In Madeira Place

In Madeira Place, by Heman
White Chaplin

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Title: In Madeira Place 1887
Author: Heman White Chaplin
Release Date: October 12, 2007 [EBook #23004]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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MADEIRA PLACE ***

Produced by David Widger

IN MADEIRA PLACE
1887
By Heman White Chaplin

Turning from the street which follows the line of the wharves, into
Madeira Place, you leave at once an open region of docks and spars for
comparative retirement. Wagons seldom enter Madeira Place: it is too
hard to turn them in it; and then the inhabitants, for the most part, have
a convenient way of buying their coal by the basket. How much trouble
it would save, if we would all buy our coal by the basket!
A few doors up the place a passageway makes off to the right, through
a high wooden gate that is usually open; and at the upper corner of this
passage stands a brick house, whose perpetually closed blinds suggest
the owner's absence. But the householders of Madeira Place do not
absent themselves, even in summer; they could hardly get much nearer
to the sea. And if you will take the pains to seat yourself, toward the
close of day, upon an opposite doorstep, between two rows of
clamorous little girls sliding, with screams of painful joy, down the
rough hammered stone, to the improvement of their clothing, you will
see that the house is by-no means untenanted.
Every evening it is much the same thing. First, following close upon
the heels of sunset, comes a grizzly, tall, and slouching man, in the cap
and blouse of a Union soldier, bearing down with his left hand upon a
cane, and dragging his left foot heavily behind him, while with his right
hand he holds by a string a cluster of soaring toy balloons, and also
drags, by its long wooden tongue, a rude child's cart, in which is a
small hand-organ.
Next will come, most likely, a dark, bent, keen-eyed old woman, with
her parchment face shrunk into deep wrinkles. She bears a dangling
placard, stating, in letters of white upon a patent-leather background,
what you might not otherwise suspect,--that she was a soldier under the
great Napoleon, and fought with him at Waterloo. She also bears, since
music goes with war, a worn accordion. She is the old woman to whose
shrivelled, expectant countenance you sometimes offer up a copper
coin, as she kneels by the flagged crossway path of the Park.
She is succeeded, perhaps, by a couple of black-haired, short,
broad-shouldered men, leading a waddling, unconcerned bear, and
talking earnestly together in a language which you will hardly follow.

Then you will see six or eight or ten other sons and daughters of toil,
most of them with balloons.
All these people will turn, between the high, ball-topped gate-posts,
into the alley, and descend at once to the left, by a flight of three or four
steps, to a side basement door.
As they begin to flock in, you will see through the alley gate a dark,
thick-set man, of middle age, but with very little hair, come and stand
at the foot of the steps, in the doorway. It is Sorel, the master of the
house; for this is the Maison Sorel. Some of his guests he greets with a
Noachian deluge of swift French words and high-pitched cries of
welcome. It is thus that he receives those capitalists, the bear-leaders
from the Pyrenees; it is thus that he greets the grizzled man in the blue
cap and blouse,--Fidèle the old soldier, Fidèle the pensioner, to whom a
great government, far away, at Washington, doubtless with much else
on its mind, never forgets to send by mail, each quarter-day morning, a
special, personal communication, marked with Fidèle's own name,
enclosing the preliminaries of a remittance: "Accept" (as it were) "this
slight tribute." "Ah! que c'est un gouvernement! Voilà une république!"
Even a Frenchman may be proud to be an American!
Most of his guests, however, Sorel receives with a mere pantomime of
wide-opened eyes and extended hands and shrugged-up shoulders,
accompanied by a long-drawn "Eh!" by which he bodies forth a
thousand refinements of thought which language would fail to express.
Does a fresh immigrant from the Cévennes bring back at night but one
or two of the gay balloons with which she was stocked in the morning,
or, better, none;