Norman Duncan

“ But here are a hundred harbours—a thousand miles of coast—with reefs and islands scattered like dust the length of it. The man who sails the Labrador must know it all like his own back yard—not in sunny weather alone, but in the night, when the headlands are like black clouds ahead, and in the mist, when the noise of breakers tells him all that he may know of his whereabouts. A flash of white in the gray distance, a thud and swish from a hidden place: the one is his beacon, the other his fog-horn. It is thus, often, that the doctor gets along. ”

“ They were Judith’s eyes, the same, as ever, in infinite depth of shadow, like the round sky at night, the same in light, like the stars that shine therein, the same in black-lashed mystery, like the firmament God made with His own hand. But still ’twas with a most marvellously gluttonous glance that she eyed the roast of fresh meat on the table before me. ’Twas no matter to me, to be sure! for a lad’s love is not so easily alienated: ’tis an actual thing––not depending upon a neurotic idealization: therefore not to be disillusioned by these natural appearances. ”

“ As the big seas slipped under the pack, the pans rose and fell; they were never at rest, never horizontal, except momentarily, perhaps, on the crest of a wave and in the lowest depths of a trough. They tipped—pitched and rolled like the deck of a schooner in a gale of wind. And as the height of the waves at the edge of the ice may fairly be estimated at thirty feet, the incline of the pans was steep and the surface slippery.
Much of the ice lying out from Point-o'-Bay was wide and heavy. It could be crossed without peril by a sure-footed man. ”

“ A clean man: a big, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, long-legged body, with a soul to match it—a glowing heart and a purpose lifted high. There was no mistaking the man by men.
John Fairmeadow, clad like a lumber-jack, upright, now, in the full stature of a man, body and soul, grinned like a delighted schoolboy. His fine head was thrown back, in the pride of clean, sure strength; his broad face was in a rosy glow; his great chest still heaved with the labour of a stormy trail; his gray eyes flashed and twinkled in the soft light of Pale Peter's many lamps. ”

“ On the fine days of that summer, when there were no fish to be caught, the man and the lad went together to the Wash-tub—a deep, little cove of the sea, clear, quiet, bottomed with smooth rock and sheltered from the wind by high cliffs; but cold—almost as cold as ice-water. Here Bobby delighted to watch Eli dive, leap from the cliff, float on his back, swim far out to sea; here he gazed with admiration on the man's rugged body—broad shoulders, bulging muscles, great arms and legs. ”

“ There is no mastery of it to be won. It gives no accounting to men. It has no feeling. The shore is bare and stolid. Black cliffs rise from the water; they are forever white at the base with the fret of the sea. Inland, the blue-black hills lift their heads; they are unknown to the folk—hills of fear, remote and cruel. Seaward, fogs and winds are bred; the misty distances are vast and mysterious, wherein are the great cliffs of the world’s edge. Winds and fogs and ice are loose and passionate upon the waters. ”

“ Poddle lay alone, lifted on the pillows, staring deep into the wide, shining sky: composed and dreamful. The distress of his deformity, as the pains of dissolution, had been mitigated by the woman's kind and knowing hand: the tawny hair, by nature rank and shaggy, by habit unkempt, now damp with sweat, was everywhere laid smooth upon his face—brushed away from the eyes: no longer permitted to obscure the fast failing sight.
Beside him, close—drawing closer—the boy seated himself. Very low and broken—husky, halting—was the Dog-faced Man's voice. The boy must often bend his ear to understand. ”

“ The weather concerns the old, the satisfied and disillusioned of life, the folk from whom the romance of being has departed. What care had we for the weather? ’Twas dusk, and we were alone at the turn of the road––a broad, rocky twist in the path, not without the softness of grass, where lovers had kissed in parting since fishing was begun from Twist Tickle and Whisper Cove. By the falling shades and a screen of young leaves we were hid from the prying eyes of Whisper Cove. ”

“ Past twelve o'clock and the night as black as a wolf's throat, with the wind blowing a forty-mile gale, thick and stifling with snow, and the ice broken up in ragged pans of varying, secret area—it was no time for any man to stir abroad from the safe place he occupied. There were patches of open water forming near by, and lanes of open water widening and shifting with the drift and spreading of the ice; and somewhere between the cliffs and the moving pack, which had broken away from them, there was a long pitfall of water in the dark. ”

