Norman Duncan - The Cruise of the Shining Light

“I’ll try, sir,” said I.

My uncle touched me again–moving nearer, now, that his hand might lie upon me. “Dannie,” he whispered, “if you must sin the sins of us–”

“Ay, sir?”

“They’ll be some poor folk t’ suffer. An’ Dannie–”

I was very grave in the pause.

“You’ll not forget t’ be kind, will you,” he pleaded, “t’ them that suffer for your sins?”

“I will not sin,” I protested, “t’ the hurt of any others.”

He seemed not to hear. “An’ you’ll bear your own pain,” he continued, “like a man, will you not?”

I would bear it like a man.

“That’s good,” said he. “That’s very good!”

The moon was now risen from the sea: the room full of white light.

“They is a Shepherd,” said my uncle. “God be thanked for that. He’ll fetch you home.”

“An’ you?” said I.

“Me? Oh no!”

“He’ll remember,” said I, confidently, “that you was once a little lad–jus’ like me.”

“God knows!” said he.

I was then bade go to sleep…

Presently I fell asleep, but awoke, deep in the night, to find my uncle brooding in a chair by my bed. The moon was high in the unclouded heaven. 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 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. I was afraid–’twas his eyes: they shook me with fear of the place and distance from which it seemed he gazed at me. ’Twas as though a gulf lay between, a place of ghostly depths, of echoes and jagged rock, dark with wind-blown shadows. He had brought me far (it seemed) upon a journey, leading me; and having now set my feet in other paths and turned my face to a City of Light, lifted in glory upon a hill, was by some unworthiness turned back to his own place, but stayed a moment upon the cloudy cliff at the edge of darkness, with the night big and thick beyond, to watch me on my way.

“Uncle Nick,” said I, “’tis wonderful late in the night.”

“Ay, Dannie,” he answered; “but I’m wantin’ sore t’ sit by you here a spell.”

“I’ll not be able,” I objected, “t’ go t’ sleep.”

“’Twill do no hurt, lad,” said he “if I’m wonderful quiet. An’ I’ll be quiet–wonderful quiet.”

“But I’m wantin’ t’ go t’ sleep!”

“Ah, well,” said he, “I’ll not trouble you, then. I would not have you lie awake. I’ll go. Good-night. God bless you, lad!”

I wish I had not driven him away…

In all this time I have said little enough of Twist Tickle, never a word (I think) of Twin Islands, between whose ragged shores the sheltering tickle winds; and by your favor I come now gratefully to the task. ’Tis a fishing outport: a place of rock and sea and windy sky–no more than that–but much loved by the twelvescore simple souls of us, who asked for share of all the earth but salt-water and a harbor (with the winds blowing) to thrive sufficient to ourselves and to the world beyond. Had my uncle sought a secret place to foster the child that was I–which yet might yield fair wage for toil–his quest fortuitously ended when the Shining Light ran dripping out of the gale and came to anchor in the quiet water of the tickle. But more like ’twas something finer that moved him: in that upheaval of his life, it may be, ’twas a wistful turning of the heart to the paths and familiar waters of the shore where he lived as a lad. Had the Shining Light sailed near or far and passed the harbor by, the changed fortunes of–but there was no sailing by, nor could have been, for the great wind upon whose wings she came was passionate, too, and fateful.

If ’tis a delight to love, whatever may come of it (as some hold), I found delight upon the grim hills of Twin Islands…

They lie hard by the coast, but are yet remote: Ship’s Run divides them from the long blue line of main-land which lifts its barren hills in misty distance from our kinder place. ’Tis a lusty stretch of gray water, sullen, melancholy, easily troubled by the winds, which delight, it seems, sweeping from the drear seas of the north, to stir its rage. In evil weather ’tis wide as space; when a nor’easter lifts the white dust of the sea, clouding Blow-me-down-Billy of the main-land in a swirl of mist and spume, there is no departure; nor is there any crossing (mark you) when in the spring of the year a southerly gale urges the ice to sea. We of Twin Islands were cut off by Ship’s Run from all the stirring and inquisitive world.

According to Tumm, the clerk of the Quick as Wink , which traded our harbor, Twin Islands are t’ the west’ard o’ the Scarf o’ Fog, a bit below the Blue Gravestones, where the Soldier o’ the Cross was picked up by Satan’s Tail in the nor’easter o’ the Year o’ the Big Shore Catch. “Oh, I knows un!” says he. “You opens the Tickle when you rounds Cocked Hat o’ the Hen-an’-Chickens an’ lays a course for Gentleman Cove, t’other side o’ the bay. Good harbor in dirty weather,” says he: “an’, ecod! my lads, a hearty folk.” This is forbidding enough, God knows! as to situation; but though the ancient islands, scoured by wind and rain, are set in a misty isolation and show gray, grimly wrinkled faces to the unkind sea, betraying no tenderness, they are green and genial in the places within: there are valleys; and the sun is no idler, and the lean earth of those parts is not to be discouraged.

“God-forsaken place, Nick!” quoth Tom Bull, at the Anchor and Chain.

“How was you knowin’ that, Tom?” says my uncle. “You isn’t never been there.”

“ Sounds God-forsaken.”

“So does hell.”

“Well, hell is .”

“There you goes again, Tom Bull!” cries my uncle, with a sniff and wrathful twitch of the lip. “There you goes again, you dunderhead–jumpin’ t’ conclusions!”

Tom Bull was shocked.

“Hell God-forsaken!” growls my uncle. “They’s more hard labor for the good Lord t’ do in hell, Tom Bull, than any place I knows on; an’ I ’low He’s right there, kep’ double watches on the jump, a-doin’ of it!”

Twist Tickle pursues an attenuated way between the Twins, broadening into the harbor basin beyond the Pillar o’ Cloud, narrowing at the Finger and Thumb, widening, once more, into the lower harbor, and escaping to the sea, at last, between Pretty Willie and the Lost Soul, which are great bare heads. You get a glimpse of the Tickle from the deck of the mail-boat: this when she rounds the Cocked Hat and wallows off towards Gentleman Cove. ’Tis but a niggardly glimpse at best, and vastly unfair to the graces of the place: a white house, wee and listlessly tilted, gripping a rock, as with expiring interest; a reach of placid water, deep and shadowy, from which rise the hills, gray, rugged, splashed with green; heights beyond, scarfed with clinging wisps of mist.

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. My uncle’s cottage sat respectably, even with some superiority, upon a narrow neck of rock by the Lost Soul, outlooking, westerly, to sea, but in the opposite direction dwelling in a way more intimate and fond upon the unruffled water of Old Wives’ Cove, within the harbor, where rode the Shining Light .