unfortuitous chance, not an incident of catastrophe, but a significant
expression of character. Terry Lute was a coward, deep down, through
and through: he had not lapsed in a panic; he had disclosed an abiding
fear of the sea. He was not a coward by any act; no mere wanton folly
had disgraced him, but the fallen nature of his own heart. He had
failed; but he was only a lad, after all, and he must be helped to
overcome. And there he sat, snuggled close to the fire, sobbing now,
his face in his hands. Terry Lute knew--that which Skipper Tom did not
yet know--that he had nurtured fear of the sea for the scandalous
delight of imposing it upon others in the exercise of a devilish
impulse and facility.
And he was all the more ashamed. He had been overtaken in iniquity; he
was foredone.
"Terry, lad," said Skipper Tom, gently, "you've done ill the day."
"Ay, sir."
"I 'low," Skipper Tom apologized, "that you isn't very well."
"I'm not ailin', sir," Terry whimpered.
"An I was you," Skipper Tom admonished, "I'd not spend time in
weepin'."
"I'm woebegone, sir."
"You're a coward, God help you!" Skipper Tom groaned.
"Ay, sir."
Skipper Tom put a hand on the boy's knee. His voice was very gentle.
"There's no place in the world for a man that's afeard o' the sea," he
said. "There's no work in the world for a coward t' do. What's fetched
you to a pass like this, lad?"
"Broodin', sir."
"Broodin', Terry? What's that?"
"Jus' broodin'."
"Not that damned picture, Terry?"
"Ay, sir."
"How can that be, lad?" It was all incomprehensible to Skipper Tom.
"'Tis but an unreal thing."
[Illustration: "'You're a coward, God help you!' Skipper Tom
groaned."]
Terry looked up.
"'Tis _real_!" he blazed.
"'Tis but a thing o' fancy."
"Ay, fancy! A thing o' fancy! 'Tis fancy that _makes_ it real."
"An' you--a coward?"
Terry sighed.
"Ay, sir," said he, ashamed.
"Terry Lute," said Skipper Tom, gravely, now perceiving, "is you been
fosterin' any fear o' the sea?"
"Ay, sir."
Skipper Tom's eye flashed in horrified understanding. He rose in
contempt and wrath.
"_Practicin'_ fear o' the sea?" he demanded.
"Ay, sir."
"T' sketch a picture?"
Terry began to sob.
"There wasn't no other way," he wailed.
"God forgive you, wicked lad!"
"I'll overcome, sir."
"Ah, Terry, poor lad," cried Skipper Tom, anguished, "you've no place
no more in a decent world."
"I'll overcome."
"'Tis past the time."
Terry Lute caught his father about the neck.
"I'll overcome, father," he sobbed. "I'll overcome."
And Tom Lute took the lad in his arms, as though he were just a little
fellow.
* * * * *
And, well, in great faith and affection they made an end of it all
that night--a chuckling end, accomplished in the kitchen stove, of
everything that Terry Lute had done, saving only "The Fang," which
must be kept ever-present, said Skipper Tom, to warn the soul of Terry
Lute from the reefs of evil practices. And after that, and through the
years since then, Terry Lute labored to fashion a man of himself after
the standards of his world. Trouble? Ay, trouble--trouble enough at
first, day by day, in fear, to confront the fabulous perils of his
imagination. Trouble enough thereafter encountering the sea's real
assault, to subdue the reasonable terrors of those parts. Trouble
enough, too, by and by, to devise perils beyond the common, to find a
madcap way, to disclose a chance worth daring for the sheer exercise
of courage. But from all these perils, of the real and the fanciful,
of the commonplace path and the way of reckless ingenuity, Terry Lute
emerged at last with the reputation of having airily outdared every
devil of the waters of Out-of-the-Way.
When James Cobden came wandering by, Terry Lute was a great, grave
boy, upstanding, sure-eyed, unafraid, lean with the labor he had done
upon his own soul.