“ There is one—now a captain of a coastal boat on the Newfoundland shore—who takes his steamer into a ticklish harbour of a thick, dark night, when everything is black ahead and roundabout, steering only by the echo of the ship’s whistle! There is another, a confident seaman, a bluff, high-spirited fellow, who was once delayed by bitter winter weather—an inky night, with ice about, the snow flying, the seas heavy with frost, the wind blowing a gale. ”

“ My window was black; there was no light in the sky—no star shining. Rain pattered on the roof. I heard the rush of wind. ’Twas inevitable that I should contrast the quiet of the room, the security of my place, the comfort of my couch and blankets, with a rain-swept, heaving deck and a tumultuous sea. A gusty night, I thought—thick, wet, with the wind rising. The sea would be in a turmoil on the grounds by dawn: there would be no fishing; and I was regretting this—between sleep and waking—when the bell again clanged dolefully. Roused, in a measure, I got ear of men stumbling up the path. ”

“ In Scalawag Run, thus, the ice was like a strip of shaken carpet—it's length rolling in lessening waves from first to last, as when a man takes the corners of an end of the strip and snaps the whole to shake the dust out of it; and the spindrift, blown in from the sea and snatched from the lakes in the mist of the floe, may be likened to clouds of white dust, half realized in the dusk. ”

“ OF a sunny afternoon the Newfoundland coastal steamer Clyde dropped Billy Topsail at Snook's Arm, the lair of the whaler Viking: a deep, black inlet of the sea, fouled by the blood and waste flesh of forgotten victims, from the slimy edge of which, where a score of whitewashed cottages were squatted, the rugged hills lifted their heads to the clean blue of the sky and fairly held their noses. It was all the manager's doing. Billy had but given him direction through the fog from Mad Mull to the landing place of the mail-boat. ”

“ But a borrowed baby, it seems, is of no use whatsoever; the satisfaction is said to be temporary—nothing more—and to leave a sense of vacant arms and a stinging aggravation of envy. So what Pattie Batch wanted was a baby to keep—a baby she could call her own and cherish against meddling—a baby that should be so rosy and fat and curly, so neat and white, so scrubbed and highly polished from crown to toe-nails, that every mother in the land, beholding, would promptly expire on the spot of amazement, incredulity and sheer jealousy. ”

“ We dropped the anchor of the Shining Light, and beat out, through the tickle, to the wide, menacing sea, with the night coming down and a gale of wind blowing lustily up from the gray northeast. ’Twas thus not in flight the Shining Light continued her cruise, ’twas in pursuit of the maid I loved: a thing infinitely more anxious and momentous––a thing that meant more than life or death to me, with the maid gone as cook on a Labrador craft. ”

“ The hands of the men of Candlestick Cove 150 were raw with salt-water sores; all charms against the affliction of toil in easterly gales had failed—brass bracelets and incantations alike. And the eyes of the men of Candlestick Cove were alert with apprehensive caution: tense, quick to move, clear and hard under drawn brows. With a high sea perversely continuing beyond the harbor tickle, there was no place in the eyes of men for the light of humor or love, which thrive in security. Windy weather, indeed! ’Twas a time for men to be men! ”

“ Reefs, drift-ice, wind and sea—and over all the fog: thick, wide-spread, persistent, swift in coming, mysterious in movement; it compounds the dangers. It blinds men—they curse it, while they grope along: a desperate business, indeed, thus to run by guess where positive knowledge of the way merely mitigates the peril. There are days when the fog lies like a thick blanket on the face of the sea, hiding the head-sails from the man at the wheel; it is night on deck, and broad day—with the sun in a blue sky—at the masthead; the schooners are sometimes steered by a man aloft. ”

“ Doctor Luke was completely aware of the difficulties of Anxious Bight, and so was Billy Topsail—the way from Our Harbour to Ragged Run: the treacherous reaches of young ice, bending under the weight of a man, and the veiled black water, and the labour, the crevices, the snow-crust of the Arctic pans and hummocks, and the broken field and wash of the sea beyond the lesser island of the Spotted Horses. ”

