OF HIS OUTCAST STATE
I, Daniel Mylrea, the son (God forgive me!) of Gilcrist Mylrea, Bishop
of Man--grace and peace be with that saintly soul!--do set me down in
the year (as well as my reckoning serves me) 1712, the month September,
the day somewhere between the twentieth and the thirtieth, to begin a
brief relation of certain exceeding strange accidents of this life that
have befallen me since, at the heavy judgment of God, I first turned my
face from the company of men. Not, as the good Bunyan was, am I now
impelled to such a narration--bear with me though I name myself with
that holy man--by hope or thought that the goodness and bounty of God
may thereby be the more advanced before the sons of men, though it is
for me also to magnify the Heavenly Majesty, insomuch as that by this
door of my outcast state He has brought me to partake of grace and life.
Alone I sit to write what perchance no eye may read, but it is with
hope, perhaps only vain, that she who is dear to me beyond words of
appraisement may yet learn of the marvels which did oft occur, that I
try in these my last days to put my memory under wardship. For it has
fastened on me with conviction that God has chosen me for a vessel of
mercy, and that very soon he will relieve me from the body of the death
I live in. If I finish this writing before I go hence, and if when I am
gone she reads it, methinks it will come to her as a deep solace that
her prayer of long since was answered, and that, though so sorely
separated, we twain have yet been one even in this world, and lived
together by day and hour in the cheer of the spirit. But if the gracious
end should come before I bring my task to a period, and she should know
only of my forlorn condition and learn nothing of the grace wherein much
of its desolation was lost, and never come to an understanding of such
of those strange accidents as to her knowledge have befallen, then that
were also well, for she must therein be spared many tears.
It was on May 29, 1705--seven years and four months, as I reckon it,
back from this present time--that in punishment of my great crime the
heavy sentence fell on me that cut me off forever from the number of the
people. What happened on that day and on the days soon following it I do
partly remember with the vividness of horror, and partly recall with
difficulty and mistrust from certain dark places of memory that seem to
be clouded over and numb. When I came to myself as I was plodding over
the side of Slieu Whallin, the thunder was loud in my ears, the
lightning was flashing before my eyes, and the rain was swirling around
me. I minded them not, but went on, hardly seeing what was about or
above me, on and on, over mountain road and path, until the long day was
almost done and the dusk began to deepen. Then the strength of the
tempest was spent, and only the hinder part of it beat out from the west
a thin, misty rain, and I found myself in Rushen, on the south brow of
the glen below Carny-Gree. There I threw myself down on the turf with a
great numbness and a great stupor upon me, both in body and in mind. How
long I lay there I know not, whether a few minutes only, or, as I then
surmised, near four-and-twenty hours; but the light of day was not
wholly gone from the sky when I lifted my head from where it had rested
on my hands, and saw that about me in a deep half-circle stood a drift
of sheep, all still, save for their heavy breathing, and all gazing in
their questioning silence down on me. I think in my heart, remembering
my desolation, I drew solace from this strange fellowship on the lone
mountain-side, but I lifted my hand and drove the sheep away, and I
thought as they went they bleated, but I could hear nothing of their
cry, and so surmised that under the sufferings of that day I had become
deaf.
I fell back to the same stupor as before, and when I came to myself
again the moon was up, and a white light was around the place where I
sat. With the smell of the sheep in my nostrils I thought they might be
standing about me again, but I could see nothing clearly, and so
stretched out my hands either way. Then, from their confusion in
scurrying away, I knew that the sheep had indeed been there, and that
under the sufferings of that day I had also failed in my sight.
The tempest was over by this time, the mountain turf had run dry, and I
lay me down at length and fell into a deep sleep without dreams; and so
ended the first day of my solitary state.
When I awoke the sun was high, and the wheat-ear was singing on a stone
very close above me, whereunder her pale-blue egg she had newly laid. I
know not what wayward humor then possessed me, but it is true that I
reached my hand to the little egg and looked at it, and crushed it
between my finger and thumb, and cast its refuse away. My surmise of the
night before I now found to be verified, that hearing and sight were
both partly gone from me. No man ever mourned less at first knowledge of
such infirmities, but in truth I was almost beyond the touch of pain,
and a sorer calamity would have wanted strength to torture me. I rose
and set my face southward, for it was in the Calf Sound, as I
remembered, that I was to find my boat, and if any hope lived in my
heart, so numb of torpor, it was that perchance I might set sail and get
myself away.
I walked between Barrule and Dalby, and came down on the eastward of
Cronk-na-Irey-Lhaa. Then I, who had never before known my strength to
fail, grew suddenly weary, and would fain have cast me down to rest. So
to succumb I could not brook, but I halted in my walking and looked
back, and across the plain to the east, and down to the Bay of Fleswick
to the west. Many times since have I stood there and looked on sea and
sky, and mountain and dale, and asked myself was ever so fair a spot,
and if the plains of heaven were fairer? But that day my dim eyes
scoured the sea for a sail and the mountains for a man, and nothing did
they see of either, and all else was then as nothing.
Yet, though I was so eager to keep within sight of my fellow-man, I was
anxious not to come his way, and in choosing my path I walked where he
was least likely to be. Thus, holding well to the west of Fleswick, I
took the cliff-head toward Brada, and then came down between Port Erin
and Port-le-Mary to the moors that stretch to the margin of the sound.
