The Country of the Pointed Firs

“I suppose we shall know it all some day,” said I.

“We shall know it while yet below,” insisted the captain, with a flush of impatience on his thin cheeks. “We have not looked for truth in the right direction. I know what I speak of; those who have laughed at me little know how much reason my ideas are based upon.” He waved his hand toward the village below. “In that handful of houses they fancy that they comprehend the universe.”

I smiled, and waited for him to go on.

“I am an old man, as you can see,” he continued, “and I have been a shipmaster the greater part of my life,—forty-three years in all. You may not think it, but I am above eighty years of age.”

He did not look so old, and I hastened to say so.

“You must have left the sea a good many years ago, then, Captain Littlepage?” I said.

“I should have been serviceable at least five or six years more,” he answered. “My acquaintance with certain—my experience upon a certain occasion, I might say, gave rise to prejudice. I do not mind telling you that I chanced to learn of one of the greatest discoveries that man has ever made.”

Now we were approaching dangerous ground, but a sudden sense of his sufferings at the hands of the ignorant came to my help, and I asked to hear more with all the deference I really felt. A swallow flew into the schoolhouse at this moment as if a kingbird were after it, and beat itself against the walls for a minute, and escaped again to the open air; but Captain Littlepage took no notice whatever of the flurry.

“I had a valuable cargo of general merchandise from the London docks to Fort Churchill, a station of the old company on Hudson’s Bay,” said the captain earnestly. “We were delayed in lading, and baffled by head winds and a heavy tumbling sea all the way north-about and across. Then the fog kept us off the coast; and when I made port at last, it was too late to delay in those northern waters with such a vessel and such a crew as I had. They cared for nothing, and idled me into a fit of sickness; but my first mate was a good, excellent man, with no more idea of being frozen in there until spring than I had, so we made what speed we could to get clear of Hudson’s Bay and off the coast. I owned an eighth of the vessel, and he owned a sixteenth of her. She was a full-rigged ship, called the Minerva, but she was getting old and leaky. I meant it should be my last v’y’ge in her, and so it proved. She had been an excellent vessel in her day. Of the cowards aboard her I can’t say so much.”

“Then you were wrecked?” I asked, as he made a long pause.

“I wa’n’t caught astern o’ the lighter by any fault of mine,” said the captain gloomily. “We left Fort Churchill and run out into the Bay with a light pair o’ heels; but I had been vexed to death with their red-tape rigging at the company’s office, and chilled with stayin’ on deck an’ tryin’ to hurry up things, and when we were well out o’ sight o’ land, headin’ for Hudson’s Straits, I had a bad turn o’ some sort o’ fever, and had to stay below. The days were getting short, and we made good runs, all well on board but me, and the crew done their work by dint of hard driving.”

I began to find this unexpected narrative a little dull. Captain Littlepage spoke with a kind of slow correctness that lacked the longshore high flavor to which I had grown used; but I listened respectfully while he explained the winds having become contrary, and talked on in a dreary sort of way about his voyage, the bad weather, and the disadvantages he was under in the lightness of his ship, which bounced about like a chip in a bucket, and would not answer the rudder or properly respond to the most careful setting of sails.

“So there we were blowin’ along anyways,” he complained; but looking at me at this moment, and seeing that my thoughts were unkindly wandering, he ceased to speak.

“It was a hard life at sea in those days, I am sure,” said I, with redoubled interest.

“It was a dog’s life,” said the poor old gentleman, quite reassured, “but it made men of those who followed it. I see a change for the worse even in our own town here; full of loafers now, small and poor as ‘tis, who once would have followed the sea, every lazy soul of ‘em. There is no occupation so fit for just that class o’ men who never get beyond the fo’cas’le. I view it, in addition, that a community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper. In the old days, a good part o’ the best men here knew a hundred ports and something of the way folks lived in them. They saw the world for themselves, and like’s not their wives and children saw it with them. They may not have had the best of knowledge to carry with ‘em sight-seein’, but they were some acquainted with foreign lands an’ their laws, an’ could see outside the battle for town clerk here in Dunnet; they got some sense o’ proportion. Yes, they lived more dignified, and their houses were better within an’ without. Shipping’s a terrible loss to this part o’ New England from a social point o’ view, ma’am.”

