by Bill Bowers
“But Tom he told Cap’n Witherspoon, and the Cap’n he agreed to keep an eye out the next night. But there warn’t nothing said to the rest o’ the men.
“Wal, the next night they put Bill Bridges on the watch. The fog had lifted, and they had a fair wind, and was going on steady. The men all turned in, and went fast asleep, except Cap’n Witherspoon, Tom and Bob Coffin. Wal, sure enough, ’twixt twelve and one o’clock, the same thing came over, only there war four men ’stead o’ two. They come in jes’ so over the bowsprit, and they looked neither to right nor left, but clim down stairs, and sot down, and crouched and shivered over the stove jist like the others. Wal, Bill Bridges, he came tearin’ down like a wild-cat, frightened half out o’ his wits, screechin’, ‘Lord, have mercy! we’re all goin’ to the devil!’ And then they all vanished.
“‘Now, Cap’n, what’s to be done?’ says Tom. ‘Ef these ’ere fellows is to take passage, we can’t do nothin’ with the boys: that’s clear.’
“Wal, so it turned out; for, come next night, there was six on ’em come in, and the story got round, and the boys was all on eend. There wa’n’t no doin’ nothin’ with ’em. Ye see, it’s allers jest so. Not but what dead folks is jest as ’spectable as they was afore they’s dead. These might ’a’ been as good fellers as any aboard; but it’s human natur’. The minute a feller’s dead, why, you sort o’ don’t know ’bout him; and it’s kind o’ skeery hevin’ on him round; and so ’twan’t no wonder the boys didn’t feel as if they could go on with the vy’ge, ef these ’ere fellers was all to take passage. Come to look, too, there war consid’able of a leak stove in the vessel; and the boys, they all stood to it, ef they went farther, that they’d all go to the bottom. For, ye see, once the story got a-goin’, every one on ’em saw a new thing every night. One on ’em saw the baitmill a-grindin’, without no hands to grind it; and another saw fellers up aloft, workin’ in the sails. Wal, the fact war, they jest had to put about,—run back to Castine.
“Wal, the owners, they hushed up things the best they could; and they put the vessel on the stocks, and worked her over, and put a new coat o’ paint on her, and called her ‘The Betsey Ann’; and she went a good vy’ge to the Banks, and brought home the biggest fare o’ fish that had been for a long time; and she’s made good vy’ges ever since; and that jest proves what I’ve been a-saying,—that there’s nothin’ to drive out ghosts like fresh paint.”
10
A Strange Story from the Coast
By Rebecca Harding Davis
Born in Pennsylvania, Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) was a prolific writer, best known for her novel Life in the Iron Mills, a realistic depiction of the difficulties of life among working-class people. She was also one of the first American female authors to explore the moral independence of women in a patriarchal society. She was the mother of the internationally famous war correspondent Richard Harding Davis. Though her work was largely forgotten at the time of her death, it was rediscovered in the 1970s. “A Strange Story from the Coast” first appeared in 1879.
The incident of which you have asked me to give you an account occurred six years ago, but the details are still fresh in my memory. The matter impressed me at the time with peculiar force. I am quite sure that I cannot convey any of this impression to you. I can only give you the facts, and very probably your shrewd common sense will readily find a rational explanation of them. I confess honestly, however, that I have never been able to account for them to myself on any ordinary basis of reasoning.
In February of 1873 her physician ordered C—— to the seashore. Our medical men were then just beginning to find out that the tonic of a bath of salt air for lungs and body, even in winter, was a surer restorer of exhausted vitality than the usual prescriptions of interminable quinine and beef-tea.