Some few I met, chiefly shepherds and fishermen, but I lifted my eyes to
none, and none gave me salutation. This was well, for my heart was
bitter, and if any had spoken, not knowing me, I doubt not I should have
answered ill. In my great heart-torpor, half-blind, half-deaf, I was
that day like a wounded beast of the field, ranging the moorland with a
wild abandonment and dangerous to its kind.
When I came to Cregneesh and saw it for the first time, a little
disjointed gipsy encampment of mud-built tents pitched on the bare
moor, the sky was reddening across the sea, and from that I knew how
far advanced the day must be, how slow my course had been, and how
low my strength. In half an hour more I had sighted my boat, the
"Ben-my-Chree," where she lay in the Doon Creek of the sound, at the
length of some fifty fathoms inside the rocks of Kitterland. When I came
up to her I found her anchored in some five fathoms of water, with the
small-boat lying dry on the shingly beach. Her cabin contained
provisions enough for present needs, and more than that I was in no mood
to think about. Since the morning of the day before I had not broken
fast, but now I ate hungrily of oaten and barley cake. Later in the
evening, when the stars were out and the moon, which was in its last
quarter, was hanging over the Calf, I mixed myself some porridge of
rye-meal and cold water, and ate it on the deck, and then went below to
my bunk and lay me down alone. Between sleeping and waking I tried to
think of my position and to realize it, but an owl was hooting somewhere
on the land, and somewhere over the waters of the sound a diver was
making his unearthly laugh. I could not think save of the hooting owl
and the screaming diver, and when I thought of them, though their note
was doleful and seemed to tell of suffering, or perhaps of demoniac
delight, I could not thank God that I had been made a man. Thus, feeling
how sore a thing it is to be a creature living under the wrath of God, I
tossed on my bunk until I fell to sleep; and so ended the second day of
my unblessed condition.
To follow closely all that befell on the next day, or the many days
thereafter whereof I kept no reckoning, were to weary my spirit. One
thing I know, that a sudden numbness of the spiritual life within me
left me a worse man than I had been before the day of my cutting off,
and that I did soon lose the little I had of human love and tenderness.
My gun had been put in the boat, and with that I ranged the cliffs and
the moor from the Mull Hills that lie to the west of Cregneesh to the
Chasms that are to the east of it. Many puffins I shot, that much
frequent these shores, but their flesh was rank and salt, and they were
scarcely worth the powder I spent on them. Thus, it sometimes happened
that, being in no straits for food, I cast the birds away, or did not
put myself to the pains of lifting them up after they fell to my gun,
but went on, nevertheless, to destroy them in my wanton humor. Rabbits I
snared by a trick I learned when a boy, and sometimes cooked them in the
stove and ate them like a Christian man, and at other times I sat me
down on the hillside and rived them asunder as a wild creature of the
hills might do. But whether I ate in my boat or on the cliff I took no
religion to my table, and thought only that I liked my food or misliked
it.
Many times in these first days I had to tear myself away from thinking
of my condition, for to do so was like the stab of a knife to my brain,
and I plainly saw that in that way madness itself would lie. If I told
myself that other men had been cast alone ere now in desolate places
where no foot of man was and no sound of a human voice, a great stroke
would come upon my spirit with the thought that only their bodies had
been cast away, but that my soul was so. The marooned seaman on an
uninhabited island, when at length he set eyes on his fellow-man, might
lift up his heart to God, but to me the company of men was not blessed.
Free I was to go where men were, even to the towns wherein they herded
together, but go where I would I must yet be alone.
With this thought, and doubting not that for me the day of grace was
past and gone, since God had turned His face from the atonement I had
erewhile been minded to make, I grew day by day more bitter in my heart,
and found it easiest to shut my mind by living actively from hour to
hour. Then, like a half-starved hound, I went abroad at daybreak and
scoured the hills the day long, and returned to my bed at night. I knew
I was a baser thing than I had been, and it brought some comfort then to
know that I was alone and no eye saw me as I now was. Mine was a rank
hold of life, and it gave me a savage delight unknown before to live by
preying on other creatures. I shot and slew daily and hourly, and if for
a moment I told myself that what I had killed held its life on the same
tenure that I did, my humanity was not touched except to feel a strange
wild thrill that it was not I that lay dead. Looking back over these
seven years, it comes to me as an unnatural thing that this mood can
ever have been mine; but mine it was, and from the like of it may God in
His mercy keep all Christian men.
One day--I think it must have been somewhere toward the end of the first
month of my outcast state--I was ranging the cliff-side above the gray
rocks of the Black Head, when I chanced on a hare and shot it. On coming
up with it I found it was lean and bony, and so turned aside and left it
as it squeaked and bounced from my feet. This was in the morning, and
toward nightfall I returned by the same way and saw the hare lying by a
brookside, ragged and bleeding, but still alive. At sight of me the wee
thing tried to move away, but its weakness and a clot of its blood kept
it down, and, feeling its extremity, it lifted its two slender paws in
the air, while its glistening eyes streamed visibly, and set up a
piteous cry like the cry of a little child. I can not write what then I
did, for it wounds me sore to think of it, but when it was done, and
that piteous cry was no more in mine ears, suddenly I said with myself
this awful word, "I am no longer a man, but a beast of the field; and
the God of mercy and of tenderness has cast me forever out of the hollow
of His hand."