The Devastation of Dennisport
I
MY neighbor, Mrs. Captain Whorf, hung out the last of her sheets on the clothes-line that shone as yellow in the sun as the new rigging on a ship. She approached the fence that bounded our respective yards, leaned against it and spoke: —
’I hold with women bein’ clean, and I hold with a woman’s keepin’ her house as it should be kep’, but I don’t hold with no woman bein’ so pizen clean that she has to keep her husband in the wood-shed!’
From the hammock, Captain Dan’el Whorf, home from a week’s cruise on the George, boomed forth, —
‘ I’d like to see any woman keep me in the wood-shed!’
‘I could n’t keep you in the woodshed nor in no other place that you did n’t want to be,’ his wife retorted, ‘but you ain’t married to Zephiry Nickerson.’
‘Zephiry Nickerson could n’t keep me in no wood-shed!’ boasted Captain Whorf.
Mrs. Whorf surveyed her husband with tender admiration. He stood six feet one in his socks, and I judged his chest to be about three feet thick. He looked shorter than he was, on account of his ample shoulders and big shaggy head, a proud figure for any woman to call husband. The coast-line of New England breeds men like this in no small quantities. Even after her fond survey of her lord, Mrs. Whorf was forced to say: —
‘Zephiry would keep you or any other man in the wood-shed, or in the cellar, if she thought you was goin’ to track dirt. Cleanness is a principle with Zephiry.’ She said it as one who had lived in a community where principles were not vain beliefs, but where they were the mainsprings of the lives of people.
Captain Whorf lit another cigarette and said musingly, half to me and half to himself, —
‘It’s a queer thing to think of Captain Ephraim Nickerson not darin’ to set foot over the door-sill of his own kitchen except in his socks, and an engraved invitation from his wife in his mitt. Why, he would n’t no more make free with his own front room than a ship’s boy would make free with the Ole Man’s bunk. He who’s owned his own ship when he was n’t no more ’n twenty-five! Why, Nickersons, Mis’ Towner, have owned their ships since there was Nickersons. Clipper ships they’ve owned, fleets of ’em. My pa can remember when down there,’ he pointed to the receding tide, ‘there was a wharf and alongside an waitin’ ’d be twenty or more schooners and squareriggers, all Nickersons! You always saw Nickersons comin’ and goin’, some to the South Seas for whale and elephant, and some to the West Injys, and others to the coast o’ Africky, not countin’ coast-wise packets.’
I looked out, and where his hand pointed were stumps of green and rotting piles, stretching out and out, green spots in the low-tide sand, mute testimony of the early days when our merchant marine was a glory, and when families like Nickersons sent their vessels out to the four quarters of the earth.
‘Nickersons,’ Captain Whorf continued, ‘was always drivers and killers, mostly made like Cap’n Ephraim Nickerson. You know, Mis’ Towner, the kind that looks fat and ain’t. The kind that’s all solid meat from keel to pennant, an’ soft-spoken too with their men. You’d ought to seen the men jump when Nickerson spoke soft to ’em! I remember old Cap’n Nickerson saying to my pop, —
“‘I hear so much talk all the time about us masters o’ vessels bein’ rough with our men! I’ve been in the Chiny trade twenty years and I was never rough with no man”; and he stooped down his big shaggy head and looked just like a bull who was agoin’ to charge, and sez in his low husky voice, “I did n’t hev ter be!” You bet he didn’t hev ter be! There was heft to the words he spoke.’
Thus did Cap’n Dan’el Whorf paint to me the puissant graces of the Nickersons. ‘An’ then when steam come,’ he went on, ‘most families like Nickersons was bust and bankrupt. But they knew how to save themselves. Look at Cap’n Ephraim Nickerson in a steam-whaler sailing from Seattle, — look at him now he’s gettin’ along, ownin’ shares of a quarter of all the fresh fishermen sailin’ from this port.’
He waved his hand out toward the harbor. My eyes followed, and lying at anchor I saw mirrored in the calm surface of the bay the fleet of fresh fishermen — hundred-foot schooners, painted black, as beautiful as any racing yacht, the last, most perfect children of a romantic and dying race, whose very life is even now threatened by the hideous encroaching steam-trawlers. There they lay at rest, lifting up their proud masts, some of them flying halfmast flags, which is a signal for bait. Even as I looked, one and then another made sail, and then, beautiful and majestic, floated off beyond the point; one of the most perfect and ideal expressions of the imagination of man, they seemed to me, lovely and dignified and poetic.