We went down together to an old farmhouse on the New Jersey coast in which we had spent a summer years before. The farmer, who was also, according to a common custom there, captain of a coast-schooner, was trading in the South that winter, and had taken his wife with him. We rented the house, opened it, built up fires and began housekeeping in a couple of hours. The older part of the house, built long before the Revolution, consisted of log huts joined one to another, through whose vacant rooms and fireless chimneys the wind from the sea whistled drearily, but the living-room and chamber which we occupied, with their double doors, red rag-carpets and hearths heaped with blazing logs from the wrecks which strewed the beach, were snug and comfortable enough. Outside, the solitude and silence, even at noonday, were so profound that it was incredible to us that we were but a day’s journey from New York. This was surely some forgotten outskirt of the world which we had first discovered. The windows on one side of the living-room opened on the vast sweep of water, swelling and sinking that day gray and sullen under the low wintry sky; and on the other upon a plane of sand as interminable, broken at intervals by swamps overgrown with black bare laurel-bushes, by pine woods and by a few lonely fishermen’s houses, the surf-boats set up on end against them, rows of crab-cars and seine-reels fronting the leafless orchards.
When C—— and I had visited this coast before it had borrowed a certain gayety and lightness from the summer. The marshes were rich in color; artists were camping under their yellow umbrellas here and there, catching brilliant effects of sky or water; sportsmen from New York in irreproachable shooting-rig were popping at the snipe among the reeds; the sea and bay were full of white scudding sails. But in winter it lapsed back to its primitive condition: the land seemed to answer the sea out of depths of immeasurable age and silence. The only sign of life was the trail of smoke upward to the clouds from some distant cabin, or a ghostly sail flitting along the far horizon. The sand heaped itself day by day in fantastic unbroken ridges along the beach. The very fences and houses had grown hoary with lichen and gray moss that shivered unwholesomely in the wind. Some of these old log houses had been built two centuries ago by Quaker refugees from England under the Proprietary Barclay. They built the houses and settled down in them, so far barred out of the world on this lonely coast that they did not know when their old persecutor Charles was dead. We were almost persuaded that they had forgotten to die themselves when we saw the old graycoated, slow-moving folk going in and out of these houses, with the same names as those of the men who built them, the same features and inexorable habits of hard work and prosy gossip, the same formal tricks of speech and strange superstitions. Indeed, these people usually live to an old age so extreme that it seems as if Death himself forgot this out-of-the-way corner of the world on his rounds. In many of the houses there had been but two generations since the days of the Stuarts, son and father living far beyond the ninetieth year.
A wiry, withered youth of seventy-six, Captain Jeremiah Holdcomb (who is still living, by the way), whom we met one day on the beach, constituted himself our guide and protector: he took us from farmhouse to farmhouse by day to make friends with the “old people,” always coming in at night to tell us the histories of them and of their houses, and to chuckle boyishly over the “onaccountable notions of them as was gettin’ on in years,” and to sip a glass of toddy, unctuously smacking his withered lips and wagging his white poll.
One day, as a storm was rising, C—— and I led the old man across the garden at an earlier hour than usual to set him safely on his way homeward. A raw nor’easter blew heavily off sea that evening; the sun had not been seen for two days; the fog was banked up to landward in solid wet masses; the landscape was walled in by it until nothing was left in view but our house and the rotted leaves of the garden-beds, half buried now in drifted sand.
“You have never told us the history of this house, captain?” said C——, looking back at the dilapidated log building behind us.
Holdcomb, as I thought, evaded the question at first. The house, he said when C—— urged it, had been built by a family named Whynne, and still belonged to them, the young man from who
m we rented it being himself only a tenant. The Whynnes were of the oldest Quaker stock; the men had always followed the water; they “took to brandy,” Holdcomb said, “as a lamb to its dam’s milk. Men and women was oneasy, wanderin’ folk.” But they all came home to this house at the last, which was the reason, he supposed, they were so longlived. He referred here to a belief which we had found current among these people, that a man’s hold upon life was stronger in the house in which he was born than in any other.
“Because thar,” explained the captain, “is where the yerth first got a grip on him, and thar’s the last place it’ll be loosened. Now, the Whynnes all lived in this house to an oncommon old age. Thar was a kind of backbone of obstinacy in them all. I reckon Death himself had to have a tough fight with them before he got them under. Old Abner Whynne lived to be a hunderd and four. He died—let me see—he died just sixty year ago, come January. Priscilla was his youngest da’ater. She’s livin’ yet: she’s got no notion of dyin’. She’s the only Whynne, though, that is livin’.”
