes of ice, pink and
lavender in the sunset, with sea-gulls sitting upright on the edges,
like so many penguins on an Arctic floe. You decide that the Cape
harbors are full of ice. But if you inspect the harbor of Provincetown
on that same day, you are likely to find not a scrap of ice on the
premises.
You might as well confine yourself to particulars, and avoid large
sayings of any sort. Thoreau is properly cautious about this. Even when
he speaks of so simple a matter as the rarity of dogs and cats on the
Atlantic side of the Cape, he guards his speech. "Still less," says he,
"could you think of a cat bending her steps that way and shaking her wet
foot over the Atlantic; _yet even this happens sometimes, they tell
me._" They told him the truth. A fine, enormous, distinguished-looking
white cat, sitting on your doorstep at the foot of the pilaster of your
doorway, is as common on some parts of the Cape as the pointed
Christmas-trees in green tubs on the doorsteps of old houses in certain
cities inland. Remarkable cats, brindle or yellow or tiger or snowball
or gray, they are loved while they live, lamented when they die. "If I
could look out of the window," said a little boy whose favorite cat had
died, "and see my Bobbie coming down the road, wouldn't I wun to let him
in?" The Cape Cod cats are not confined to doorsteps. They catch the
Cape Cod mice. And at least one elegant pure-white cat of our
acquaintance goes stepping down the Cape with her master, shaking her
wet foot over the Atlantic, perhaps, but waiting until it is time to go
back, and then escorting him home.
Therefore, since it is so unsafe to generalize, we are resolved to make
no sweeping statements about the Cape Cod house. You cannot be too sure
even about your own. You discover this when you take its measurements
for curtains and wall-paper; no two apertures and no two surfaces are
alike.
But, with due reservations, there is one sort of old house that was most
nearly standardized by the early builders: the low-studded,
story-and-a-half house, with its long gable roof, its many little
windows tucked up under the point of the gable, its front to the south,
its "West Entry" at one side, and its six-panel door, with a row of
little square glass panes above it---sometimes a row of four lights,
sometimes five. More rarely there is a fan-light over the door, curving
out to the pilasters at each side.
All this varies a little, and most of the houses have been altered more
or less by subsequent generations. But whenever you come upon the
regulation, unspoiled Cape Cod house, there is a general plan that you
recognize at once.
For example: the term "West Entry" is no idle phrase. West Entry means
west entry, regardless of your angle to the road. Your house faces the
south, and your side entry faces west, though the road may run at random
on a wild slant, and though your west entry open on the midst of the
sea. It does not matter whether you face the highway or not, does it? A
road is a perishable and human thing at best; but the points of the
compass mean business on the Cape.
Our own house is a perfect illustration of the results of this theory:
if you should ever wish to reach our West Entry, you would have to
circumnavigate our Point, and scale an all-but-inaccessible bank to the
unused door. Because of this inconvenience of our "entry," we always
expect callers to come in at the door of our kitchen--our porch. For the
benefit of the uninstructed it may be well to say that when we speak of
our "porch" on our part of the Cape, we mean the same thing as an ell.
Our porch is an ell with an attic over it, a kitchen chimney, our stove,
and our pump and major equipment for the industries of the day. It opens
into the "winter kitchen," where they did their fireplace cooking years
ago, before there was a stove in the porch.
The outside piazza arrangement, unroofed, we call our platform, or walk.
Ours is very neatly made of matched planks, with one part at the end
cleverly arranged to slide, so that you can draw out the planks a little
and get down into the manhole that incloses the pipes from pump to
drilled well. On cold winter nights, you let yourself down on the ladder
twelve feet underground, to turn off the water in the pump, if you are
afraid that the pipes are going to freeze. I shall never forget the
sensation of usefulness that filled my beating heart when I disappeared
down that hatchway one clear cold night and opened the little faucet far
below. When you go down that neat, perfectly smooth tube, with the
winter stars shining solemnly down on the top of your head, you feel
like a more slender Saint Nicholas making his way down a sootless
chimney.