“ Often, when the men were spinning yarns in the cottages of Ruddy Cove of a winter night, he had listened, open-mouthed, to the tales of seal-hunters who had been cast away. Now he was himself drifting out to sea. He had no fire, no food, no shelter but a hummock of ice. He had the bitterness of the night to pass through—the hunger of to-morrow to face.
"But sure," he muttered, with characteristic hopefulness, "I've a boat, an' many a man has been cast away without one." ”

“ From the Strait to Chidley, our folk and their kin from Newfoundland with hook and net reaped the harvest from the sea—a vast, sullen sea, unwilling to yield: sourly striving to withhold the good Lord’s bounty from the stout and merry fellows who had with lively courage put out to gather it. ’Twas catch and split and stow away! In the dawn of stormy days and sunny ones—contemptuous of the gray wind and reaching seas—the skiffs came and went. From headland to headland—dodging the reefs, escaping the shifting peril of ice, outwitting the drifting mists—little schooners chased the fish. ”

“ It was a wild night; the wind was a vicious wind, the rain a blinding mist, the night thick and unkind, the sea such in turmoil as no punt could live through save by grace. Beyond Chain Tickle, Salim Awad entered the thick of that gale, but was not perturbed; for he remembered, rather than recognized the menace of the water, the words of that great lover, Antar, warrior and lover, who, from the sands of isolation, sang to Abla, his beloved: “The sun as it sets turns toward her and says, Darkness obscures the land, do thou arise in my absence. ”

“ And it was in this determination that Doctor Rolfe opened the surgery door and came gratefully into the warmth and light and familiar odors of the little room. Caution was the wisdom and privilege of age, wasn't it? he reflected after supper in the glow of the surgery fire. There was no shame in it, was there? Did duty require of a man that he should practice medicine out of Afternoon Arm for thirty-seven years—in all sorts of weather and along a hundred and thirty miles of the worst coast in the world—and go recklessly into a future of increasing inadequacy? ”

“ I believed in visions––in the unreasoning progress, an advance in the way of life not calculated, but made in unselfish faith, with eyes lifted up from the vulgar, swarming, assailing advantages of existence. My uncle and the fool and I! there was no peril upon the sea to daunt us: we would find and fetch, to her own place, in perfect honor, the maid I loved. And of all this I thought, whatever the worth of it, as I ran upon the Whisper Cove road, in the evening of that gray, blustering day. ”

“ The weather has scoured the coast—a thousand miles of it—as clean as an old bone: it is utterly sterile, save for a tuft or two of hardy grass and wide patches of crisp moss; bare gray rocks, low in the south, towering and craggy in the north, everywhere blasted by frost, lie in billowy hills between the froth and clammy mist of the sea and the starved forest at the edge of the inland wilderness. ”

“ From this sad tangle we were next morning extricated by news from the south ports of our coast—news so ill that sentimental tears and wishes were of a sudden forgot; being this: that the smallpox had come to Poor Luck Harbour and was there virulently raging. By noon of that day the doctor’s sloop was underway with a fair wind, bound south in desperate haste: a man’s heart beating glad aboard, that there might come a tragic solution of his life’s entanglement. ”

“ Arch Butt's link in the long chain was from Burnt Bay to Ruddy Cove. Once a week, come wind, blizzard or blinding sunlight, with four dollars and a half to reward him at the end of it, he made the eighty miles of wilderness and sea, back and forth, with the mail-bag on his broad back.
No man of the coast, save he, dared face that stretch in all weathers. It may be that he tramped a league, skated a league, sailed a league, sculled a league, groped his way through a league of night, breasted his way through a league of wind, picked his way over a league of shifting ice. ”

“ He rose, gasped, sank—came breathless to the surface; and self-possessed again, and fighting for life against hope, instinctively, but yet with determined intelligence, grasping breath when he could and desperately seeking handhold, foothold—fighting thus he was dragged a bruising course through the narrowing channel towards Black Pool and at last momentarily arrested his drift with a failing grip of a boulder.
Archie Armstrong ran down-stream. No expedient was in his horrified mind. The impulse was to plunge in and rescue Billy if he could. That was all. ”