On further inquiry it appeared that this said Priscilla had married a Perot, and, being now a childless widow, occupied the Perot house, another decayed old habitation on the other side of the marshes, to the north.
“She was ninety-two last June,” said Holdcomb. “It’s thirty years since she has been able to hear thunder. But she keeps a-watchin’ and a-watchin’ out of them black eyes of hern. God knows what fur. But whenever I see her I says to myself, ‘It’ll come to you some day, Priscilla,’ says I, whatever it be. She’s got an awful holt on livin’, that ther woman. All the Whynnes had, as I told you. She’s a mere shackle of bones, and as deaf as that dead sherk yander, but she’s got a kind of life in her yet, sech as these pink-an’-white mishy young gells never knowed. I’ll take you to see her to-morrow. If she gets a sight of anybody that’s come from out of the towns and the crowd, it kind of gives her a fresh start. Yes, we’ll go and see her to-morrow,” climbing over the bars. “Well, I’ll be goin’ now. That’s all ther is to tell about this house.”
“No, no,” said C——. “One moment, captain. Those queer squares of brick at the end of the garden, what are they?”
The old man shuffled uneasily: “I don’t see no brick. I don’t know nothin about ’em.”
“Surely, you can see them—close to the house, almost covered with the sand. They look like the entrance to a vault—or they might be graves.”
By this time Holdcomb had succeeded in ridding his startled face of every glimmer of meaning, “Oh, them?” staring at them with unconcern. “They were ther long before I was born. I wouldn’t worry myself about them if I was you. They’ve somethin’ to do, ’s likely, with them old Whynnes that’s dead an’ gone. I’d let ’em rest. Never dig deep into a rotten ma’ash, ’s we say hereabouts.”
With that old Jeremiah hobbled quickly away, and C—— and I returned to the house, pausing to look curiously at the sunken squares of brick over which the sand had drifted deep. I remember that C—— remarked irritably that it was evident that the old man knew for what purpose they had been built there, and chose to conceal it from us.
“There is something evil about them,” she added, declaring that whenever she passed them she was conscious of some sudden unpleasant physical influence, as though she had breathed miasma. Her illness had made her peculiarly susceptible to outside influences, real or imaginary. I thought nothing more at the time, therefore, of her assertion, though later circumstances reminded me of it.
The next day we crossed the marshes under Jeremiah’s guidance, and found Priscilla in the old Perot house. This woman differed from any other human being I had ever seen in some indescribable way. The peculiar effect of it upon me returns whenever I remember her: I would rather see a ghost than think of that nightmare of a woman.
Age had ravaged and gnawed her away mercilessly: nothing was left of her in the world but a little quick-moving shadow. The delicate features, the restless, birdlike hands, the shrunken outline of shape, made but a silhouette of the actual woman that she once had been. The brown flannel gown and crossed white handkerchief which she wore after the Quaker fashion seemed to me like a load hung upon a ghost. For the rest, she was vivacious, keen, hard; she talked incessantly in a shrill, vehement pipe; our answers necessarily were written or by signs. She welcomed us with a kind of fierce eagerness, examined the cut and material of our clothes, and questioned us about the city and the news of the day with the delight of a prisoner to whose dungeon had come a glimmer of light from the world outside. She chattered in return the gossip of the neighborhood—gossip which from her lips obscurely hinted at malignant and foul meanings—occasionally rebuffing old Holdcomb with savage contempt.
“But she’s not such a bad un,” he said, turning deprecatingly to us. “Naterally, she’s a kind, decent soul, Priscilla is. But, you see, it’s excitement to her to talk that way: all them Whynnes must have excitement of one sort or another. The men took to liquor, and the women—Now, Priscilla—” suddenly checking himself: “it’s like bein’ shut up in jail, what with livin’ here alone and that dreadful deafness.”