The voice of Captain Whorf broke in on me. ‘Yes; he owns shares in a quarter o’ ’em and has to set in his woodshed when he wants to smoke.’
To me it seemed high romance to own even one little share in one of those beautiful and stately boats, now progressing swan-like out of the sheltering harbor.
Captain Whorf followed them with his eyes and murmured, —
‘Got everything on to-day, ain’t they? Bet Nickerson wishes he was followin’ the sea yet, some days!’
‘H’ssh,’ admonished Mrs. Whorf, ‘speakin’ of angels!’ Then in a low undertone to me, ‘That’s her now!’
There sailed down the board-walk a woman as majestic as any of her husband’s ships. She was large-framed, finely set up for all her fifty-odd years, wide-browed, large-eyed, with large but delicately carved features that were not unreminiscent of those of the father of our country. She had the same firm jaw, the same implacably calm mouth was hers; her face was framed by grayish curls. She herself was garbed — I use the word advisedly — in a gray dress of rather flowing cut, reminiscent of the sixties. She would have looked a personage anywhere. August was the only word I could think of that applied to her adequately, and the thing she was most like was a splendid if somewhat antiquated vessel under full sail. She lacked, just a little, the magnificent serenity of the ships that sailed the sea, but none the less she was magnificent. As though reading my thought, Mrs. Whorf whispered in my ear: —
‘An’ he tops her by a half head or more!’
She bore down upon us superbly and came to anchor near Mrs. Whorf. Introductions were effected, and it was my good luck to make friends. I found myself engaged to go next day and look at a collection of fur robes and Arctic things.
The impression her house left upon me was of a marvelously immaculate ship now being used as a museum, but a museum kept more exquisitely and wonderfully clean than anyone could imagine.
I expressed my wonder at the arrangement and perfection of her collection of Arctic things.
‘It must be hard to keep them in such good condition,’ I said; ‘it is hard to keep dirt from any house.’
She looked at me with her clear eyes. ‘I fight It day and night!’ she said, and her mouth bent itself into a firm line, and her shoulders squared themselves.
I saw indeed that she fought It day and night, even if she had to pay a price for it and even if Captain Nickerson had to remain in the wood-shed as part of the price.
I saw that I had before me a splendid if tyrannical perfectionist. The nature of women must be satisfied and if it does not find itself satisfied in one way it will in another — it makes no difference at what cost.
Such thoughts, half-formed, floated through my mind as for some seconds of silence my eyes and those of my hostess rested upon the beautiful outgoing boats.
‘I can never look at ’em,’ said Mrs. Nickerson, ‘without thinking what whited sepulchres they are! The scent of a fresh fisherman is nothing for a decent Christian woman to dwell upon, and yet, I can’t see them go past without thinking of the state the gurrybutts is in, and what the bilge is like that is a-sloshing about the keel! Oh, you should have seen the clipper ships of my father’s day, Mis’ Towner, with their decks holy-stoned so that they shone in the sun like a white beach at noonday! And the smell of some of the spice-ships from the Injys — the scent is in my nostrils yet! And the look of them, with their cordage all coiled like it seems no seaman knows how to coil rope these days. There! that is what irritates me so with Man!’ The emphasis which she gave to this word stamped her opinion of men. ‘Look how they keep their ships, and then see how they keep their houses on land! What ails ’em?’ she cried, ‘holy-stoning their vessels, going daft if a bit of cordage is adrift; and get ’em ashore and they wallow! Wallow in the mud of the street, bringing it through their clean houses with no more thought than if they were senseless animals. Off their clean vessels they come to wallow! What ails ’em?
‘Look,’ she went on, her deep voice rising under the pressure of her emotion, ’look at this beach, look at this street! I like to stand with my back to it! It’s gettin’ so I can’t think of outof-doors. Garbage on the beach, Mis’ Towner, and refuse and tomato cans in the back country. Yes, the back country’s littered till there’s no peace for the eye till you reach the clean sands of the dunes and the peace of the open sea.’
