My uncle, Nicholas Top, of Twist Tickle, was of a cut so grotesque
that folk forgot their manners when he stumped abroad. Bowling through
the streets of St. John's, which twice a year he tapped with staff and
wooden leg, myself in leading--bowling cheerily, with his last rag
spread, as he said, and be damned to the chart--he left a swirling
wake of amazement: craning necks, open mouths, round eyes, grins so
frank, the beholders being taken unaware, that 'twas simple to
distinguish hearts of pity from savage ones.
Small wonder they stared; my uncle was a broad, long-bodied, scowling,
grim-lipped runt, with the arms and chest of an ape, a leg lacking,
three fingers of the left hand gone at the knuckles, an ankle botched
in the mending (the surgery his own), a jaw out of place, a round
head set low between gigantic shoulders upon a thick neck: the whole
forever clad in a fantastic miscellany of water-side slops, wrinkled
above, where he was large, flapping below, where he was lean, and
chosen with a nautical contempt for fit and fashion, but with a
mysteriously perverse regard for the value of a penny.
"An' how much, lad," says he, in the water-side slop-shops, "is a
penny saved?"
'Twas strange that of all men he should teach me this old-fashioned
maxim as though 'twere meant for my own practice. 'Twas well enough
for him, it seemed; but 'twas an incumbrance of wisdom in the singular
case of the lad that was I.
"A penny made, sir," says I.
"Co'--rect!" says he, with satisfaction.
There was more to be wondered at: beginning at my uncle's left ear,
which was itself sadly puckered and patched, a wide, rough scar, of
changing color, as his temper went, cut a great swath in his wiry
hair, curving clear over the crown of his head. A second scar, of
lesser dimension and ghastly look, lay upon his forehead, over the
right eyebrow, to which though by nature drooping to a glower, it gave
a sharp upward twist, so that in a way to surprise the stranger he was
in good humor or bad, cynical or sullen, according to the point of
approach.
There were two rolls of flabby flesh under his chin, and a puff of fat
under each of his quick little eyes; and from the puffs to the lower
chin, which was half submerged in the folds of a black cravat, the
broad, mottled expanse was grown wild with short gray beard, save
where, on the left cheek, a ragged scar (the third) kept it bare and
livid. 'Twas plain the man had blundered into some quarrel of wind and
sea, whence he had been indifferently ejected, in the way of the sea,
to live or die, as might chance: whereof--doubtless to account for his
possession of me--he would tell that my father had been lost in the
adventure.
"Swep' away by the third big sea," says he, his face wan with the
terror of that time, his body shrunk in the chair and so uneasy that I
was moved against my will to doubt the tale. "May God A'mighty forgive
un the deed he done!"
"Was it a sore, wicked thing my father did?"
"God forgive un--an' me!"
"Is you sure, Uncle Nick?"
"God forgive un!"
"You're not likin' my poor father," I complained, "for the sinful
thing he done."
"'Tis a sinful wicked world us dwells in," says he. "An' I 'low, b'y,"
says he, in anxious warning, "that afore you goes t' bed the night....
Pass the bottle. Thank 'e, lad ... that afore you goes t' bed the
night you'd best get a new grip on that there little anchor I've give
ye t' hang to."
"An' what's that?" says I.
"The twenty-third psa'm," says he, his bottle tipped, "for safety!"
My uncle would have (as he said) no dealings with a glass. There was
none in the places familiar to his eyes; and when by chance, in the
tap-rooms of the city, he came face to face with himself, he would
start away with a fervent malediction upon the rogue in the mirror,
consigning him to perdition without hope of passage into some easier
state.
'Twas anathema most feeling and complete.
"Hist!" cries I. "You're never so bad as _that_, Uncle Nick!"
"None worse," says he, "than that there ol' lost rascal!"