AFTER FIFTY YEARS
If you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered,
all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England
gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home,
you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus
Briggs, long years retired.
Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks
projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize
rest after labor, peace after strife.
From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a
splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the
harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore,
rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the
white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding
mystery of open Atlantic.
Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries
and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed
ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung.
Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the
dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray
headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed
big in history.
Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village
street extended. Wandering irregularly with the broken shore line, it
led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white,
square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and
wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine
odors with the fresh tang of the sea.
Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the
captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes insistent odors, with her
own perfumes of asters and petunias, nasturtiums, dahlias, sweet fern,
and fresh, revivifying caresses of poplar, elm and pine, of sumac,
buttonwood and willow.
With certain westerly breezes—breezes that bore to Snug Haven the sad,
slow chant of the whistling buoy on Graves Shoal and the tolling of the
bell buoy on the Shallows—oakum and tar, pitch, salt and fish had the
best of it in South Endicutt. But with a shift to landward, apple-tree,
mignonette and phlox and other blooms marshalled victorious essences;
and the little village by the lip of the sea grew sweet and warm as the
breast of a young girl who dreams.
The afternoon on which Captain Alpheus Briggs once more comes to our
sight—the 24th of June, 1918—was just one of those drowsy, perfumed
afternoons, when the long roar of the breakers over Dry Shingle Reef
seemed part of the secrets the breeze was whispering among the pine
needles on Croft Hill, and when the droning of the captain’s bees,
among his spotted tiger-lilies, his sweet peas, cannas and hydrangeas,
seemed conspiring with the sun-drenched warmth of the old-fashioned
garden to lull man’s spirit into rest and soothe life’s fever with
nepenthe.
Basking in the sunlight of his piazza, at ease in a broad-armed rocker
by a wicker table, the old captain appeared mightily content with life.
Beside him lay a wiry-haired Airedale, seemingly asleep yet with one
eye ready to cock open at the captain’s slightest move. A blue cap,
gold-braided, hung atop one of the uprights of the rocking-chair; the
captain’s bushy hair, still thick, though now spun silver, contrasted
with his deep-lined face, tanned brown. Glad expectancy showed in his
deep-set eyes, clear blue as they had been full fifty years ago, eyes
under bushy brows that, once black, now matched the silver of his hair.
White, too, his beard had grown. Once in a while he stroked it,
nervously, with a strong, corded hand that seemed, as his whole,
square-knit body seemed, almost as vigorous as in the long ago—the
half-forgotten, wholly repented long ago of violence and evil ways.
Not yet had senility laid its clutch upon Alpheus Briggs. Wrinkles had
come, and a certain stooping of the powerful shoulders; but the old
captain’s blue coat with its brass buttons still covered a body of iron
strength.
The telescope across his knees was no more trim than he. Carefully
tended beard, well-brushed coat and polished boots all proclaimed
Alpheus Briggs a proud old man. Though the soul of him had utterly
changed, still Captain Briggs held true to type. In him no laxity
inhered, no falling away from the strict tenets of shipshape neatness.
The captain appeared to be waiting for something. Once in a while he
raised the telescope and directed it toward the far blue sheet of the
outer harbor, where the headland of Pigeon Cliff thrust itself against
the gray-green of the ship channel, swimming in a distant set of haze.
Eagerly he explored the prospect, letting his glass rest on white lines
of gulls that covered the tide-bars, on the whiter lines of foam over
the reef, on the catboats and dories, the rusty coasting steamers and
clumsy coal-barges near or far away. With care he sought among the
tawny sails; and as each schooner tacked, its canvas now sunlit, now
umber in shade, the captain’s gaze seemed questioning: “Are you the
craft I seek?”
The answer came always negative. With patience, Captain Briggs lowered
his glass again and resumed his vigil.
“No use getting uneasy,” said he, at last; and brought out pipe and
tobacco from the pocket of his square-cut jacket. “It won’t bring him a
bit sooner. He wrote me he’d be here sometime to-day, and that means he
surely will be. He’s a Briggs. What he says he’ll do he _will_ do. No
Briggs ever breaks a promise, and Hal is all clear Briggs, from truck
to keelson!”
Waiting, pondering, the old man let his eyes wander over the Snug Haven
of his last years; the place where he could keep contact with sunshine
and seashine, with the salt breeze and the bite of old ocean, yet where
comfort and peace profound could all be his.
A pleasant domain it was, and in all its arrangements eloquent of
the old captain. There life had been very kind to him, and there his
darkest moments of bereavement had been fought through, survived.
Thither, more than five-and-forty years ago, he had brought the young
wife whose love had turned his heart from evil ways and set his feet
upon the better path from which, nearly half a century, they had not
strayed.
In the upper front room his only son, Edward, had been born; and from
the door, close at hand, he had followed the coffins that had taken
away from him the three beings about whom, successively, the tendrils
of his affection had clung.
First, the hand of death had closed upon his wife; but, profound as
that loss had been, it had left to him his son. In this same house,
that son had grown to manhood, and had himself taken a wife; and so
for a few years there had been happiness again.
But not for long. The birth of Hal, the old man’s grandson, had cost
the life of Hal’s mother, a daughter-in-law whom Captain Briggs had
loved like his own flesh and blood; and, two years after, tragedy had
once more entered Snug Haven. Edward Briggs, on his first voyage as
master of a ship—a granite-schooner, between Rockport and Boston—had
fallen victim of a breaking derrick-rope. The granite lintel that had
crushed the body of the old captain’s son had fallen also upon the
captain’s heart. Long after the grass had grown upon that third grave
in the Briggs burial lot, up there on the hill overlooking the shining
harbor, the old man had lived as in a dream.