The Cape Cod cellar is also interesting to a newcomer. It is a small
circular dungeon-keep, solidly built of masonry, usually under the "east
room." You go into it down a short flight of steps on the outside of the
house, through a small entry which has the outer aspect of a tall
dog-kennel, and the inner aspect of a Dutch interior, perfectly
spotless. Some authorities say that the Cape cellars were made circular
to prevent the heavy sand from breaking through by undue pressure on any
one wall, as would happen in a four-cornered cellar. Others imagine that
seafaring men made their cellars circular on the principle of the
half-barrel in the sand. An old stone-mason says that they did it
because firm corners of field-rock are so hard to make. But when you
stand in these spick-and-span circles of solid masonry,--an interior
like the inside of a bowl,--you suspect that the tidy housewives planned
the rounded walls so as to leave no odd corners for spiders and cobwebs.
There may be square cellars on the Cape, and there certainly are some
west entries that point the wrong way. But in general, when you enter a
Cape Cod "three-quarters" house, you go in through the porch-door, you
sit and visit in the winter kitchen, and you have your wedding in The
Room. Porch, winter kitchen, pantry, east bedroom, The Room, the west
bedroom near the west entry--it is a charming and compact arrangement
for a little house, with regard for space and views and corners. Unless
your "sight" from the windows is cut off by trees or hills, you have
views of ocean dawns and sunsets framed in delicate white moulding, and
seen through small square panes. The world outside appears like a series
of pictures seen through an artist's finder. If your house tops a dune
on the narrow part of the Cape, you may see the sails on the horizon of
the Atlantic on the east, and the sails on the horizon of the Bay on the
west; a clear view of the salt water straight across the Cape in both
directions.
As you go down from Barnstable to Provincetown, in automobile or by
train, you notice that there are more windows than you expect to see in
the triangle under the slope of the roofs. Commonly, you see two large
windows in the middle of the upper half-story, and on each side of
these, under the slope of the roof, two much smaller windows in the
corners. Perhaps there is even a fifth window, sometimes triangular,
sometimes elongated, under the very peak of the roof. Thoreau was
mightily pleased with these. He said that it looked as if every member
of the family had punched a hole through the upper half-story, the
better to see the view--large windows for Father and Mother, small
windows for children, on the principle of large door for the cat and
small door for the kitten. The two large windows light the one square
room finished off under the peak of the roof. The other smaller windows
are to ventilate the "open chambers"--the slope-roofed spaces left on
either side of the finished room, under the rafters. In large families,
in the early days, some of the children had to sleep out in these open
chambers, under the slope of the roof. There is at least one noted man
of affairs in the United States to-day who affirms that there is one
rafter in the open chamber of a certain house on Cape Cod that has a
slight but clearly defined hollow worn in it, where he used to collide
with the roof when he got aboard his trundle-bed in the dark.
[Illustration: Old Fish Wharf, Cape Cod]
The Double House is different; the two-story house is different; the
steep-roofed house is different; and so are the houses built by summer
people. There are even a few houses made of old windmills, with three
stories: living-room on the ground floor, little bedroom on the second
floor, tiny bedroom up aloft, and a look-out that is almost level with
the windmill sails.
But let us stick to our own experience. In our own house, and in those
of the neighbors around us, you see delicate white paneling around the
fireplace up to the ceiling; an antique china closet with its old
copper-lustre and sprigged ware; white wainscoting around the room up to
the level of the window-sills; exquisite moulding all around the windows
and doors; in short, it is the simplest little house in the world, in
plan, with unexpected beauty of detail. Braided mats on the floor, a
fire in the stove, and a breeze from the Azores scudding over our
roof--there certainly is good comfort even in dead of winter on the
Cape.
We are glad that the Pilgrims were "joyfull" at the sight of "Cap-Codd."
They decided not to pause there, but to "stande for ye southward to
finde some place aboute Hudsons river for their habitation." But they
were turned back by the "deangerous shoulds and roring breakers," and
were thankful to bear up again along the Atlantic side of the Cape until
they got into harbor, "wher they ridd in safetie."
In our intervals of fair weather, we visited the places where they
stopped: Chatham where they were turned back, Provincetown where they
waded ashore, Truro where they camped for the night and explored the
Pamet River, and Corn Hill where they found "diverce faire Indean
baskets filled with corne." All this country was as wintry as the
Pilgrims found it, with long streaks of snow caught in the beach-grass
on the tops of the camel-back dunes. From the crest of one dune, we
watched the sun dropping over the harbor until it rested on the water,
like a great luminous net-float drifting off to sea.