“I have thought of that myself,” I returned, with my interest quite awakened. “It accounts for the change in a great many things,—the sad disappearance of sea-captains,—doesn’t it?”

“A shipmaster was apt to get the habit of reading,” said my companion, brightening still more, and taking on a most touching air of unreserve. “A captain is not expected to be familiar with his crew, and for company’s sake in dull days and nights he turns to his book. Most of us old shipmasters came to know ‘most everything about something; one would take to readin’ on farming topics, and some were great on medicine,—but Lord help their poor crews!—or some were all for history, and now and then there’d be one like me that gave his time to the poets. I was well acquainted with a shipmaster that was all for bees an’ beekeepin’; and if you met him in port and went aboard, he’d sit and talk a terrible while about their havin’ so much information, and the money that could be made out of keepin’ ‘em. He was one of the smartest captains that ever sailed the seas, but they used to call the Newcastle, a great bark he commanded for many years, Tuttle’s beehive. There was old Cap’n Jameson: he had notions of Solomon’s Temple, and made a very handsome little model of the same, right from the Scripture measurements, same’s other sailors make little ships and design new tricks of rigging and all that. No, there’s nothing to take the place of shipping in a place like ours. These bicycles offend me dreadfully; they don’t afford no real opportunities of experience such as a man gained on a voyage. No: when folks left home in the old days they left it to some purpose, and when they got home they stayed there and had some pride in it. There’s no large-minded way of thinking now: the worst have got to be best and rule everything; we’re all turned upside down and going back year by year.”

“Oh no, Captain Littlepage, I hope not,” said I, trying to soothe his feelings.

There was a silence in the schoolhouse, but we could hear the noise of the water on a beach below. It sounded like the strange warning wave that gives notice of the turn of the tide. A late golden robin, with the most joyful and eager of voices, was singing close by in a thicket of wild roses.

VI. The Waiting Place

“HOW DID YOU manage with the rest of that rough voyage on the Minerva?” I asked.

“I shall be glad to explain to you,” said Captain Littlepage, forgetting his grievances for the moment. “If I had a map at hand I could explain better. We were driven to and fro ‘way up toward what we used to call Parry’s Discoveries, and lost our bearings. It was thick and foggy, and at last I lost my ship; she drove on a rock, and we managed to get ashore on what I took to be a barren island, the few of us that were left alive. When she first struck, the sea was somewhat calmer than it had been, and most of the crew, against orders, manned the long-boat and put off in a hurry, and were never heard of more. Our own boat upset, but the carpenter kept himself and me above water, and we drifted in. I had no strength to call upon after my recent fever, and laid down to die; but he found the tracks of a man and dog the second day, and got along the shore to one of those far missionary stations that the Moravians support. They were very poor themselves, and in distress; ‘twas a useless place. There were but few Esquimaux left in that region. There we remained for some time, and I became acquainted with strange events.”

The captain lifted his head and gave me a questioning glance. I could not help noticing that the dulled look in his eyes had gone, and there was instead a clear intentness that made them seem dark and piercing.

“There was a supply ship expected, and the pastor, an excellent Christian man, made no doubt that we should get passage in her. He was hoping that orders would come to break up the station; but everything was uncertain, and we got on the best we could for a while. We fished, and helped the people in other ways; there was no other way of paying our debts. I was taken to the pastor’s house until I got better; but they were crowded, and I felt myself in the way, and made excuse to join with an old seaman, a Scotchman, who had built him a warm cabin, and had room in it for another. He was looked upon with regard, and had stood by the pastor in some troubles with the people. He had been on one of those English exploring parties that found one end of the road to the north pole, but never could find the other. We lived like dogs in a kennel, or so you’d thought if you had seen the hut from the outside; but the main thing was to keep warm; there were piles of bird-skins to lie on, and he’d made him a good bunk, and there was another for me. ‘Twas dreadful dreary waitin’ there; we begun to think the supply steamer was lost, and my poor ship broke up and strewed herself all along the shore. We got to watching on the headlands; my men and me knew the people were short of supplies and had to pinch themselves. It ought to read in the Bible, ‘Man cannot live by fish alone,’ if they’d told the truth of things; ‘taint bread that wears the worst on you! First part of the time, old Gaffett, that I lived with, seemed speechless, and I didn’t know what to make of him, nor he of me, I dare say; but as we got acquainted, I found he’d been through more disasters than I had, and had troubles that wa’n’t going to let him live a great while. It used to ease his mind to talk to an understanding person, so we used to sit and talk together all day, if it rained or blew so that we couldn’t get out. I’d got a bad blow on the back of my head at the time we came ashore, and it pained me at times, and my strength was broken, anyway; I’ve never been so able since.”

