THE running of the first train over the Eastern Road from Boston to
Portsmouth--it took place somewhat more than forty years ago--was
attended by a serious accident. The accident occurred in the crowded
station at the Portsmouth terminus, and was unobserved at the time. The
catastrophe was followed, though not immediately, by death, and that
also, curiously enough, was unobserved. Nevertheless, this initial
train, freighted with so many hopes and the Directors of the Road, ran
over and killed--LOCAL CHARACTER.
Up to that day Portsmouth had been a very secluded little community, and
had had the courage of its seclusion. From time to time it had calmly
produced an individual built on plans and specifications of its own,
without regard to the prejudices and conventionalities of outlying
districts. This individual was purely indigenous. He was born in the
town, he lived to a good old age in the town, and never went out of the
place, until he was finally laid under it. To him, Boston, though only
fifty-six miles away, was virtually an unknown quantity--only fifty-six
miles by brutal geographical measurement, but thousands of miles distant
in effect. In those days, in order to reach Boston you were obliged
to take a great yellow, clumsy stage-coach, resembling a three-story
mud-turtle--if zoologist will, for the sake of the simile, tolerate
so daring an invention; you were obliged to take it very early in the
morning, you dined at noon at Ipswich, and clattered into the great city
with the golden dome just as the twilight was falling, provided always
the coach had not shed a wheel by the roadside or one of the leaders had
not gone lame. To many worthy and well-to-do persons in Portsmouth, this
journey was an event which occurred only twice or thrice during life. To
the typical individual with whom I am for the moment dealing, it never
occurred at all. The town was his entire world; he was a parochial as
a Parisian; Market Street was his Boulevard des Italiens, and the North
End his Bois de Boulogne.
Of course there were varieties of local characters without his
limitations; venerable merchants retired from the East India trade;
elderly gentlewomen, with family jewels and personal peculiarities; one
or two scholarly recluses in by-gone cut of coat, haunting the Athenaeum
reading-room; ex-sea captains, with rings on their fingers, like Simon
Danz’s visitors in Longfellow’s poem--men who had played busy parts in
the bustling world, and had drifted back to Old Strawberry Bank in the
tranquil sunset of their careers. I may say, in passing, that these
ancient mariners, after battling with terrific hurricanes and typhoons
on every known sea, not infrequently drowned themselves in pleasant
weather in small sail-boats on the Piscataqua River. Old sea-dogs who
had commanded ships of four or five hundred tons had naturally slight
respect for the potentialities of sail-boats twelve feet long. But there
was to be no further increase of these odd sticks--if I may call them
so, in no irreverent mood--after those innocent-looking parallel bars
indissolubly linked Portsmouth with the capital of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. All the conditions were to be changed, the old angles
to be pared off, new horizons to be regarded. The individual, as an
eccentric individual, was to undergo great modifications. If he were not
to become extinct--a thing little likely--he was at least to lose his
prominence.
However, as I said, local character, in the sense in which the term
is here used, was not instantly killed; it died a lingering death, and
passed away so peacefully and silently as not to attract general, or
perhaps any, notice. This period of gradual dissolution fell during my
boyhood. The last of the cocked hats had gone out, and the railway had
come in, long before my time; but certain bits of color, certain half
obsolete customs and scraps of the past, were still left over. I was
not too late, for example, to catch the last town crier--one Nicholas
Newman, whom I used to contemplate with awe, and now recall with a sort
of affection.
Nicholas Newman--Nicholas was a sobriquet, his real name being
Edward--was a most estimable person, very short, cross-eyed, somewhat
bow-legged, and with a bell out of all proportion to his stature. I have
never since seen a bell of that size disconnected with a church steeple.
