Read Online Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
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could ever find the place, much less want to go to all the trouble of getting to it and actually living in it.”
I was, by then, finally able to tease Mother Hannah a little; I say finally, because it took me years to dare to do it. Mother Hannah never did come to invite it. But she seldom realized she was being teased, either, so I was fairly safe the few times I did.
“Nonsense,” she said serenely, bothered not at all by any opinion I might have. “There are many people who would move heaven and earth to be a part of Retreat. But they’re rarely suitable, and they wouldn’t be happy here anyway.
We’re very plain-living people, you know, when we’re up here. And often quite high-minded; most people are far happier in Northeast Harbor or at Bass Cove or Somes Sound.
Places like that. Even Bar Harbor.”
Her high-arched nose told me what she thought of those sinks of depravity and excess.
Peter, who was lying stretched full-length before the fire eating apples while one of our frequent June nor’easters moaned outside, said from the depths of an old Hudson Bay blanket, “ ‘The soul selects her own society and shuts the door. On her divine majority, obtrude no more.’ ”
“Exactly,” Mother Hannah said. “That’s very cleverly put, darling.”
“Emily Dickinson thought so,” Peter’s voice, suspiciously equable, said from the couch.
“Is she that strange little woman with the bicycle visiting Frances and English Sears?” Mother Hannah said vaguely.
“I doubt it,” Peter said, laughter breaking through. “From what I hear, she never left her own back yard in her entire life.”
“Really, darling, you know the strangest people.”
“Don’t I just,” said Peter.
For whatever reason, mainly geographical ones, Cape Rosier and Retreat remain nearly as untouched today as they did on that long-ago day I first came here, and in a way it is a great pity, for this coast and
the countryside around it are by far the most beautiful I have ever seen. But at first it frightened me. Stark, jutting, thickly forested with the graceful pointed firs whose silhouettes against the sky can break the heart, gray-spined where the great rock ribs of the earth break through, and bound at the sea’s edge by huge pink boulders and fierce red ledges left by the last dying glaciers, the cape seems, at first, inimicable to man, inhospitable to life. The great blue skies and endless indigo seas—edged in a kind of crystal light when the weather is about to change for the worse, losing themselves altogether in the thick, silent, white sea fogs that sometimes roll in for weeks—seem to me to be deeper, purer, harder, vaster than anywhere else on that old coast. On the wind you can hear the cries of gulls all the way out on the big islands, or the fog buoy miles and miles away off Stonington on Deer Isle. On the days of high sun and still blue air, you can see the line of the Camden Hills across the entire great bay. Sight, sound, smells all have a preternatural keenness here.
It seems to me—and I remember it was perhaps the first thought I had when at last we jolted out of the forest and saw Retreat lying ahead of us in the sunset, at the end of that endless day—that Cape Rosier is about clarity. Simply that.
There is nothing here shifting, seeping, insidious, seductive, smothering, soft, to blur the edges of anything. The sharp beauty cuts like a knife. Even the small rich green sweeps of the little sea meadows, thick with wildflowers and rimmed with the black-green of the firs; even the undulating fringes of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace along the dusty roadsides; even the riots of short-lived summer flowers in the yards of the most humble shacks—even these seem as sharply and clearly limned as the details of a Dali painting. To my senses, long lulled by the velvety morass that is the Low Country, it looked that day a country of a million sharp and dangerous and beautiful sword points.
“I never saw
I was, by then, finally able to tease Mother Hannah a little; I say finally, because it took me years to dare to do it. Mother Hannah never did come to invite it. But she seldom realized she was being teased, either, so I was fairly safe the few times I did.
“Nonsense,” she said serenely, bothered not at all by any opinion I might have. “There are many people who would move heaven and earth to be a part of Retreat. But they’re rarely suitable, and they wouldn’t be happy here anyway.
We’re very plain-living people, you know, when we’re up here. And often quite high-minded; most people are far happier in Northeast Harbor or at Bass Cove or Somes Sound.
Places like that. Even Bar Harbor.”
Her high-arched nose told me what she thought of those sinks of depravity and excess.
Peter, who was lying stretched full-length before the fire eating apples while one of our frequent June nor’easters moaned outside, said from the depths of an old Hudson Bay blanket, “ ‘The soul selects her own society and shuts the door. On her divine majority, obtrude no more.’ ”
“Exactly,” Mother Hannah said. “That’s very cleverly put, darling.”
“Emily Dickinson thought so,” Peter’s voice, suspiciously equable, said from the couch.
“Is she that strange little woman with the bicycle visiting Frances and English Sears?” Mother Hannah said vaguely.
“I doubt it,” Peter said, laughter breaking through. “From what I hear, she never left her own back yard in her entire life.”
“Really, darling, you know the strangest people.”
“Don’t I just,” said Peter.
For whatever reason, mainly geographical ones, Cape Rosier and Retreat remain nearly as untouched today as they did on that long-ago day I first came here, and in a way it is a great pity, for this coast and
the countryside around it are by far the most beautiful I have ever seen. But at first it frightened me. Stark, jutting, thickly forested with the graceful pointed firs whose silhouettes against the sky can break the heart, gray-spined where the great rock ribs of the earth break through, and bound at the sea’s edge by huge pink boulders and fierce red ledges left by the last dying glaciers, the cape seems, at first, inimicable to man, inhospitable to life. The great blue skies and endless indigo seas—edged in a kind of crystal light when the weather is about to change for the worse, losing themselves altogether in the thick, silent, white sea fogs that sometimes roll in for weeks—seem to me to be deeper, purer, harder, vaster than anywhere else on that old coast. On the wind you can hear the cries of gulls all the way out on the big islands, or the fog buoy miles and miles away off Stonington on Deer Isle. On the days of high sun and still blue air, you can see the line of the Camden Hills across the entire great bay. Sight, sound, smells all have a preternatural keenness here.
It seems to me—and I remember it was perhaps the first thought I had when at last we jolted out of the forest and saw Retreat lying ahead of us in the sunset, at the end of that endless day—that Cape Rosier is about clarity. Simply that.
There is nothing here shifting, seeping, insidious, seductive, smothering, soft, to blur the edges of anything. The sharp beauty cuts like a knife. Even the small rich green sweeps of the little sea meadows, thick with wildflowers and rimmed with the black-green of the firs; even the undulating fringes of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace along the dusty roadsides; even the riots of short-lived summer flowers in the yards of the most humble shacks—even these seem as sharply and clearly limned as the details of a Dali painting. To my senses, long lulled by the velvety morass that is the Low Country, it looked that day a country of a million sharp and dangerous and beautiful sword points.
“I never saw
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