The old creature had gone, moving with a quick, nervous step, to a corner cupboard, from which she brought out a plate of seed-cakes. She stood holding them out to me, poising herself on tiptoe, her dark luminous eyes fixed on me from underneath the shaggy white brows.
“No, C——,” I said, “this is not a bad woman: she is not immodest nor malignant.” Yet I drew back from her. Now I was conscious wherein she differed from other aged people. It was a young woman who looked out of those strange eyes at me. Old Priscilla Perot, in the isolation of her thirty years of deafness, had grown vulgar and bitter in her speech, but back of that was another creature, who was not vulgar, who never spoke. I fancied that it looked out with all the unsatisfied passion and longing of youth through these eyes before me. They seemed perpetually challenging the world to give back something that was lost with a silent, sad entreaty strangely at variance with the shrill, mean talk that came from the woman’s lips. I wondered idly when this creature in her had ever lived, and what had killed it, and whether it would ever, in all the ages to come, waken and live again. How many possible human beings, after all, die in each of us and are forgotten before the body gives up too and has to be hidden out of sight!
Old Priscilla went out into the kitchen and bustled aimlessly about. Our coming had made her restless; she laughed without cause; frequent nervous shudders passed over her lean body.
“It’s always the way when any one from the city comes near her,” said Jeremiah. “She was main fond of the crowd and of town.”
“So I should have guessed,” said C——. “Do you notice the dainty dress and the high shoes and jaunty bit of ribbon in her cap? Yet she impresses me strangely, as though she might have had once a much finer, more delicate, nature than she shows to us.—She has not always lived here? What is her history?” turning to Holdcomb.
The old fellow gave a scared look at the wan little figure skipping in and out of the dark kitchen: “Lord! how should I know? She belongs to them as was dead and gone before my time.” To stop short all further inquiry he began talking to her by signs. She perched herself upon the high wooden chair at one side of the fireplace, looking at C——, her head a little on one side.
“She wants to know what changes I remember in this place?” for so Holdcomb had interpreted C——’s question. “Not many—not many: my time has been so short. Now, my father could remember when a good part of Ocean and Monmouth counties was under the sea. But he lived to a good age. Under this house where you are there’s been dug up sherks’ teeth and the backbones of whales. My grandfather, ’s likely, could remember when they swam over this field,” pursing up her thin lips thoughtfully. “Thee wasn’t here in the war of 1812?” turning sharply on C——.
“No.”
“I was here: I had come home for the first ti
me from New York then. I watched the English vessels come up the inlet: it was a gusty afternoon like this. They had come up to plunder the farms. The men that weren’t Friends took their guns and went down to fire on them from the shore.”
“And those that were Friends?” asked C——.
“Took their guns and went along,” with a shrill laugh and nod. “Oh, the young people in the house were terribly frightened. It was all I could do to keep their courage up, silly children.”
“Were you not afraid?”
“No. I wasn’t young, and I had nothing to lose.” She had turned her head, with her back to us, and was talking into the darkness. She hurled out the last words with a kind of defiance. “I had nothing to lose.”
“True enough!” said Jeremiah, with many wags of the head and senile blinks of sympathy; but, catching our inquiring looks, he recovered himself with a sudden deprecatory cough and leaned his chin on his cane, silent and attentive.
“I set the children to barring up the windows,” continued Priscilla after a moment’s pause, “and then I took a ladder and climbed on to the roof. I put my back against the chimney and my feet on the top rung, and there I saw the fight. Our men hid among the salt grass of the ma’ash and picked ’em off one by one. They was main good shots. I saw Ben Stover aim at a man up on the foremast, and then there was a whiff of smoke and down he went in a lump into the water. They said his dyin’ yell was terrible to hear,” she added with a chuckle.
“What became of Stover after that?” asked Jeremiah.
“He died when he was a young man—only sixty or thereabout. He used to go up and down the beach lookin’ for Kidd’s treasure, muttering to himself. They said he went mad because there was blood on his hands, him bein’ a Quaker. But I knew different from that: it was the money drove him mad—Kidd’s money—he was so sure of finding it.”