The only thing about him that matched the instrument of his office was
his voice. His “Hear All!” still deafens memory’s ear. I remember that
he had a queer way of sidling up to one, as if nature in shaping him
had originally intended a crab, but thought better of it, and made a
town-crier. Of the crustacean intention only a moist thumb remained,
which served Mr. Newman in good stead in the delivery of the Boston
evening papers, for he was incidentally newsdealer. His authentic duties
were to cry auctions, funerals, mislaid children, traveling theatricals,
public meetings, and articles lost or found. He was especially strong in
announcing the loss of reticules, usually the property of elderly maiden
ladies. The unction with which he detailed the several contents, when
fully confided to him, would have seemed satirical in another person,
but on his part was pure conscientiousness. He would not let so much as
a thimble, or a piece of wax, or a portable tooth, or any amiable vanity
in the way of tonsorial device, escape him. I have heard Mr. Newman
spoken of as “that horrid man.” He was a picturesque figure.
Possibly it is because of his bell that I connect the town crier with
those dolorous sounds which I used to hear rolling out of the steeple
of the Old North every night at nine o’clock--the vocal remains of
the colonial curfew. Nicholas Newman has passed on, perhaps crying his
losses elsewhere, but this nightly tolling is still a custom. I can
more satisfactorily explain why I associate with it a vastly different
personality, that of Sol Holmes, the barber, for every night at nine
o’clock his little shop on Congress Street was in full blast. Many a
time at that hour I have flattened my nose on his window-glass. It was a
gay little shop (he called it “an Emporium”), as barber shops generally
are, decorated with circus bills, tinted prints, and gaudy fly-catchers
of tissue and gold paper. Sol Holmes--whose antecedents to us boys were
wrapped in thrilling mystery, we imagined him to have been a prince in
his native land--was a colored man, not too dark “for human nature’s
daily food,” and enjoyed marked distinction as one of the few exotics
in town. At this juncture the foreign element was at its minimum; every
official, from selectman down to the Dogberry of the watch, bore a
name that had been familiar to the town for a hundred years or so.
The situation is greatly changed. I expect to live to see a Chinese
policeman, with a sandal-wood club and a rice-paper pocket handkerchief,
patrolling Congress Street.
Holmes was a handsome man, six feet or more in height, and as straight
as a pine. He possessed his race’s sweet temper, simplicity, and vanity.
His martial bearing was a positive factor in the effectiveness of the
Portsmouth Greys, whenever those bloodless warriors paraded. As he
brought up the rear of the last platoon, with his infantry cap stuck
jauntily on the left side of his head and a bright silver cup slung on
a belt at his hip, he seemed to youthful eyes one of the most imposing
things in the display. To himself he was pretty much “all the company.”
He used to say, with a drollness which did not strike me until years
afterwards, “Boys, I and Cap’n Towle is goin’ to trot out ‘the Greys’
to-morroh.” Though strictly honest in all business dealings, his
tropical imagination, whenever he strayed into the fenceless fields of
autobiography, left much to be desired in the way of accuracy. Compared
with Sol Holmes on such occasions, Ananias was a person of morbid
integrity. Sol Holmes’s tragic end was in singular contrast with his
sunny temperament. One night, long ago, he threw himself from the deck
of a Sound steamer, somewhere between Stonington and New York. What led
or drove him to the act never transpired.
There are few men who were boys in Portsmouth at the period of which I
write but will remember Wibird Penhallow and his sky-blue wheelbarrow.
I find it difficult to describe him other than vaguely, possibly because
Wilbird had no expression whatever in his countenance. With his vacant
white face lifted to the clouds, seemingly oblivious of everything, yet
going with a sort of heaven-given instinct straight to his destination,
he trundled that rattling wheelbarrow for many a year over Portsmouth
cobblestones. He was so unconscious of his environment that sometimes a
small boy would pop into the empty wheelbarrow and secure a ride without
Wibird arriving at any very clear knowledge of the fact. His employment
in life was to deliver groceries and other merchandise to purchasers.