Captain Littlepage fell into a reverie.

“Then I had the good of my reading,” he explained presently. “I had no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his books were foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember. The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man. I was well acquainted with the works of Milton, but up there it did seem to me as if Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea terms very accurate, and some beautiful passages were calming to the mind. I could say them over until I shed tears; there was nothing beautiful to me in that place but the stars above and those passages of verse.

“Gaffett was always brooding and brooding, and talking to himself; he was afraid he should never get away, and it preyed upon his mind. He thought when I got home I could interest the scientific men in his discovery: but they’re all taken up with their own notions; some didn’t even take pains to answer the letters I wrote. You observe that I said this crippled man Gaffett had been shipped on a voyage of discovery. I now tell you that the ship was lost on its return, and only Gaffett and two officers were saved off the Greenland coast, and he had knowledge later that those men never got back to England; the brig they shipped on was run down in the night. So no other living soul had the facts, and he gave them to me. There is a strange sort of a country ‘way up north beyond the ice, and strange folks living in it. Gaffett believed it was the next world to this.”

“What do you mean, Captain Littlepage?” I exclaimed. The old man was bending forward and whispering; he looked over his shoulder before he spoke the last sentence.

“To hear old Gaffett tell about it was something awful,” he said, going on with his story quite steadily after the moment of excitement had passed. “‘Twas first a tale of dogs and sledges, and cold and wind and snow. Then they begun to find the ice grow rotten; they had been frozen in, and got into a current flowing north, far up beyond Fox Channel, and they took to their boats when the ship got crushed, and this warm current took them out of sight of the ice, and into a great open sea; and they still followed it due north, just the very way they had planned to go. Then they struck a coast that wasn’t laid down or charted, but the cliffs were such that no boat could land until they found a bay and struck across under sail to the other side where the shore looked lower; they were scant of provisions and out of water, but they got sight of something that looked like a great town. ‘For God’s sake, Gaffett!’ said I, the first time he told me. ‘You don’t mean a town two degrees farther north than ships had ever been?’ for he’d got their course marked on an old chart that he’d pieced out at the top; but he insisted upon it, and told it over and over again, to be sure I had it straight to carry to those who would be interested. There was no snow and ice, he said, after they had sailed some days with that warm current, which seemed to come right from under the ice that they’d been pinched up in and had been crossing on foot for weeks.”

“But what about the town?” I asked. “Did they get to the town?”

“They did,” said the captain, “and found inhabitants; ‘twas an awful condition of things. It appeared, as near as Gaffett could express it, like a place where there was neither living nor dead. They could see the place when they were approaching it by sea pretty near like any town, and thick with habitations; but all at once they lost sight of it altogether, and when they got close inshore they could see the shapes of folks, but they never could get near them,—all blowing gray figures that would pass along alone, or sometimes gathered in companies as if they were watching. The men were frightened at first, but the shapes never came near them,—it was as if they blew back; and at last they all got bold and went ashore, and found birds’ eggs and sea fowl, like any wild northern spot where creatures were tame and folks had never been, and there was good water. Gaffett said that he and another man came near one o’ the fog-shaped men that was going along slow with the look of a pack on his back, among the rocks, an’ they chased him; but, Lord! he flittered away out o’ sight like a leaf the wind takes with it, or a piece of cobweb. They would make as if they talked together, but there was no sound of voices, and ‘they acted as if they didn’t see us, but only felt us coming towards them,’ says Gaffett one day, trying to tell the particulars. They couldn’t see the town when they were ashore. One day the captain and the doctor were gone till night up across the high land where the town had seemed to be, and they came back at night beat out and white as ashes, and wrote and wrote all next day in their notebooks, and whispered together full of excitement, and they were sharp-spoken with the men when they offered to ask any questions.