“ It is in a grave of night and heaviness, O Khalil, my friend!”
“It is like a seed sown,” said Khalil Khayyat.
“To fail of harvest!”
“Nay; to bloom in compassionate deeds. The flower of sorrow is the joy of the world. In the broken heart is the hope of the hopeless; in the agony of poets is their sure help. Hear me, O Salim Awad!” the old man continued, rising, lifting his lean brown hand, his voice clear, vibrant, possessing the quality of prophecy. “The broken heart is a seed sown by the hand of the Beneficent and Wise. ”

“ There was no sound or stirring in all the world––a low, unresting, melancholy swish and sighing upon the rocks below my window, where the uneasy sea plainted of some woe long forgot by all save it, which was like a deeper stillness and silence. The Lost Soul was lifted old and solemn and gray in the cold light and shadow of the 68 night. I was troubled: for my uncle sat in the white beam, striking in at my window, his eyes staring from cavernous shadows, his face strangely fixed and woful––drawn, tragical, set in no incertitude of sorrow and grievous pain and expectation. ”

“ There is no jolly companionship of the forecastle and turf hut for him—no new scene, no hilarious adventure; nor has he the expectation of a proud return to lighten his toil. In the little punt he has made with his own hands he is forever riding an infinite expanse, which, in “fish weather,” is melancholy, or threatening, or deeply solemn, as it may chance—all the while and all alone confronting the mystery and terrible immensity of the sea. It may be that he gives himself over to aimless musing, or, even less happily, to pondering certain dark mysteries of the soul ”

“ We boarded her, sad at heart that a craft so lovely should come to a pass like this; and ’twas at once plain to us sailor-men that ’twas a case of ugly abandonment, if not of barratry—plain, indeed, to such as knew the man, that in conspiracy with the skipper Jagger had caused the wreck of the schooner, counting upon the isolation of the place, the lateness of the season, the simplicity of the folk, the awe in which they held him—upon all this to conceal the crime: as often happens on our far-off coast. ”

“ Hapless Harbor, then, in a nor’east blow, and a dirty day—uncivil weather; an ugly sea, a high wind, fog as thick as cheese, and, to top off with, a scowling glass. Still early spring—snow in the gullies, dripping in rivulets to the harbor water; ice at sea, driving with the variable, evil-spirited winds; perilous sailing and a wretched voyage of it upon that coast. A mean season, a dirty day—a time to be in harbor. A time most foul in feeling and intention, an hour to lie snug in the lee of some great rock. ”

“ The white houses are builded in a fashion the most disorderly at the edge of the tickle, strung clear from the narrows to the Lost Soul and straying somewhat upon the slopes, with the scrawny-legged flakes clinging to the bare declivities and the stages squatted at the water-side; but some houses, whose tenants are solitary folk made morose by company, congregate in the remoter coves––where the shore is the shore of the open sea and there is no crowd to trouble––whence paths scramble over the hills to the Tickle settlement. ”

“ It was a matter of twenty miles from the Thimble, across Schooner Bay, to the Scotchman's Breakfast of Ginger Head, and a matter of thirty miles inland to Rattle Brook—wherefrom you may compute the area of the triangle for yourself and bestir your own imagination, if you can, to apply the pressure of a forty-mile gale to the vast rough surface of the bay.
Past midnight the ice yielded to the irresistible urge of the wind.
Crack! The noise of the break zigzagged in the distance and approached, and shot past near by, and rumbled away like a crash of brittle thunder. Billy Topsail started awake. ”

“ What with floes and bergs—vast fields of drift-ice—the way north in the spring is most perilous. The same bergs—widely scattered, diminished in number, dwarfed by the milder climate—give the transatlantic passenger evil dreams: somewhere in the night, somewhere in the mist, thinks he, they may lie; and he shudders. The skipper of the Labrador craft knows that they lie thick around him: there is no surmise; when the night fell, when the fog closed in, there were a hundred to be counted from the masthead. ”