This he did in a dreamy, impersonal kind of way. It was as if a spirit
had somehow go hold of an earthly wheelbarrow and was trundling it quite
unconsciously, with no sense of responsibility. One day he appeared at
a kitchen door with a two-gallon molasses jug, the top of which was
wanting. It was not longer a jug, but a tureen. When the recipient of
the damaged article remonstrated with “Goodness gracious, Wibird! You
have broken the jug,” his features lighted up, and he seemed immensely
relieved. “I thought,” He remarked, “I heerd somethink crack!”
Wibird Penhallow’s heaviest patron was the keeper of a variety store,
and the first specimen of a pessimist I ever encountered. He was an
excellent specimen. He took exception to everything. He objected to the
telegraph, to the railway, to steam in all its applications. Some of his
arguments, I recollect, made a deep impression on my mind. “Nowadays,”
he once observed to me, “if your son or your grandfather drops dead at
the other end of creation, you know of it in ten minutes. What’s the
use? Unless you are anxious to know he’s dead, you’ve got just two or
three weeks more to be miserable in.” He scorned the whole business, and
was faithful to his scorn. When he received a telegram, which was rare,
he made a point of keeping it awhile unopened. Through the exercise of
this whim he once missed an opportunity of buying certain goods to great
advantage. “There!” he exclaimed, “if the telegraph hadn’t been invented
the idiot would have written to me, and I’d have sent a letter by return
coach, and got the goods before he found out prices had gone up in
Chicago. If that boy brings me another of those tapeworm telegraphs,
I’ll throw an axe-handle at him.” His pessimism extended up, or down, to
generally recognized canons of orthography. They were all iniquitous. If
k-n-i-f-e spelled knife, then, he contended, k-n-i-f-e-s was the plural.
Diverting tags, written by his own hand in conformity with this theory,
were always attached to articles in his shop window. He is long since
ded, as he himself would have put it, but his phonetic theory appears to
have survived him in crankish brains here and there. As my discouraging
old friend was not exactly a public character, like the town crier or
Wibird Penhallow, I have intentionally thrown a veil over his identity.
I have, so to speak, dropped into his pouch a grain or two of that
magical fern-seed which was supposed by our English ancestors, in
Elizabeth’s reign, to possess the quality of rendering a man invisible.
Another person who singularly interested me at this epoch was a person
with whom I had never exchanged a word, whose voice I had never heard,
but whose face was as familiar to me as every day could make it. For
each morning as I went to school, and each afternoon as I returned, I
saw this face peering out of a window in the second story of a shambling
yellow house situated in Washington Street, not far from the corner of
State. Whether some malign disease had fixed him to the chair he sat on,
or whether he had lost the use of his legs, or, possible, had none (the
upper part of him was that of a man in admirable health), presented a
problem which, with that curious insouciance of youth I made no attempt
to solve. It was an established fact, however, that he never went out of
that house. I cannot vouch so confidently for the cobwebby legend which
wove itself about him. It was to this effect: He had formerly been the
master of a large merchantman running between New York and Calcutta;
while still in his prime he had abruptly retired from the quarter-deck,
and seated himself at that window--where the outlook must have been the
reverse of exhilarating, for not ten persons passed in the course of the
day, and the hurried jingle of the bells on Parry’s bakery-cart was the
only sound that ever shattered the silence. Whether it was an amatory
or a financial disappointment that turned him into a hermit was left to
ingenious conjecture. But there he sat, year in and year out, with his
cheek so close to the window that the nearest pane became permanently
blurred with his breath; for after his demise the blurr remained.
In this Arcadian era it was possible, in provincial places, for an
undertaker to assume the dimensions of a personage. There was a sexton
in Portsmouth--his name escapes me, but his attributes do not--whose
impressiveness made him own brother to the massive architecture of the
Stone Church. On every solemn occasion he was the striking figure,
even to the eclipsing of the involuntary object of the ceremony. His
occasions, happily, were not exclusively solemn; he added to his other
public services that of furnishing ice-cream for the evening parties.
I always thought--perhaps it was the working of an unchastened
imagination--that he managed to throw into his ice-creams a peculiar
chill not attained by either Dunyon or Peduzzi--arcades ambo--the rival
confectioners.