The slanting rays of the sun struck her as she stood there in her window, and gilded the gray of her dress. Her checks were flushed and her eyes glowed dark under the stress of her emotion. She seemed like some reincarnation of an ancient prophetess, like some force of nature, powerful and dominant, restrained for the moment in the form of a majestic woman.
I understood her emotions more than was seemly, and with the instinct which makes us poor human beings forever hasten away from the too revealing moment, I began prattling of the cleaning-up of a Western town, while Mrs. Nickerson listened with a disquietingly hungry air.
II
The next day I was given a glimpse into the nature of the terrific force with which I had unwittingly trifled.
Captain Dan’el Whorf was lounging at ease in his Gloucester hammock. I was pottering about my sweet peas, which I hoped would in time bloom next their fence. The windows of his house were open, and from within came noises as of furniture being moved.
The handsome head of Mrs. Whorf emerged through the open window. Her hair was in a dust-cap; her face was pink and her eyes sparkled with some deep and inner emotion.
‘Dan’el!’ she called, ‘Dan’el, you come in and help me heave this livingroom rug on to the line. Isaiah ’s comin’ to beat to-day.’
Captain Whorf stirred his powerful frame uneasily in the hammock. A strange look crept over his face, a look one might have called timorous, almost fearful. He was profoundly disturbed.
‘I thought you warn’t going to do It till my next trip?’ he said wretchedly.
‘Warn’t going to do It till your next trip!’ she echoed, with sparkling eyes, ‘I’ d never do It if I waited for you, Dan’el Whorf!’
She was usually soft and good-tempered in her manner to her husband. Now her words came with a crackling crispness as of a pennant snapping in the breeze of a great wind.
‘I can’t live in such dirt no longer!’ she blazed. ‘It’s no good sweeping no more. There’s dirt in every crack and corner of this house.’
‘But,’ moaned Captain Whorf miserably, ‘you said you’d wait till I got home next time?’
‘And how’ll I know what the weather’s going to be next time? Do you think I’m going to fly in the face of Providence with the weather bureau saying fair weather for a spell? Do you suppose I’m going to let every woman in all Dennisport have her house cleaned before me? Come and heave out this living-room rug!’
He rose slowly, painfully, and unwillingly; but he obeyed his master’s voice.
It was then that I witnessed the metamorphosis that is so terrifying and disquieting to the heart of man. For eleven months and some days Mrs. Dan’el Whorf was a woman who had for a man’s erring ways the tolerance of a mother for a little child. Then, between one day and the next she became transformed. Within her was unleashed a demonic fury, and under its spell she fell upon her house and cleaned it. But it was no mere house-cleaning that I witnessed: what I saw had an element of the orgiastic, it took upon itself the proportions of a great natural cataclysm. Now I would catch glimpses of her, scrubbing and cleaning with tense fury. Again with the aid of Captain Whorf, she would hurl forth the rugs and carpets of the house. She drove him before her to do her bidding as a wind of autumn drives the dry leaves, his occasional protests as futile as the fluttering of a leaf itself.
Her orgy communicated itself to Mary, her sixteen-year-old daughter. There was something madman-like in their swift ascents and descents of staircases, their rapid flights out-ofdoors. Captain Whorf did the bidding of his two furious women, while an old man called Isaiah kept staccato time to the wild doings within, thumping perpetually from dawn to dark on the carpets and rugs that were suspended on the clothes-line.
I realized then what a force woman has hidden within her. I realized how it is compelled to wreak itself upon housecleaning, circumscribed as its energies now are in our shrunken homes. As contagion goes its devastating way, so did the lust for cleaning devastate the village. Clothes-lines on all sides blossomed with hand-woven rugs, with comforters of many colors, and with carpets.
The air was full of the smell of fresh paint and varnish, for the women of Dennisport are not content with mere cleaning. They have learned a trick or two from their husbands, the owners of vessels. They do not merely clean their houses, they overhaul them, and paint them and varnish them yearly as though they were boats, until their mahogany furniture becomes encrusted with thick translucent layers of varnish.
With superb and relentless energy the Dennisport women wantoned and rioted in cleanliness. The distraught males, when their services were not required at home, skulked unhappily in stores and on the ends of wharves and spat, in melancholy mood, seaward. Each year when the cleaning mania recurred they found themselves as disturbed as before. They never got used to it; nor did they ever see the sense of it.
