Now we must turn from James Parsons to a man of a different type, or
rather of a different variety of the same type; for they descend
alike from original founders of the town, and, like most of their
fellow-townsmen, are both of unqualified Pilgrim stock.
To get to Captain Joseph Pelham's house, you have to drive along a range
of hills for some miles, skirting the sea; then you come, half-way, to a
bright modern village with trees along the main street, with houses and
fences kept painted up, for the most part, but here and there relieved
by an unpainted dwelling of a past generation.
Here you have an option. You may either pursue your road through the
high-lying prosperous street, with peeps of salt water to the right,
or you may turn sharply off at a little store and descend to the lower
road. It is always a struggle to choose.
The road to the beach descends a sharp, gravelly hill, and crosses a
bridge. Then you come out on a waste of salt-marsh, threaded by the
creek, broken by wild, fantastic sand-hills, grown over by beach-grass
which will cut your fingers like a knife. You drive close along
the white, precipitous beach; you pass the long, shaky pier, with
half-decayed fish-houses at the other end, and picturesque heaps of
fish-cars, seines, and barrels. Then the road, following the shore a
little longer, climbs the hill and enters the woods. Two miles more and
you come out to fields with mossy fences, and occasional houses.
The houses begin to be more frequent. All at once you enter the main
street of W------.
In a moment you see that you have come into a new atmosphere. There is a
large modern church among the older ones. There are large, fine houses,
some old-fashioned, others new. By some miraculous intervention Queen
Anne has not as yet made her appearance. There are handsome, well-filled
stores, going into no little refinement in stock. There is, of course,
a small brick library, built by the bounty of a New Yorker who was born
here. There is a brick national bank, and a face brick block occupied
above by Freemasons, orders of Red Men, Knights Templars, and the Pool
of Siloam Lodge, I. O. O. F., and below by a savings bank and a local
marine insurance company.
It is here that we shall find Captain Joseph Pelham. If a stranger has
occasion to inquire for the leading men of the place he is always first
referred to him. It is he who heads every list and is the chairman
of every meeting. When a certain public man, commanding but a small
following here, appeared, upon his campaign tour, and found no one
to escort him to the platform and preside, so that he was obliged to
justify his appearance here by the Scripture passage, “They that are
whole need not a physician, but they that are sick;” at the moment
of entering the hall, closely packed with curious opponents, disposed
perhaps to be derisive when the situation for the visitor was
embarrassing in the extreme,--it was Captain Joseph Pelham who, though
the bitterest opponent of them all, rose from his seat, gave the speaker
his arm, escorted him to the platform, presented him with grave courtesy
to the audience, and sat beside him through the entire discourse.
While Captain Pelham continued to go to sea, and after that, until he
was made president of the insurance company, he lived a mile or two out
of the town, in a house he had inherited. It is picturesquely situated,
on a bare hill, with a wide view of the inland and the ocean. As
you look down from its south windows, the cluster of houses nestling
together at the shore below stand sharply out against the water. It is
one of those white houses common in our older towns,--two-storied, long
on the street, with the front door in the middle. Of the interior it is
enough to say that its owner had sailed for thirty years to Hong-Kong,
Calcutta and Madras. It had a prevailing odor of teak and lacquer. In
the front hall was a vast china cane-holder; a turretted Calcutta hat
hung on the hat-tree; a heavy, varnished Chinese umbrella stood in a
corner; a long and handsome settee from Java stood against the wall.
In the parlors, on either hand, were Chinese tables shutting up like
telescopes, elaborate rattan chairs of different kinds, and numberless
other things of this sort, which had plainly been honestly come by, and
not bought.
Then, if you met the Captain's favor, he would show you with becoming
pride some family relics, and tell you about them. They came mostly
from his paternal grandfather, who was a shipmaster too, had commanded a
privateer in the Revolution, and made a fortune. There were a number
of pieces of handsome furniture,--these you could see for yourself What
would be shown you, with a half-diffident air, would be: a silver mug;
two Revere tablespoons; a few tiny teaspoons marked F.; a handsome sword
and scabbard; a yellow satin waistcoat and small-clothes; portraits,
not artistic, but effective, of his grandfather, in a velvet coat and
knee-breeches, with a long spyglass in his hand, and of his grandmother,
a strong, matter-of-fact looking woman, handsomely dressed.