Perhaps I should not say rival, for Mr. Dunyon kept a species
of restaurant, while Mr. Peduzzi restricted himself to preparing
confections to be discussed elsewhere than on his premises. Both
gentlemen achieved great popularity in their respective lines, but
neither offered to the juvenile population quite the charm of those
prim, white-capped old ladies who presided over certain snuffy little
shops, occurring unexpectedly in silent side-streets where the football
of commerce seemed an incongruous thing. These shops were never intended
in nature. They had an impromptu and abnormal air about them. I do not
recall one that was not located in a private residence, and was not
evidently the despairing expedient of some pathetic financial crisis,
similar to that which overtook Miss Hepzibah Pyrcheon in The House
of the Seven Gables. The horizontally divided street door--the upper
section left open in summer--ushered you, with a sudden jangle of bell
that turned your heart over, into a strictly private hall, haunted
by the delayed aroma of thousands of family dinners. Thence, through
another door, you passed into what had formerly been the front parlor,
but was now a shop, with a narrow, brown, wooden counter, and several
rows of little drawers built up against the picture-papered wall behind
it. Through much use the paint on these drawers was worn off in circles
round the polished brass knobs. Here was stored almost every small
article required by humanity, from an inflamed emery cushion to a
peppermint Gibraltar--the latter a kind of adamantine confectionery
which, when I reflect upon it, raises in me the wonder that any
Portsmouth boy or girl ever reached the age of fifteen with a single
tooth left unbroken. The proprietors of these little knick-knack
establishments were the nicest creatures, somehow suggesting venerable
doves. They were always aged ladies, sometimes spinsters, sometimes
relicts of daring mariners, beached long before. They always wore crisp
muslin caps and steel-rimmed spectacles; they were not always amiable,
and no wonder, for even doves may have their rheumatism; but such as
they were, they were cherished in young hearts, and are, I take it,
impossible to-day.
When I look back to Portsmouth as I knew it, it occurs to me that it
must have been in some respects unique among New England towns. There
were, for instance, no really poor persons in the place; every one had
some sufficient calling or an income to render it unnecessary; vagrants
and paupers were instantly snapped up and provided for at “the Farm.”
There was, however, in a gambrel-roofed house here and there, a
decayed old gentlewoman, occupying a scrupulously neat room with just a
suspicion of maccaboy snuff in the air, who had her meals sent in to her
by the neighborhood--as a matter of course, and involving no sense of
dependency on her side. It is wonderful what an extension of vitality is
given to an old gentlewoman in this condition!
I would like to write about several of those ancient Dames, as they were
affectionately called, and to materialize others of the shadows that
stir in my recollection; but this would be to go outside the lines of my
purpose, which is simply to indicate one of the various sorts of changes
that have come over the vie intime of formerly secluded places like
Portsmouth--the obliteration of odd personalities, or, if not the
obliteration, the general disregard of them. Everywhere in New England
the impress of the past is fading out. The few old-fashioned men and
women--quaint, shrewd, and racy of the soil--who linger in little,
silvery-gray old homesteads strung along the New England roads and
by-ways will shortly cease to exist as a class, save in the record of
some such charming chronicler as Sarah Jewett, or Mary Wilkins, on whose
sympathetic page they have already taken to themselves a remote air, an
atmosphere of long-kept lavender and pennyroyal.
Peculiarity in any kind requires encouragement in order to reach flower.
The increased facilities of communication between points once isolated,
the interchange of customs and modes of thought, make this encouragement
more and more difficult each decade. The naturally inclined eccentric
finds his sharp outlines rubbed off by unavoidable attrition with a
larger world than owns him. Insensibly he lends himself to the shaping
hand of new ideas. He gets his reversible cuffs and paper collars from
Cambridge, Massachusetts, the scarabaeus in his scarf-pin from Mexico,
and his ulster from everywhere. He has passed out of the chrysalis state
of Odd Stick; he has ceased to be parochial; he is no longer distinct;
he is simply the Average Man.