[Illustration: The Pilgrim Monument, Provincetown]
Provincetown we saw in a flying snow-squall, all the marine colors so
loved by the artists softened in the snowy light, even the strange blue
of a guineaboat by the fish-wharf. Hollyhock Lane was only a narrow
passageway of frosty stubble, and the seagulls winging over looked
ghostly against the pale sky. The wharves, the monument, the lighthouse,
and the sails in the harbor were blurred by the fine flakes that filled
the air.
But the snow soon changed to rain, the squall turned into a northeast
wind, the wind rose to a gale, and Barbara and I decided to see the
Atlantic in a real storm. We went home first for rubber coats, and then
set off down the road to the ocean side of the Cape. The wind from the
Atlantic goes over the Pamet valley in one great rush of invisible
swiftness. As you lean forward against it, you feel that you must run to
hold your own. If we had been going the other way, we could have spread
our cloaks and gone flying home like witches, over the dunes. As it was,
beating our way against it, we had to stop in the lee of the bayberry
slopes to catch our breath. Ahead of us we saw only the wave-like crests
of the dunes, one after another, with their patches of ruddy wild
cranberry, and their streaks of sand and snow. And then, as we went
battling over the top of the last rise in the road, we saw between two
sand-dunes ahead of us a darker hill beyond, its peculiar heavy gray
coloring dull and threatening; its crest lay straight against the sky,
and all the snowy white streaks along it were in motion. It was the sea.
We made for the top of the nearest dune ahead. It rose up steep as a
breaker itself, with a jagged edge at the top where the wind had scooped
out sharp hollows at the roots of the beach-grass. We each made straight
for one of these hollows, in one last determined dash up the sheer
slope. All this time, the noise of tumult had been growing louder and
louder, and when we reached the crest, there it was before us, the whole
Atlantic ocean rearing toward our frail strip of sandy shore. We had the
horrible impression that the whole roaring thing was one gray hill of
water, coming in. The breakers were plunging along from sky to shore
with no regard for order. You could not have watched for the ninth wave,
for they were breaking in masses, three great thunderheads at a time
crashing into each other from different directions and coming up the
beach with a shout, still struggling together in foam. Before they were
half-way in, another surge was almost on top of them, with a huge
white-horse breaker rearing at one side--everywhere one rush of
confusion and terrible tossing with white crests of spray. There was not
a sail in sight, or a human being, or an island, or a bird; only a world
of furious water and a ragged horizon of mist and trailing cloud as far
as we could see in three directions.
It is hard to believe that the Mayflower came cruising over the Atlantic
through just such winds. "In sundrie of these stormes," says Bradford,
"the winds were so feirce & ye seas so high, as they could not beare a
knote of sail, but were forced to hull, for diverce days togither." When
we think how the sea can growl around an ocean-liner now, and then think
how the little Mayflower went hulling for diverce days in "mighty
storme," we wonder how it ever got here at all. And indeed, we are told
that at one time in mid-ocean, when the main beam of the little craft
buckled, there was nothing between the passengers and shipwreck except a
certain "great iron scrue ye passengers brought from Holland which would
raise ye beam to his place." They screwed up the scrue and calked the
deck; and though they knew that "with the working of ye ship they would
not long keep stanch," they hoped that she might weather the rest of the
voyage if they did not overpress her with sails.
"So," remarks the Governor with fine simplicity, "they comited them
selves to ye will of God, & resolved to proseede."
The whole story of that voyage has in it the vitality of the wind at
sea. It has also the nobility always found when the human will goes
somewhere and does something with the minimum of material equipment,
alone, against odds, for the sake of a true conviction. Materially, the
Pilgrims had the narrowest possible margin. A great iron screw to prop
their beam; a great iron purpose to prop their souls.
We do well to hold in honor those who voyage alone through "crosse winds
and feirce stormes into desperat and inevitable perill," in the power of
a noble thought. We erect our monuments to those who, with
discouragement and danger and threatened shipwreck all around them,
valiantly prop up their beam, calk their decks, commit themselves to the
will of God--and "resolve to proseede."
THE END
McGrath-Sherrill Press Boston