Not with such tense enthusiasm did they attack their boats. Overhauling a boat was a time of leisure, of conversations, of fair peaceful hours spent, now spoke-shaving a mast, now sitting on the shady side of a boat, painting or caulking. A peaceful, reposeful time, the overhauling season, with nothing whatever in common with the spirit that was now breaking up homes and devastating the town.
From time to time Captain Whorf would pause to mop his streaming face with his bandanna, lean over his fence and let fall words like, ‘The deck of a vessel’s a peaceful place.’
III
It was with this fury spending itself that Mrs. Ephraim Nickerson returned my call.
‘I want you,’ she said, ‘to come and say the words you said to me, and more of them, about those Western women that straightened out their town. I want you to come and speak to the ladies of the Shakespeare and Literary Association.’
To this club belonged the flower of the womanhood of Dennisport. Most of them were women in the prime of life, women of forty and upwards; capable women they were.
They listened to my words, exchanging significant glances. They beheld wider fields and a broader scope for their mature activities. There unfolded before them the vision of stupendous house-cleaning, a gigantic, cataclysmic affair which made the cleaning of the Augean stables as insignificant as an infant’s brushing up of the sand with a toy broom on the Dennisport beach.
Up to this time they had wallowed in little private orgies of cleaning, each one in her own home. For the first time in their lives the mob-spirit seized them.
The cleanings-up which I had witnessed in Western towns were brisk, efficient affairs, conducted with good humor and with no emotion. With those women, house-cleaning had not partaken of the nature of a pagan religious festival. Not in the West did clothes-lines flower with patchwork quilts as irresistibly as in spring the sap flows in the trees. House-cleaning there was a duty rather than an emotional outbreak.
But it was in this religious spirit that the Dennisport Ladies Sanitary and Health Association was formed. They set forth on Dennisport with the mad and covetous lust of looters. In Dennisport the venerable selectmen nodded over their books as they had these many years. The Board of Health confined itself to tacking occasional pink or red cards labeled ‘Contagious disease’ on houses. This they did with the greatest possible infrequency, and paid a small sum to three aged men whose duties were supposed to be burying dead fish which had floated up on the beach.
It was the custom for these sinecures to be given to one half-blind grandsire and two other aged and infirm men. The Board of Health had never thought of imagining their functions to have a wider range than this. Why should they?
The day after the formation of the Society the town looked as usual: eggshells and refuse floated out with the receding tide as people had thrown them into the sea; papers blew about the street, and the back country flowered with many a dump.
Captain Dan’el Whorf, upon whom his duties as a member of the Board of Health sat jauntily, was engaged in caulking the seams of his hen-house. Peace reigned when I saw coming down the street under a full head of steam, Mrs. Whorf and three other ladies of the Sanitary and Health Association. They dropped anchor beside him.
‘Dan,’ said Mrs. Whorf, ‘as a member of the Board of Health, you are requested by the Ladies Sanitary and Health Association to go and tell Hen Morse he’s got to quit throwing everything in creation into the bay!’
‘Tell my own brother-in-law to quit throwing things into the bay?’ was Captain Whorf’s first exclamation; and ‘What in Tophet ’s the Ladies Sanitary and Health Association?’ was his next.
With classic simplicity his wife replied, —
‘The Ladies Sanitary and Health Association is US, and Zephiry Nickerson is the president!’
‘Ah, ha!’ he cried, ‘I might ’a’ known Zephiry was behind anything as loony as fighting with your relatives over a coupler egg-shells!’
Hen Morse was a baker by trade, and in common with all the other tradespeople of Dennisport he threw the refuse of his shop into the bay. Every morning at an early hour, banana stalks, empty crates, spoiled melons, sprouted onions, and tin cans were floated out by the outgoing tide and floated back on the incoming, accompanied by newspapers, sweepings, and tin cans from almost all the private houses facing on the beach. Later, one might have thought, from the way the beach looked, that the kitchen of some vast hotel had been wrecked somewhere near by.