“Then there came a day,” said Captain Littlepage, leaning toward me with a strange look in his eyes, and whispering quickly. “The men all swore they wouldn’t stay any longer; the man on watch early in the morning gave the alarm, and they all put off in the boat and got a little way out to sea. Those folks, or whatever they were, come about ‘em like bats; all at once they raised incessant armies, and come as if to drive ‘em back to sea. They stood thick at the edge o’ the water like the ridges o’ grim war; no thought o’ flight, none of retreat. Sometimes a standing fight, then soaring on main wing tormented all the air. And when they’d got the boat out o’ reach o’ danger, Gaffett said they looked back, and there was the town again, standing up just as they’d seen it first, comin’ on the coast. Say what you might, they all believed ‘twas a kind of waiting-place between this world an’ the next.”

The captain had sprung to his feet in his excitement, and made excited gestures, but he still whispered huskily.

“Sit down, sir,” I said as quietly as I could, and he sank into his chair quite spent.

“Gaffett thought the officers were hurrying home to report and to fit out a new expedition when they were all lost. At the time, the men got orders not to talk over what they had seen,” the old man explained presently in a more natural tone.

“Weren’t they all starving, and wasn’t it a mirage or something of that sort?” I ventured to ask. But he looked at me blankly.

“Gaffett had got so that his mind ran on nothing else,” he went on. “The ship’s surgeon let fall an opinion to the captain, one day, that ‘twas some condition o’ the light and the magnetic currents that let them see those folks. ‘Twa’n’t a right-feeling part of the world, anyway; they had to battle with the compass to make it serve, an’ everything seemed to go wrong. Gaffett had worked it out in his own mind that they was all common ghosts, but the conditions were unusual favorable for seeing them. He was always talking about the Ge’graphical Society, but he never took proper steps, as I viewed it now, and stayed right there at the mission. He was a good deal crippled, and thought they’d confine him in some jail of a hospital. He said he was waiting to find the right men to tell, somebody bound north. Once in a while they stopped there to leave a mail or something. He was set in his notions, and let two or three proper explorin’ expeditions go by him because he didn’t like their looks; but when I was there he had got restless, fearin’ he might be taken away or something. He had all his directions written out straight as a string to give the right ones. I wanted him to trust ‘em to me, so I might have something to show, but he wouldn’t. I suppose he’s dead now. I wrote to him an’ I done all I could. ‘Twill be a great exploit some o’ these days.”

I assented absent-mindedly, thinking more just then of my companion’s alert, determined look and the seafaring, ready aspect that had come to his face; but at this moment there fell a sudden change, and the old, pathetic, scholarly look returned. Behind me hung a map of North America, and I saw, as I turned a little, that his eyes were fixed upon the northernmost regions and their careful recent outlines with a look of bewilderment.

VII. The Outer Island

GAFFETT WITH HIS good bunk and the bird-skins, the story of the wreck of the Minerva, the human-shaped creatures of fog and cobweb, the great words of Milton with which he described their onslaught upon the crew, all this moving tale had such an air of truth that I could not argue with Captain Littlepage. The old man looked away from the map as if it had vaguely troubled him, and regarded me appealingly.

“We were just speaking of”—and he stopped. I saw that he had suddenly forgotten his subject.

“There were a great many persons at the funeral,” I hastened to say.

“Oh yes,” the captain answered, with satisfaction. “All showed respect who could. The sad circumstances had for a moment slipped my mind. Yes, Mrs. Begg will be very much missed. She was a capital manager for her husband when he was at sea. Oh yes, shipping is a very great loss.” And he sighed heavily. “There was hardly a man of any standing who didn’t interest himself in some way in navigation. It always gave credit to a town. I call it low-water mark now here in Dunnet.”

