Chapter XVIII: Epilogue

To-day the tide of old affairs has ebbed from the Cape shores and left them high and dry. Not even sentiment can blow the breath of life into the sails of the vanished fishing fleet nor call back the dead glory of the clippers. No analysis of the sandy soil--however cheering--can lure the young Cape-Codder back to the abandoned farms. Time will not turn backward in its flight, nor can imagination swell the meager gleanings of boat fishermen or the barrels of whiting in the freezers to the bulk of the full fares of cod and mackerel that two hundred schooners piled on the wharves of Wellfleet and Provincetown in the forties. Land and Sea have failed the Cape-Codder; and the best of the rising generation have moved away.

But what of the others--those whose years are ripe enough to recall the salt works and the packets? Has the passing of the old and busy days left them bitter and resentful, or, what is just as bad, are they content to live on the flimsy basis of a prosperous past? They have been saved from both fates by a whimsical sense of humor, half revealed, yet ever present, which guides their sayings and doings through the lean years. Where did they get it? asks the psychologist. Certainly not from the stern brethren of Plymouth nor from the bitter malcontents who left England after the Acts of Conformity. It did not come to them unbidden from their early struggles with a sandy soil. Rather it followed as the result of a true perspective--that great prerequisite for a humorous point of view--and this perspective they learned from seagoing fathers and grandfathers who had picked it up in the far corners of the world: from Shanghai bartenders and San Francisco crimps; from the sultry banks of the Ganges and from matching wits with British captains in the Master Mariners’ Club at Calcutta; they pulled perspective along with codfish from the rugged waters of the Grand Banks and pursued it from Hatteras to Nova Scotia with the mackerel. And though their sons and grandsons inherited no ships and sailed on no far voyages, yet they caught the perspective that enables them to-day to distinguish great matters from small, and so to look at life with a humorous slant. The picture of the Ringleader, or the Belle Creole, or the Leading Wind, which hangs over the stove in the sitting-room, is the symbol of this saving and instinctive point of view.

So the Cape-Codder feels no qualms about nailing up roadside apple stands for the automobilists, or about filling his spare rooms with transients for the night. Some have built shore-dinner restaurants or converted the old barn into an antique shop for the summer visitors. Others have set up a garage or a filling station. If whales no longer visit their shores, rich city folk do, and with easy adaptability, Cape men and women take the goods the gods provide them. What, they argue, is the use of a proud history if it does not make them independent? Why claim descent from the Pilgrims if they cannot serve tables without losing their pride? And the twinkle in their eyes, which Grandfather Howes brought from the ends of the world and handed down to them with the teakwood blanket-chest--that twinkle appears for a moment as they put the tourists’ money in the till, and they chuckle quietly at the ways of the world.

THE END

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