* * * * *
When the _Stand By_, in from Twillingate Harbor, dropped anchor at
Out-of-the-Way Tickle, James Cobden had for three days lived
intimately with "The Fang." He was hardly to be moved from its
company. He had sought cause of offense; he had found no reasonable
grounds. Wonder had grown within him. Perhaps from this young work he
had visioned the highest fruition of the years. The first warm flush
of approbation, at any rate, had changed to the beginnings of
reverence. That Terry Lute was a master--a master of magnitude,
already, and of a promise so large that in generations the world had
not known the like of it--James Cobden was gravely persuaded. And this
meant much to James Cobden, clear, aspiring soul, a man in pure love
with his art. And there was more: grown old now, a little, he dreamed
new dreams of fatherly affection, indulged in a studio which had grown
lonely of late; and he promised himself, beyond this, the fine delight
of cherishing a young genius, himself the prophet of that power, with
whose great fame his own name might bear company into the future. And
Terry Lute, met in the flesh, turned out to be a man--even such a man,
in his sure, wistful strength, as Cobden could respect.
There came presently the close of a day on the cliffs of
Out-of-the-Way, a blue wind blowing over the sunlit moss, when
Cobden, in fear of the issue, which must be challenged at last, turned
from his work to the slope behind, where Terry Lute sat watching.
"Come!" said Cobden, smiling, "have a try."
Terry Lute shrank amused from the extended color-box and brushes.
"Ah, no, sir," said he, blushing. "I used t', though, when I were a
child."
Cobden blinked.
"Eh?" he ejaculated.
"I isn't done nothin' at it since."
"'I put away childish things,'" flashed inevitably into Cobden's mind.
He was somewhat alarmed. "Why not since then?" he asked.
"'Tis not a man's work, sir."
"Again, why not?"
"'Tis a sort o'--silly thing--t' do."
"Good God!" Cobden thought, appalled. "The lad has strangled his
gift!"
Terry Lute laughed then.
"I'm sorry, sir," he said quickly, with a wistful smile, seeking
forgiveness; "but I been watchin' you workin' away there like mad with
all them little brushes. An' you looked so sort o' funny, sir, that I
jus' couldn't help--laughin'." Again he threw back his head, and once
more, beyond his will, and innocent of offense and blame, he laughed a
great, free laugh.
It almost killed James Cobden.
* * * * *
IV
THE DOCTOR OF AFTERNOON ARM
* * * * *
IV
THE DOCTOR OF AFTERNOON ARM
It was March weather. There was sunshine and thaw. Anxious Bight was
caught over with rotten ice from Ragged Run Harbor to the heads of
Afternoon Arm. A rumor of seals on the Arctic drift ice off shore had
come in from the Spotted Horses. It inspired instant haste in all the
cottages of Ragged Run--an eager, stumbling haste. In Bad-Weather Tom
West's kitchen, somewhat after ten o'clock in the morning, in the
midst of this hilarious scramble to be off to the floe, there was a
flash and spit of fire, and the clap of an explosion, and the clatter
of a sealing-gun on the bare floor; and in the breathless, dead little
interval between the appalling detonation and a man's groan of dismay
followed by a woman's choke and scream of terror, Dolly West,
Bad-Weather Tom's small maid, stood swaying, wreathed in gray smoke,
her little hands pressed tight to her eyes.
She was--or rather had been--a pretty little creature. There had been
yellow curls--in the Newfoundland way--and rosy cheeks and grave blue
eyes; but now of all this shy, fair loveliness----
"You've killed her!"
"No--no!"
Dolly dropped her hands. She reached out, then, for something to
grasp. And she plainted: "I ithn't dead, mother. I juth--I juth can't
thee." She extended her hands. They were discolored, and there was a
slow, red drip. "They're all wet!" she complained.
By this time the mother had the little girl gathered close in her
arms. She moaned: "The doctor!"