But the thing which the Captain secretly treasured most, but brought out
last, was his grandmother's Dutch Bible. It is a curious old book; you
can see it still if you wish. It has an elaborate frontispiece. Sixteen
cuts of leading incidents in Scripture history conduct you by gentle
stages, from Eden, through the offering of Isaac, to the close of the
Evangelists, and surround Dr. Martin Luther, who, in a gown, holds back
the curtains of a pillared alcove, to show you, through two windows, an
Old and a New Testament landscape, and a lady sitting beneath a canopy,
with an open volume. The covers are of thick bevelled board covered with
leather. There was once a heavy clasp. The edges are richly gilded, and
figures are pricked in the gilding. It is very handsomely printed.
It was in the possession, in 1760, of a young New England girl, the
Captain's grandmother. There is a story about it,--a story too long to
tell here. Suffice it to say that the Captain's ancestor, who settled
early in New England, came from Leyden shortly after Mr. John Robinson.
A hundred years later and more, in the oddest way, an acquaintance
sprang up with certain Dutch connections, and in the course of it this
Bible, then new and elegant, found its way over the sea as a gift to
young Mistress Preston. In New England, and as a relic of the early
ties of our people with Holland, momentarily renewed after a century had
passed away, it is probably unique. It was a last farewell from Holland
to her English children, before she parted company with them forever.
I have told you about this house, as I recall it, although Captain
Pelham had now ceased to live there, because it was there alone that he
seemed completely at home. Furnished as it was from the four quarters
of the globe, everything seemed to fit in with his ways. He supplemented
the Chinese tables, and they supplemented him. But when he ceased to
go to sea, in late middle life, and settled down at home upon his
competency, and began a little later to become interested in public
matters; when he was at last made president of the insurance company,
a director in the bank, and a trustee in the savings bank, and when
affairs were left more and more to his control, it became convenient for
him to get into town; and his wife and daughter were perhaps ambitious
for the change.
So he had sold his house by the sea, and had bought a large and somewhat
pretentious one on the main street, with a cast-iron summer arbor, and
a bay-window closed in for a conservatory. He had furnished it from the
city with new Brussels carpet, with a parlor set, a sitting-room set,
a dining-room set, and chamber sets; and the antique things which had
given his former home an air of charming picturesqueness were for the
most part tucked away in unnoticed corners.
The Captain never seemed to me to have become quite naturalized in his
new home. He never belonged to the furniture, or the furniture to him.
The place where you saw him best in these later days was in the office
of his insurance company, or in the little business-room of one of the
banks, surrounded by a knot of more substantial townsmen, or talking
patiently with some small farmer or seafaring man seeking for insurance
or a loan. One of the most marked features of his character was a
certain patience and considerateness which made all borrowers apply by
preference to him. He would sit down at his little table with a plain
man whose affairs were in disorder, and listen with close attention
to his application for a loan. Somehow the man would find himself
disclosing all the particulars of his distress. Then Captain Pelham, in
his quiet way, would go over the whole matter with him; would plan
with him on his concerns; would try to see if it were not possible to
postpone a little the payment of debts and to hasten the collection of
claims; to get a part of the money for a short time from a son in Boston
or a married daughter in New Bedford; and so, by pulling and hauling, to
weather the Cape.
I must say a word about his position in town matters. He had been at sea
the greater part of the time from sixteen to fifty-two. During that time
he had had absolutely no concern with political affairs. He had never
voted: for he had never, as it had happened, been ashore at the time of
an election. And yet before he had been at home six years he was one
of the selectmen of the town and overseer of the poor, and had
become familiar with the details of Massachusetts town government,
superficially so simple, in fact so complex. It was a large town, of no
small wealth. Lying as it did along the seaboard, where havoc was always
being made by disasters of the sea, there was not only a larger number
than in an inland town of persons actually quartered in the poorhouse,
but there were many broken families who had to be helped in their own
homes. And it was to me an interesting fact that in dealing with two
score households of this class, Captain Pel-ham, who had spent most of
his time at sea, was able to display the utmost tact and judgment. He
applied to their affairs that same plain kindliness and sound sense
which he showed in the matter of discounts at the bank.
While the friendships of Captain Pelham were chiefly in his own town,
his acquaintance was not confined to it. In his own quiet, unpretending
way he was something of a man of the world. He was known in the marine
insurance offices in the large cities. He had been familiar all his
life with large affairs; he had commanded valuable ships, loaded with
fortunes in teas and silks, in the days when an India captain was a
merchant.