Garments, too, one could find on the shore; old shoes, corsets, and overalls were numerous, being indestructible. Indeed, one could have picked up a whole wardrobe for Lazarus and his wife, in the course of a short stroll, and a ruined bed-tick for them to sleep upon.
As is the custom in New England, the inhabitants showed due deference to the laws they did not intend to keep, by making these offerings to Neptune in an unostentatious fashion; for your New Englander, even when he is a seafaring man and comes of seafaring stock, does not defy the law — he merely breaks it with as little noise as possible.
‘I’m not going to make bad blood between me and my sister because of a coupler tin cans, for any Zephiry Nickerson,’ protested Captain Whorf again.
‘Don’t worry about your sister,’ his wife responded dryly. ‘It’s she who’s asked this committee to speak to you because you’ve got so much influence with Hen! She’s talked and talked to him, but God knows what comes of a wife’s talking! Not a woman in town whose husband’s got a work-shop or a store anywhere but what his wife’s ached to get her fingers on it and give it a good house-cleaning! But now,’ she concluded triumphantly, ‘we’ve got a way better than that! The Sanitary and Health Association is going to look after you. Yes, sir, after every one of you, till you’ve cleaned up! We’re going to look into the fish factories. We’re going to clean up the gurry-butts on the ends of the wharves. We’re going to stop this here taking the livers out of dog-fish to make cod-liver oil, and then throwing the dog-fish over the ends of wharves, floating in and out till they ’re et by crabs.’
She talked in a triumphant way, like a religious zealot reading the Psalms of David. ‘Yes, sir; and we’ve got the law behind us. Laws is goin’ to be obeyed in this town, Dan’el Whorf !’
A more revolutionary sentiment could not have been uttered by the lips of woman.
‘You made the laws; now our Sanitary and Health Association will see you keep ’em! An’ while we’re about it you’d better tell Sy Medders to get rid of his blind pig if he don’t want to get arrested. Oh, don’t look at me! I don’t care if he is my cousin! I know why his pool-room is so popular! And Gideon Boyden can just stop asking folks to come into his shop and look at the new dory he’s building, at ten cents a look!’
Thus did the ladies of the Sanitary and Health Association taste the power of solidarity.
‘Now,’ continued Mrs. Whorf, ‘ Dan’el, step right in along of us ladies and write a letter to Hen warning him. Tell him we’re not going to stop at a constable. Tell him his own wife’s come to an end of her patience along of his dirty, messy ways, like all of us ladies have done with all Dennisport, and, — yes, sir,— with all our husbands! Tell him Zephiry Nickerson’s the only woman in all Dennisport that acted like she felt up to now, but there’s one hundred and twenty-three Zephirys this minute in Dennisport all fightin’ with the law behind ’em!’
In her tone of voice there was a quality of triumph, and that tone of decision and command which women employ when they are about to ‘houseclean.’ All women have these moments when the dread words, ‘I can’t live in such dirt any longer,’ pass their lips. Even the man who is most ‘master in his own house’ recognizes its voice.
Captain Dan’el Whorf was not a man to argue with the fury of the hurricane. He went into the house.
‘There’s three things we’re going to do,’ Mrs. Whorf told him, with the wild house-cleaning light in her eye. ‘We’re going to warn you you’ve got to clean, and we’re going to see you do clean, and we’re going to keep after you so you’ll keep clean!’
The men of Dennisport seem lazy to the outsider. They probably work when on their vessels, but when ashore there are long hours spent in whittling on the ends of wharves, other hours spent in painting and varnishing their boats, and very long hours of grave inspection of a new boat. Indeed, when ashore, they give the impression of the lilies of the field; and the men who stay ashore habitually have the manner born of extensive and spacious leisure, of those who have the ‘Lords of Time to friend.’
Now from one day to another this calm was broken; from one day to another a feverish activity was manifest in the streets. Everywhere were seen men raking up beaches, the State Forester was kept busy all day issuing permits for bonfires, one could not get a teamster who would cart off rubbish, — not to miscellaneous dumps, but to the town dump — that is to say, to a place appointed by the town to be filled in.
The classic calm which had always before reigned among the selectmen in the Town Hall was shattered, as one woman after another went to lodge complaints against violations of town ordinances by Dennisport’s chief citizens. Small worried knots of men met to discuss things in the street, and to ask one another, ‘Has all the women folks gone daft?’ only to sweep asunder like leaves before a northeaster, as one or another of the committees would be seen bearing down on them.