Terry West caught up his cap and mittens and sprang to the door.
"Not by the Bight!" Bad-Weather shouted.
"No, sir."
Dolly West whimpered: "It thmart-th, mother!"
"By Mad Harry an' Thank-the-Lord!"
"Ay, sir."
Dolly screamed--now: "It hurt-th! Oh, oh, it hurt-th!"
"An' haste, lad!"
"Ay, sir."
There was no doctor in Ragged Run Harbor; there was a doctor at
Afternoon Arm, however--across Anxious Bight. Terry West avoided the
rotten ice of the Bight and took the 'longshore trail by way of Mad
Harry and Thank-the-Lord. At noon he was past Mad Harry, his little
legs wearing well and his breath coming easily through his expanded
nostrils. He had not paused; and at four o'clock--still on a
dogtrot--he had hauled down the chimney smoke of Thank-the-Lord and
was bearing up for Afternoon Arm.
* * * * *
Early dusk caught him shortcutting the doubtful ice of Thank-the-Lord
Cove; and half an hour later, midway of the passage to Afternoon Arm,
with two miles left to accomplish--dusk falling thick and cold, then,
a frosty wind blowing--Creep Head of the Arm looming black and
solid--he dropped through the ice and vanished.
Returning from a professional call at Tumble Tickle in clean, sunlit
weather, with nothing more tedious than eighteen miles of wilderness
trail and rough floe ice behind him, Doctor Rolfe was chagrined to
discover himself fagged out. He had come heartily down the trail from
Tumble Tickle, but on the ice in the shank of the day--there had been
eleven miles of the floe--he had lagged and complained under what was
indubitably the weight of his sixty-three years. He was slightly
perturbed. He had been fagged out before, to be sure. A man cannot
practice medicine out of a Newfoundland outport harbor for
thirty-seven years and not know what it means to stomach a physical
exhaustion. It was not that. What perturbed Doctor Rolfe was the
singular coincidence of a touch of melancholy with the ominous
complaint of his lean old legs.
And presently there was a more disquieting revelation. In the drear,
frosty dusk, when he rounded Creep Head, opened the lights of
Afternoon Arm, and caught the warm, yellow gleam of the lamp in the
surgery window, his expectation ran all at once to his supper and his
bed. He was hungry--that was true. Sleepy? No; he was not sleepy. Yet
he wanted to go to bed. Why? He wanted to go to bed in the way that
old men want to go to bed--less to sleep than just to sigh and stretch
out and rest. And this anxious wish for bed--just to stretch out and
rest--held its definite implication. It was more than symptomatic--it
was shocking.
"That's age!"
It was.
"Hereafter, as an old man should," Doctor Rolfe resolved, "I go with
caution and I take my ease."
* * * * *
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? It did not! He had stood his watch. What did he
owe life? Nothing--nothing! He had paid in full. Well, then, what did
life owe him? It owed him something, didn't it? Didn't life owe him
at least an old age of reasonable ease and self-respecting
independence? It did!
By this time the more he reflected, warming his lean, aching shanks
the while, the more he dwelt upon the bitter incidents of that one
hundred and thirty miles of harsh coast, through the thirty-seven
years he had managed to survive the winds and seas and frosts of it;
and the more he dwelt upon his straitened circumstances and increasing
age the more petulant he grew.
It was in such moods as this that Doctor Rolfe was accustomed to
recall the professional services he had rendered and to dispatch bills
therefor; and now he fumbled through the litter of his old desk for
pen and ink, drew a dusty, yellowing sheaf of statements of accounts
from a dusty pigeonhole, and set himself to work, fuming and grumbling
all the while. "I'll tilt the fee!" he determined. This was to be the
new policy--to "tilt the fee," to demand payment, to go with caution;
in this way to provide for an old age of reasonable ease and
self-respecting independence. And Doctor Rolfe began to make out
statements of accounts due for services rendered.