Then, gradually, the fingers of little Hal, fumbling at the latchets of
the old man’s heart, had in some miraculous way of their own that only
childish fingers possess, opened that crushed and broken doorway; and
Hal had entered in, and once more life had smiled upon the captain.
After even the last leaves of autumn have fallen, sometimes wonderful
days still for a little while warm the dying world and make men glad.
Thus, with the captain. He had seemed to lose everything; and yet,
after all, Indian summer still had waited for him. In the declining
years, Hal had become his sunshine and his warmth, once more to expand
his soul, once more to bid him love. And he had loved, completely,
blindly, concentrating upon the boy, the last remaining hope of his
family, an affection so intense that more than once the child, hurt
by the fierce grip of the old man’s arms, had cried aloud in pain and
fright. Whereat the captain, swiftly penitent, had kissed and fondled
him, sung brave sea chanteys to him, taught him wondrous miracles of
splicing and weaving, or had fashioned boats and little guns, and so
had brought young Hal to worship him as a child will when a man comes
to his plane and is another, larger child with him.
Life would have ceased to hold any purpose or meaning for the captain,
had it not been for Hal. The boy, wonderfully strong, had soon begun to
absorb so much of the captain’s affection that the wounds in his heart
had ceased to bleed, and that his pain had given place to a kind of
dumb acquiescence. And after the shock of the final loss had somewhat
passed life had taken root again, in Snug Haven.
Hal had thriven mightily in the sea air. Body and mind, he had
developed at a wonderful pace. He had soon grown so handsome that even
his occasional childish fits of temper—quite extraordinary fits, of
strange violence, though brief—had been forgiven by every one. He had
needed but to smile to be absolved.
Life had been, for the boy, all “a wonder and a wild desire.” The
shadow of death had not been able to darken it. Before very long he
had come to care little for any human relationship save with his
grandfather. But the captain, proud of race, had often spoken to him
of his father and his mother, or, leading Hal by the hand, had trudged
up the well-worn path to the cemetery on the hill, to show the boy the
well-kept graves.
So Hal had grown up. Shore and sea and sky had all combined to develop
him. School and play, and all the wonders of cliff, beach, tide, and
storm, of dories, nets, tackle, ships, and sea-things had filled both
mind and body with unusual vigor.
The captain had told Hal endless tales of travel, had taught him an
infinite number of sea-marvels. Before Hal had reached ten years, he
had come to know every rope and spar of many rigs.
At twelve, he had built a dory; and, two years later with the captain’s
help, a catboat, in which he and the old man had sailed in all
weathers. If there were any tricks of navigation that the boy did not
learn, or anything about the mysterious doings of the sea, it was only
because the captain himself fell short of complete knowledge.
In everything the captain had indulged him. Yet even though he had
never inflicted punishment, and even though young Hal had grown up to
have pretty much his own way, the captain had denied spoiling him.
“Only poor material will spoil,” he had always said. “You can’t spoil
the genuine, thoroughbred stuff. No, nor break it, either. I know what
I’m doing. Whose business is it, but my own?”
Sharing a thousand interests in common with Hal, the captain’s love
and hope had burned ever higher and more steadily. As the violent and
grief-stricken past had faded gradually into a vague melancholy, the
future had seemed beckoning with ever clearer cheer. The captain had
come to have dreams of some day seeing Hal master of the biggest ship
afloat. He had formed a hundred plans and dreamed a thousand dreams,
all more or less enwoven with the sea. And though Hal, when he had
finished school and had entered college, had begun to show strange
aptitude for languages—especially the Oriental tongues—still the old
man had never quite abandoned hope that some day the grandson might
stand as captain on the bridge of a tall liner.
For many years another influence had had its part in molding Hal—the
influence of Ezra Trefethen, whereof now a word or two. Ezra, good
soul, had lived at Snug Haven ever since Hal’s birth, less as a servant
than as a member of the household. Once he had cooked for the captain,
on a voyage out to Japan. His simple philosophy and loyalty, as well as
his exceeding skill with saucepans, had greatly attached the captain
to him—this being, you understand, in the period after the captain’s
marriage had made of him another and a better man.
When Hal’s mother had died, the captain had given Ezra dominion over
the “galley” at Snug Haven, a dominion which had gradually extended
itself to the whole house and garden, and even to the upbringing of the
boy.
Together, in a hit-or-miss way that had scandalized the good wives of
South Endicutt, Briggs and Trefethen had reared little Hal. The captain
had given no heed to hints that he needed a house-keeper or a second
wife. Trefethen had been a powerful helper with the boy. Deft with the
needle, he had sewed for Hal. He had taught him to keep his little
room—his little “first mate’s cabin,” as he had always called it—very
shipshape. And he had taught him sea lore, too; and at times when the
captain had been abroad on the great waters, had taken complete charge
of the fast-growing lad.
Thus the captain had been ever more and more warmly drawn towards Ezra.
The simple old fellow had followed the body of the captain’s son up
there to the grave on the hill, and had wept sincerely in the captain’s
sorrow. Together, Briggs and Ezra had kept the cemetery lot in order.
Evenings without number, after little Hal had been tucked into bed, the
two ageing men had sat and smoked together.
Almost as partners in a wondrous enterprise, they two had watched Hal
grow. Ezra had been just as proud as the captain himself, when the
sturdy, black-haired, blue-eyed boy had entered high school and had won
his place at football and on the running-track. When “Hal” had become
“Master Hal,” for him, on the boy’s entering college, the old servitor
had come to look upon him with something of awe, for now Hal’s studies
had lifted him beyond all possible understanding. Old Ezra had thrilled
with pride as real and as proprietary as any Captain Briggs had felt.
Thus, the belovèd idol of the two indulgent old sea-dogs, Hal had grown
up.