He rose with dignity to take leave, and asked me to stop at his house some day, when he would show me some outlandish things that he had brought home from sea. I was familiar with the subject of the decadence of shipping interests in all its affecting branches, having been already some time in Dunnet, and I felt sure that Captain Littlepage’s mind had now returned to a safe level.

As we came down the hill toward the village our ways divided, and when I had seen the old captain well started on a smooth piece of sidewalk which would lead him to his own door, we parted, the best of friends. “Step in some afternoon,” he said, as affectionately as if I were a fellow-shipmaster wrecked on the lee shore of age like himself. I turned toward home, and presently met Mrs. Todd coming toward me with an anxious expression.

“I see you sleevin’ the old gentleman down the hill,” she suggested.

“Yes. I’ve had a very interesting afternoon with him,” I answered, and her face brightened.

“Oh, then he’s all right. I was afraid ‘twas one o’ his flighty spells, an’ Mari’ Harris wouldn’t”—

“Yes,” I returned, smiling, “he has been telling me some old stories, but we talked about Mrs. Begg and the funeral beside, and Paradise Lost.”

“I expect he got tellin’ of you some o’ his great narratives,” she answered, looking at me shrewdly. “Funerals always sets him goin’. Some o’ them tales hangs together toler’ble well,” she added, with a sharper look than before. “An’ he’s been a great reader all his seafarin’ days. Some thinks he overdid, and affected his head, but for a man o’ his years he’s amazin’ now when he’s at his best. Oh, he used to be a beautiful man!”

We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water’s edge.

It had been growing gray and cloudy, like the first evening of autumn, and a shadow had fallen on the darkening shore. Suddenly, as we looked, a gleam of golden sunshine struck the outer islands, and one of them shone out clear in the light, and revealed itself in a compelling way to our eyes. Mrs. Todd was looking off across the bay with a face full of affection and interest. The sunburst upon that outermost island made it seem like a sudden revelation of the world beyond this which some believe to be so near.

“That’s where mother lives,” said Mrs. Todd. “Can’t we see it plain? I was brought up out there on Green Island. I know every rock an’ bush on it.”

“Your mother!” I exclaimed, with great interest.

“Yes, dear, cert’in; I’ve got her yet, old’s I be. She’s one of them spry, light-footed little women; always was, an’ light-hearted, too,” answered Mrs. Todd, with satisfaction. “She’s seen all the trouble folks can see, without it’s her last sickness; an’ she’s got a word of courage for everybody. Life ain’t spoilt her a mite. She’s eighty-six an’ I’m sixty-seven, and I’ve seen the time I’ve felt a good sight the oldest. ‘Land sakes alive!’ says she, last time I was out to see her. ‘How you do lurch about steppin’ into a bo’t?’ I laughed so I liked to have gone right over into the water; an’ we pushed off, an’ left her laughin’ there on the shore.”

The light had faded as we watched. Mrs. Todd had mounted a gray rock, and stood there grand and architectural, like a caryatide. Presently she stepped down, and we continued our way homeward.

“You an’ me, we’ll take a bo’t an’ go out some day and see mother,” she promised me. “‘Twould please her very much, an’ there’s one or two sca’ce herbs grows better on the island than anywhere else. I ain’t seen their like nowheres here on the main.”

“Now I’m goin’ right down to get us each a mug o’ my beer,” she announced as we entered the house, “an’ I believe I’ll sneak in a little mite o’ camomile. Goin’ to the funeral an’ all, I feel to have had a very wearin’ afternoon.”

I heard her going down into the cool little cellar, and then there was considerable delay. When she returned, mug in hand, I noticed the taste of camomile, in spite of my protest; but its flavor was disguised by some other herb that I did not know, and she stood over me until I drank it all and said that I liked it.

“I don’t give that to everybody,” said Mrs. Todd kindly; and I felt for a moment as if it were part of a spell and incantation, and as if my enchantress would now begin to look like the cobweb shapes of the arctic town. Nothing happened but a quiet evening and some delightful plans that we made about going to Green Island, and on the morrow there was the clear sunshine and blue sky of another day.