* * * * *
From this labor and petulant reflection Doctor Rolfe was withdrawn by
a tap on the surgery door. He called "Come in!" with no heart for the
event. It was no night to be abroad on the ice. Yet the tap could mean
but one thing--somebody was in trouble; and as he called "Come in!"
and looked up from the statement of account, and while he waited for
the door to open, his pen poised and his face in a pucker of trouble,
he considered the night and wondered what strength was left in his
lean old legs.
A youngster--he had been dripping wet and was now sparkling all over
with frost and ice--intruded.
"Thank-the-Lord Cove?"
"No, sir."
"Mad Harry?"
"Ragged Run, sir."
"Bad-Weather West's lad?"
"Yes, sir."
"Been in the water?"
The boy grinned. He was ashamed of himself. "Yes, sir. I falled
through the ice, sir."
"Come across the Bight?"
The boy stared. "No, sir. A cat couldn't cross the Bight the night,
sir. 'Tis all rotten. I come alongshore by Mad Harry an'
Thank-the-Lord. I dropped through all of a sudden, sir, in
Thank-the-Lord Cove."
"Who's sick?"
"Pop's gun went off, sir."
Doctor Rolfe rose. "'Pop's gun went off!' Who was in the way?"
"Dolly, sir."
"And Dolly in the way! And Dolly----"
"She've gone blind, sir. An' her cheek, sir--an' one ear, sir----"
"What's the night?"
"Blowin' up, sir. There's a scud. An' the moon----"
"You didn't cross the Bight? Why not?"
"'Tis rotten from shore t' shore. I'd not try the Bight, sir, the
night."
"No?"
"No, sir." The boy was very grave.
"Mm-m."
All this while Doctor Rolfe had been moving about the surgery in sure
haste--packing a waterproof case with little instruments and vials and
what not. And now he got quickly into his boots and jacket, pulled
down his coonskin cap, pulled up his sealskin gloves, handed
Bad-Weather West's boy over to his housekeeper for supper and bed (he
was a bachelor man), and closed the surgery door upon himself.
* * * * *
Doctor Rolfe took to the harbor ice and drove head down into the gale.
There were ten miles to go. It was to be a night's work. He settled
himself doggedly. It was heroic. In the circumstances, however, this
aspect of the night's work was not stimulating to a tired old man. It
was a mile and a half to Creek Head, where Afternoon Tickle led a
narrow way from the shelter of Afternoon Arm to Anxious Bight and the
open sea; and from the lee of Creep Head--a straightaway across
Anxious Bight--it was nine miles to Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run
Harbor. And Doctor Rolfe had rested but three hours. And he was old.
Impatient to revive the accustomed comfort and glow of strength he
began to run. When he came to Creep Head and there paused to survey
Anxious Bight in a flash of the moon, he was tingling and warm and
limber and eager. Yet he was dismayed by the prospect. No man could
cross from Creep Head to Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run Harbor in the
dark. Doctor Rolfe considered the light. Communicating masses of
ragged cloud were driving low across Anxious Bight. Offshore there was
a sluggish bank of black cloud. The moon was risen and full. It was
obscured. The intervals of light were less than the intervals of
shadow. Sometimes a wide, impenetrable cloud, its edges alight,
darkened the moon altogether. Still, there was light enough. All that
was definitely ominous was the bank of black cloud lying sluggishly
offshore. The longer Doctor Rolfe contemplated its potentiality for
catastrophe the more he feared it.
"If I were to be overtaken by snow!"
* * * * *
It was blowing high. There was the bite and shiver of frost in the
wind. Half a gale ran in from the open sea. Midway of Anxious Bight it
would be a saucy, hampering, stinging head wind. And beyond Creep Head
the ice was in doubtful condition. A man might conjecture; that was
all. It was mid-spring. Freezing weather had of late alternated with
periods of thaw and rain. There had been windy days. Anxious Bight had
even once been clear of ice. A westerly wind had broken the ice and
swept it out beyond the heads. In a gale from the northeast, however,
these fragments had returned with accumulations of Arctic pans and
hummocks from the Labrador current; and a frosty night had caught them
together and sealed them to the cliffs of the coast. It was a most
delicate attachment--one pan to the other and the whole to the rocks.