It is bad enough for a man to be caught up in the maelstrom of his wife’s house-cleaning, but he miserably looks forward to this cataclysm; he knows that it must come; but out of the peaceful blue of a May morning to have his women-folk transform themselves into dragons and swoop down upon him, insisting that he ‘ house-clean ’ all his own domain, his barn, his wood-shed, his store, his fish-house, his carpenter shop; that he clean up the beach and the sea and the back country, — this is more than can be borne.
IV
It was several days after the cyclone had left the men of Dennisport in darkness that I happened to pass the house of Captain Ephraim Nickerson. Peace reigned in his yard. On one side of his house nasturtiums bloomed profusely in an old boat. A whale’s vertebra sat austerely on either side of his doorstep. A bed of petunias was edged with pinklipped shells. This was as usual. But something had been added to the front yard. It was a Gloucester hammock, and in it, his stockinged feet, in the sun, lay Captain Ephraim Nickerson, peacefully whittling long curly shavings from a stick, on the hitherto speckless grass.
Before him stood two of the venerable selectmen. I heard one of them remark, —
‘Say, Ephraim, you know as well as me that woman’s place is in the home!’
Captain Nickerson shaved off another long ringlet.
‘I don’t see why,’ he said slowly; ‘I think we’re better off for women partakin’ of our national life.’
Something like a groan went up from the selectmen.
‘You would n’t say that if you was a selectman,’ said one of them. ‘You don’t know what it’s ben like, bein’ a selectman. Women’s too delicate and fragile to be fussin’ with dirty things like gurry-butts and water fronts.’
Captain Nickerson’s eyes twinkled, but the muscles of his face did not relax their serious reflective calm. He let a moment elapse before he said, —
‘I believe in trusting woman’s instinct; the instinct of a pure woman won’t lead her to any place where she had n’t ought to be.’
I heard no more, but I saw them standing before him pleading in words which meant, ‘For the sake of peace, for the sake of decency, for the sake of our sanity and that of all the other men in Dennisport, call off your wife and her friends!’
For two weeks I watched the progress of Dennisport’s clean-up. It was no little clean-up week. Within and without, Dennisport was cleansed of its sin.
Over Dennisport towers a Sailors’ Monument, a shaft tall as a lighthouse; and presently, dropped down its surface, I saw men on scaffold boards. I saw them painstakingly and laboriously scrubbing the face of the Monument.
One rainy day I had occasion to call on Mrs. Nickerson. The door was opened by Captain Nickerson, and there rushed out the smell of fragrant tobacco smoke. He was in his socks and in his hand he carried a pipe.
‘Come in,’ he said, ‘come in and wait. Zephiry ’ll be home before long.’
He led me into the sitting-room. I could see that he had been taking his ease in two chairs in his own bow-window, looking at the ships as they floated out beyond the Point.
A very slight but pleasant sense of disorder prevailed, although perhaps disorder is too strong a word. It was as though the room had relaxed its former rigidity. An open book lay on the table, sofa-cushions showed signs of use, the perfume of good tobacco hung in the air.
‘Zephiry,’ said Captain Nickerson, ‘ is out with a stop-watch lookin’ after speedin’ automobiles and arrestin’ folks who’s breakin’ the laws. I tell you it takes women to do things! I ain’t got no patience with folks who don’t want women to vote or to take part in makin’ an’ keepin’ the laws of the land.’
Our eyes met.
‘I don’t mind if you want to smoke, captain,’ I suggested.
He struck a match. Slowly a smile dawned in his eyes and spread over his face, and for a moment in silence we grinned at each other in perfect understanding.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he whispered. ‘Look behind them shells on the mantel!’ I did. A fine, very fine him of dust marred its brightness. ‘I ain’t seen a sight as comfortin’ as that these twenty years,’ said he. He puffed for a moment at his pipe; then he let drop, —
‘Did you ever consider why ’t is that women live longer’n men? Don’t talk to me about woman’s place bein in the home! Talk about the vote bein’ what eight million women want! I tell you what eight million women want is what eight million men must have if our longevity’s ever goin’ to equal theirs!’