The house itself was a comfortable mansard-roofed affair, with a wide “piazza” (on which stood tubs of hydrangeas) and lofty rooms in which one got an impression of a good deal of white marble. Among its wonders, for me, were the wooden shutters, which slid magically out of the walls beside the windows, and a great number of small carved objects of jade and soapstone and ivory, brought from China and Japan by Cousin Stanley’s father. Best of all, however, was the attic, and its cupola. Cupola! I remember how strange the word sounded when I first heard it pronounced by Miss Bendall, the housekeeper, who smelt of camphor. It struck me as “foreign”—a Northern word, surely! — and I hadn’t the remotest idea in the world how one would go about spelling it. But from the moment when Cousin Stanley, stooping a little (as he was very tall) led us up the dark stairs to the warm wooden-smelling attic, and then, with triumph (this was several years before) showed us the cupola itself, I entertained no doubts as to its fascinations. Miserable child, who has no cupola for his rainy mornings! It was in itself a perfect little house, glassed on all sides, with a window-seat all around, so that one could sit on whatever side one liked and look out to the uttermost ends of the earth. Over the slate roofs of houses, one looked steeply downhill to the harbor, the bright masts, the blue water, the Fairhaven ferry, and Fairhaven itself beyond. Farther to the right one saw the long red brick buildings of the cotton mills (not so numerous as now) and then the Point, and the Bug lighthouse, and the old fort, and the wide blue of Buzzard’s Bay. With a good glass, one might have made out the Islands; or observed the slow progress of a Lackawanna or Lehigh Valley tug and its string of black coal barges all the way from Fort Rodman to Cuttyhunk; or pick up the old Gay Head sidewheeling back from Wood’s Hole, with its absurdly laborious walking beam.
You can imagine, Cynthia, how enthralled I was with all this, and how quickly, in my absorption in such wonders, I forgot the separation from my brother and sister, and the tragedy — now far off, tiny, and soundless — which had brought it all about. It soon seemed as if I had always lived in New Bedford, with Miss Bendall and Cousin Stanley and old John (a perfect stage coachman!) and Mabel, the Irish cook, who churned the butter in the pantry. I knew every flower and spider in the garden, every branch of every tree, and whether it would hold my weight or not; and every picture in every one of the forty-odd bound volumes of Harpers which I used to take up with me to the cupola. The great black cistern, which concealed somewhere a sinister little tinkle of water, was my ocean, where I sailed a flotilla of small blue-painted boats provided by Cousin Stanley. In the evenings, there was often a game of cribbage with Cousin Stanley or Miss Bendall, or else Cousin Stanley would talk to me about ships and shipping — he was a shipowner — and the voyages he had made as a young man. Smoking a crackling great calabash pipe, he talked rapidly and vividly; so much so that I sometimes found it difficult, afterward, to get to sleep: my senses stimulated, my imagination full of sights and sounds. It was a result of these talks that I began, in the afternoons and on Saturdays, exploring the wharves for myself. With what a thrill I used to start down Union Street, seeing, at the bottom of the mile-long cobbled hill, the bright golden eagle of a pilothouse! Or how entrancing to discover in the morning, when I looked down from the cupola before breakfast, a new four-master coming up the harbor, with its dark sails just being dropped!
The magnificent climax to all this, however, came early one Saturday morning — when Cousin Stanley woke me and told me to get dressed quickly: he “had a surprise for me.” The big bell in the Catholic steeple, a block away, by which I always went to bed and got up, was striking five, and it was just beginning to be light. What could the surprise be? I had no idea, but I knew better than to spoil Cousin Stanley’s delight in it by asking. When I went down the stairs, he was waiting for me in the darkness by the door, holding one finger to his lips as a sign to me to be quiet. We stole out, tiptoed across the piazza, and down the flagged path to the gate, where John was waiting for us with the buggy. “To the Union Street Wharf, John!” said Cousin Stanley — and instantly I was lost in a chaos of intoxicating speculations. Were we going to sea? but how could we, without luggage, without even our coats or sweaters?… The sky was beginning to turn pink as we turned from North Street; the city was profoundly still; not a sound, except for Betsy’s clip-clop on the asphalt and the twittering of sparrows and robins in the elms, where a deeper darkness seemed still to linger. But when we turned again, into the foot of Union Street, what a difference! For there before us, on the long confused wharf, was a scene of the most intense activity — a whale-ship was being made ready for the sea.
Dismounting, we plunged into the midst of this chaos. The ship, in which Cousin Stanley owned a share, was the Sylvia Lee: she was, he told me, pointing to her crossed spars, a brig, and one of the last sailing vessels in the whaling trade. Two gangways led aboard her; and along these shuffled a steady stream of men, carrying boxes, bundles, small kegs, and coils of rope. Cousin Stanley moved away to talk with someone he knew, leaving me beside a pile of fresh wooden boxes, the very boxes which were rapidly being shouldered aboard. Shouts, cries, commands, a fracas of voices — how did they manage to hear one another? A man with a brown megaphone was leaning over the bow rail of the brig (the white bowsprit pointed up Union Street) and shouting “Mr. Pierce! Mr. Pierce!” … Where was Mr. Pierce? and what was he wanted for? and who was the man with the megaphone? The tops of the masts were now struck by the sun, and became surprisingly brilliant, orange-colored, in contrast with the still-somber wharf and the dark hulk of the vessel herself. Sea gulls fluttered and swooped, quarreling, around the stem, where a man in a white jacket had emptied a pail of garbage. These too, when they rose aloft, entered the sunlight and became flamingo-colored. “Mr. Pierce!.. Mr. Pierce! Is Mr. Pierce there?” I became anxious about Mr. Pierce. What if he should arrive too late? It might be something terribly important. “Jones! send one of your men up to the office, will you, and see if Mr. Pierce is there. If he is, tell him I haven’t got my papers yet. At once!” Where was Jones? I heard no reply from him, but there must have been one, lost in the general hubbub, for the megaphone seemed to be appeased. Only for a moment, however: it reappeared immediately on the high deck of the stem, before the deckhouse. “Now then men, make it lively. I want those gangways cleared in five minutes … Mr. Jones, will you see that the slack in that cable is taken in.” … A block began a rhythmic chirping in the bow — two men, leaning backward, pulled in short, hard pulls at a rope. The pile of boxes beside me was diminishing — a dozen, ten, eight, six — condensed soup.
“Well, Billy! Shall we go aboard?”
This was the moment of Cousin Stanley’s delight, and in reply I could do nothing but grin. Was he serious? I didn’t like to commit myself, one way or the other.
“Come along, then!” he added, and led the way to the bow gangway, which was now clear. It consisted merely of two great planks lashed together at the ends, and it swayed, when we reached the middle, with a shortening rhythm which seemed disquietingly to come up to meet one’s foot in mid-air. In the dirty water between wharf and ship a lot of straw, bottles, and some lemon peels rose and fell, suckingly. I felt dizzy. I was glad to jump down from the broad black bulwark to the weatherworn deck. We walked aft, and climbed up the short companionway to the poop.