It had yielded somewhat--it must have gone rotten--in the weather of
that day. What the frost had accomplished since dusk could be
determined only upon trial.
"Soft as cheese!" Doctor Rolfe concluded. "Rubber ice and air holes!"
There was another way to Ragged Run--the way by which Terry West had
come. It skirted the shore of Anxious Bight--Mad Harry and
Thank-the-Lord and Little Harbor Deep--and something more than
multiplied the distance by one and a half. Doctor Rolfe was completely
aware of the difficulties of Anxious Bight--the way from Afternoon Arm
to Ragged Run; the treacherous reaches of young ice, bending under the
weight of a man; the veiled black water; the labor, 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. And he
knew, too, the issue of the disappearance of the moon, the desperate
plight into which the sluggish bank of black cloud might plunge a man.
As a matter of unromantic fact he desired greatly to decline a passage
of Anxious Bight that night.
Instead he moved out and shaped a course for the black bulk of the
Spotted Horses. This was in the direction of Blow-me-Down Dick of
Ragged Run, and the open sea.
He sighed. "If I had a son----" he reflected.
* * * * *
Well, now, Doctor Rolfe was a Newfoundlander. He was used to traveling
all sorts of ice in all sorts of weather. The returning fragments of
the ice of Anxious Bight had been close packed for two miles beyond
the narrows of Afternoon Arm by the northeast gale which had driven
them back from the open. This was rough ice. In the press of the wind
the drifting floe had buckled. It had been a big gale. Under the whip
of it the ice had come down with a rush. And when it encountered the
coast the first great pans had been thrust out of the sea by the
weight of the floe behind. A slow pressure had even driven them up the
cliffs of Creep Head and heaped them in a tumble below. It was thus a
folded, crumpled floe, a vast field of broken bergs and pans at
angles.
No Newfoundlander would adventure on the ice without a gaff. A gaff is
a lithe, ironshod pole, eight or ten feet in length. Doctor Rolfe was
as cunning and sure with a gaff as any old hand of the sealing fleet.
He employed it now to advantage. It was a vaulting pole. He walked
less than he leaped. This was no work for the half light of an
obscured moon. Sometimes he halted for light; but delay annoyed him. A
pause of ten minutes--he squatted for rest meantime--threw him into a
state of incautious irritability. At this rate it would be past dawn
before he made the cottages of Ragged Run Harbor.
Impatient of precaution, he presently chanced a leap. It was error. As
the meager light disclosed the path a chasm of fifteen feet intervened
between the edge of the upturned pan upon which he stood and a
flat-topped hummock of Arctic ice to which he was bound. There was
footing for the tip of his gaff midway below. He felt for this footing
to entertain himself while the moon delayed. It was there. He was
tempted. The chasm was critically deep for the length of the gaff.
Worse than that, the hummock was higher than the pan. Doctor Rolfe
peered across. It was not _much_ higher. It would merely be necessary
to lift stoutly at the climax of the leap. And there was need of
haste--a little maid in hard case at Ragged Run and a rising cloud
threatening black weather.
A slow cloud covered the moon. It was aggravating. There would be no
light for a long time. A man must take a chance----. And all at once
the old man gave way to impatience; he gripped his gaff with angry
determination and projected himself toward the hummock of Arctic ice.
A flash later he had regretted the hazard. He perceived that he had
misjudged the height of the hummock. Had the gaff been a foot longer
he would have cleared the chasm. It occurred to him that he would
break his back and merit the fate of his callow mistake. Then his toes
caught the edge of the flat-topped hummock. His boots were of soft
seal leather. He gripped the ice. And now he hung suspended and inert.
