The Country of the Pointed Firs Sarah Orne Jewett (bill gates best books TXT) 📖

below, there was a little harbor-like cove where Captain Bowden was boldly running the great boat in to seek a landing-place. There was a crooked channel of deep water which led close up against the shore.

“There, you hold fast for’ard there, an’ wait for her to lift on the wave. You’ll make a good landin’ if you’re smart; right on the port-hand side!” the captain called excitedly; and I, standing ready with high ambition, seized my chance and leaped over to the grassy bank.

“I’m beat if I ain’t aground after all!” mourned the captain despondently.

But I could reach the bowsprit, and he pushed with the boat-hook, while the wind veered round a little as if on purpose and helped with the sail; so presently the boat was free and began to drift out from shore.

“Used to call this p’int Joanna’s wharf privilege, but ’t has worn away in the weather since her time. I thought one or two bumps wouldn’t hurt us none⁠—paint’s got to be renewed, anyway⁠—but I never thought she’d tetch. I figured on shyin’ by,” the captain apologized. “She’s too gre’t a boat to handle well in here; but I used to sort of shy by in Joanna’s day, an’ cast a little somethin’ ashore⁠—some apples or a couple o’ pears if I had ’em⁠—on the grass, where she’d be sure to see.”

I stood watching while Captain Bowden cleverly found his way back to deeper water. “You needn’t make no haste,” he called to me; “I’ll keep within call. Joanna lays right up there in the far corner o’ the field. There used to be a path led to the place. I always knew her well. I was out here to the funeral.”

I found the path; it was touching to discover that this lonely spot was not without its pilgrims. Later generations will know less and less of Joanna herself, but there are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude the world over⁠—the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding; while the old bring hearts full of remembrance. This plain anchorite had been one of those whom sorrow made too lonely to brave the sight of men, too timid to front the simple world she knew, yet valiant enough to live alone with her poor insistent human nature and the calms and passions of the sea and sky.

The birds were flying all about the field; they fluttered up out of the grass at my feet as I walked along, so tame that I liked to think they kept some happy tradition from summer to summer of the safety of nests and good fellowship of mankind. Poor Joanna’s house was gone except the stones of its foundations, and there was little trace of her flower garden except a single faded sprig of much-enduring French pinks, which a great bee and a yellow butterfly were befriending together. I drank at the spring, and thought that now and then someone would follow me from the busy, hard-worked, and simple-thoughted countryside of the mainland, which lay dim and dreamlike in the August haze, as Joanna must have watched it many a day. There was the world, and here was she with eternity well begun. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

But as I stood alone on the island, in the sea-breeze, suddenly there came a sound of distant voices; gay voices and laughter from a pleasure-boat that was going seaward full of boys and girls. I knew, as if she had told me, that poor Joanna must have heard the like on many and many a summer afternoon, and must have welcomed the good cheer in spite of hopelessness and winter weather, and all the sorrow and disappointment in the world.

XVI The Great Expedition

Mrs. Todd never by any chance gave warning over night of her great projects and adventures by sea and land. She first came to an understanding with the primal forces of nature, and never trusted to any preliminary promise of good weather, but examined the day for herself in its infancy. Then, if the stars were propitious, and the wind blew from a quarter of good inheritance whence no surprises of sea-turns or southwest sultriness might be feared, long before I was fairly awake I used to hear a rustle and knocking like a great mouse in the walls, and an impatient tread on the steep garret stairs that led to Mrs. Todd’s chief place of storage. She went and came as if she had already started on her expedition with utmost haste and kept returning for something that was forgotten. When I appeared in quest of my breakfast, she would be absentminded and sparing of speech, as if I had displeased her, and she was now, by main force of principle, holding herself back from altercation and strife of tongues.

These signs of a change became familiar to me in the course of time, and Mrs. Todd hardly noticed some plain proofs of divination one August morning when I said, without preface, that I had just seen the Beggs’ best chaise go by, and that we should have to take the grocery. Mrs. Todd was alert in a moment.

“There! I might have known!” she exclaimed. “It’s the 15th of August, when he goes and gets his money. He heired an annuity from an uncle o’ his on his mother’s side. I understood the uncle said none o’ Sam Begg’s wife’s folks should make free with it, so after Sam’s gone it’ll all be past an’ spent, like last summer. That’s what Sam prospers on now, if you can call it prosperin’. Yes, I