The Cruise of the Shining Light. Duncan Norman
five years’ suspicion of the eye in his very own head, his eyes were blue and clear and clean-edged, with 7 little lights of fun and tenderness and truth twinkling in their depths. I would have you know that as a child I loved the scarred and broken old ape: this with a child’s devotion, the beauty of which (for ’tis the way of the heart) is not to be matched in later years, whatever may be told. Nor in these days, when I am full-grown and understand, will I have a word spoken in his dishonor.
Not I, by Heaven!
I came to Twist Tickle, as I am informed, on the wings of a southeasterly gale: which winds are of mean spirit and sullenly tenacious––a great rush of ill weather, overflowing the world, blowing gray and high and cold. At sea ’twas breaking in a geyser of white water on the Resurrection Rock; and ashore, in the meagre shelter of Meeting House Hill, the church-bell clanged fearsomely in a swirl of descending wind: the gloaming of a wild day, indeed! The Shining Light came lurching through the frothy sea with the wind astern: a flash of white in the mist, vanishing among the careering waves, doughtily reappearing––growing the while into the stature of a small craft of parts, making harbor under a black, tumultuous sky. Beyond the Toads, where there is a turmoil of breaking water, she made a sad mess of it, so that the folk of the Tickle, watching the strange appearance from the heads, made sure she had gone down; but she struggled out of the spray and tumble, in the end, and came to harbor unscathed in the place where Nicholas Top, himself 8 the skipper and crew, was born and fished as a lad.
They boarded him, and (as they tell) he was brisk and grim and dripping upon the deck––with the lights dancing in his eyes: those which are lit by the mastery of a ship at sea.
“Ay, mates,” says he, “I’m come back. An’,” says he, “I’d thank ye t’ tread lightly, for I’ve a wee passenger below, which I’ve no wish t’ have woke. He’s by way o’ bein’ a bit of a gentleman,” says he, “an’ I’d not have ye take a liberty.”
This made them stare.
“An’ I’d not,” my uncle repeated, steadily, glancing from eye to eye, “have ye take a liberty.”
They wondered the more.
“A bit of a gentleman!” says my uncle, in savage challenge. “A bit of a gentleman!”
He would tell them no more, nor ever did; but in imperturbable serenity and certainty of purpose builded a tight little house in a nook of Old Wives’ Cove, within the harbor, where the Shining Light might lie snug; and there he dwelt with the child he had, placidly fishing the grounds with hook and line, save at such times as he set out upon some ill-seeming business to the city, whence he returned at ease, it seemed, with himself and his errand, but something grayer, they say, than before. The child he reared was in the beginning conscious of no incongruity, but clothed the old man with every grace and goodly quality, in faith and understanding, as children will: for these knowing 9 ones, with clearer sight than we, perceive neither guile nor weakness nor any lack of beauty in those who foster them––God be thanked!––whatever the nature and outward show may be. There is a beauty common to us all, neither greater nor less in any of us, which these childish hearts discover. Looking upon us, they are blind or of transcendent vision, as you will: the same in issue––so what matter?––since they find no ugliness anywhere. ’Tis the way, it may be, that God looks upon His world: either in the blindness of love forgiving us or in His greater wisdom knowing that the sins of men do serve His purpose and are like virtue in His plan.
But this is a mystery. …
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II
AT THE SIGN OF THE ANCHOR AND CHAIN
The Anchor and Chain is a warm, pleasantly noisy place by the water-side at St. John’s, with a not ungrateful reek of rum and tobacco for such outport folk as we; forever filled, too, with big, twinkling, trumpeting men, of our simple kind, which is the sort the sea rears. There for many a mellow hour of the night was I perched upon a chair at my uncle’s side, delighting in the cheer which enclosed me––in the pop of the cork, the inspiriting passage of the black bottle, the boisterous talk and salty tales, the free laughter––but in which I might not yet, being then but seven years old, actively partake.
When in the first of it my uncle called for his dram, he would never fail to catch the bar-maid’s hand, squeeze it under the table, with his left eyelid falling and his displaced jaw solemnly ajar, informing her the while, behind his thumb and forefinger, the rest of that hand being gone, that I was a devil of a teetotaler: by which (as I thought, and, I’ll be bound, he knew well I would think) my years were excused and I was admitted to the company of whiskered skippers 11 upon a footing of equality. ’Tis every man’s privilege, to be sure, to drink rum or not, as he will, without loss of dignity.
If his mates would have me drink a glass with them my uncle would not hinder.
“A nip o’ ginger-ale,” says I, brash as a sealing-captain.
’Twas the despair of my uncle. “Lord love us!” says he, looking with horror upon the bottle.
“T’ you, sir,” says I, with my glass aloft, “an’ t’ the whole bally crew o’ ye!”
“Belly-wash!” groans my uncle.
And so, brave and jolly as the rest of them, forgetting the doses of jalap in store for me when I was got back to the Tickle, I would now have my ninny (as they called it). Had the bar-maids left off kissing me––but they would not; no, they would kiss me upon every coming, and if I had nothing to order ’twas a kiss for my virtue, and if I drank ’twas a smack for my engaging manliness; and my only satisfaction was to damn them heartily––under my breath, mark you! lest I be soundly thrashed on the spot for this profanity, my uncle, though you may now misconceive his character, being in those days quick to punish me. But such are women: in a childless place, being themselves childless, they cannot resist a child, but would kiss queer lips, and be glad o’ the chance, because a child is lovely to women, intruding where no children are.
As a child of seven I hated the bar-maids of the Anchor and Chain, because they would kiss me against 12 my will when the whiskered skippers went untouched. But that was long ago. …
I must tell that at the Anchor and Chain my uncle blundered in with Tom Bull, of the Green Billow, the owner and skipper thereof, trading the ports of the West Coast, then coast-wise, but (I fancy) not averse to a smuggling opportunity, both ways, with the French Islands to the south of us; at any rate, ’twas plain, before the talk was over, that he needed no lights to make the harbor of St.-Pierre, Miquelon, of a dark time. ’Twas a red-whiskered, flaring, bulbous-nosed giant, with infantile eyes, containing more of wonder and patience than men need. He was clad in yellow oil-skins, a-drip, glistening in the light of the lamps, for he was newly come in from the rain: a bitter night, the wind in the northeast, with a black fog abroad (I remember it well)––a wet, black night, the rain driving past the red-curtained windows of the Anchor and Chain, the streets swept clean of men, ourselves light-hearted and warm, indifferent, being ashore from the wind, the cloudy night, the vicious, crested waves of the open, where men must never laugh nor touch a glass.
They must have a dram together in a stall removed from the congregation of steaming men at the long bar. And when the maid had fetched the bottle, Tom Bull raised it, regarded it doubtfully, cocked his head, looked my shamefaced uncle in the eye.
“An’ what might this be?” says he.
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“ ’Tis knowed hereabouts, in the langwitch o’ waterside widows,” replies my uncle, mildly, “as a bottle o’ Cheap an’ Nasty.”
Tom