The slender gaff bent under the prolonged strain of his weight and
shook in response to a shiver of his arms. Courage failed a little.
Doctor Rolfe was an old man. And he was tired. And he felt unequal----
* * * * *
Dolly West's mother--with Dolly in her arms, resting against her soft,
ample bosom--sat by the kitchen fire. It was long after dark. The wind
was up; the cottage shook in the squalls. She had long ago washed
Dolly's eyes and temporarily stanched the terrifying flow of blood;
and now she waited, rocking gently and sometimes crooning a plaintive
song of the coast to the restless child.
Tom West came in.
"Hush!"
"Is she sleepin' still?"
"Off an' on. She's in a deal o' pain. She cries out, poor lamb!" Dolly
stirred and whimpered. "Any sign of un, Tom?"
[Illustration: "If he comes by the bight he'll never get here
at all."]
"Tis not time."
"He might----"
"'Twill be hours afore he comes. I'm jus' wonderin'----"
"Hush!" Dolly moaned. "Ay, Tom?"
"Terry's but a wee feller. I'm wonderin' if he----"
The woman was confident. "He'll make it," she whispered.
"Ay; but if he's delayed----"
"He was there afore dusk. An' the doctor got underway across the
Bight----"
"He'll not come by the Bight!"
"He'll come by the Bight. I knows that man. He'll come by the
Bight--an' he'll----"
"If he comes by the Bight he'll never get here at all. The Bight's
breakin' up. There's rotten ice beyond the Spotted Horses. An'
Tickle-my-Ribs is----"
"He'll come. He'll be here afore----"
"There's a gale o' snow comin' down. 'Twill cloud the moon. A man
would lose hisself----"
"He'll come."
Bad-Weather Tom West went out again--to plod once more down the
narrows to the base of Blow-me-Down Dick and search the vague light of
the coast for the first sight of Doctor Rolfe. It was not time; he
knew that. There would be hours of waiting. It would be dawn before a
man could come by Thank-the-Lord and Mad Harry, if he left Afternoon
Arm even so early as dusk. And as for crossing the Bight--no man could
cross the Bight. It was blowing up too--clouds rising and a threat of
snow abroad. Bad-weather Tom glanced apprehensively toward the
northeast. It would snow before dawn. The moon was doomed. A dark
night would fall. And the Bight--Doctor Rolfe would never attempt to
cross the Bight----
* * * * *
Hanging between the hummock and the pan, the gaff shivering under his
weight, Doctor Rolfe slowly subsided toward the hummock. A toe
slipped. He paused. It was a grim business. The other foot held. The
leg, too, was equal to the strain. He wriggled his toe back to its
grip on the edge of the ice. It was an improved foothold. He turned
then and began to lift and thrust himself backward. A last thrust on
the gaff set him on his haunches on the Arctic hummock, and he thanked
Providence and went on. And on--and on! There was a deal of slippery
crawling to do, of slow, ticklish climbing. Doctor Rolfe rounded
bergs, scaled perilous inclines, leaped crevices.
It was cold as death now. Was it ten below? The gale bit like twenty
below.
When the big northeast wind drove the ice back into Anxious Bight and
heaped it inshore, the pressure had decreased as the mass of the floe
diminished in the direction of the sea. The outermost areas had not
felt the impact. They had not folded--had not "raftered." When the
wind failed they had subsided toward the open. As they say on the
coast, the ice had "gone abroad." It was distributed. And after that
the sea had fallen flat; and a vicious frost had caught the
floe--widespread now--and frozen it fast. It was six miles from the
edge of the raftered ice to the first island of the Spotted Horses.
The flat pans were solid enough, safe and easy going; but this new,
connecting ice--the lanes and reaches of it----
Doctor Rolfe's succinct characterization of the condition of Anxious
Bight was also keen: "Soft as cheese!"