Part 6

Terry Lute was in his fourteenth year when he worked on "The Fang." Skipper Tom did not observe the damnable disintegration that occurred, nor was Terry Lute himself at all aware of it. But the process went on, and the issue, a sudden disclosure when it came, was inevitable in the case of Terry Lute. When the northeasterly gales came down with fog, Terry Lute sat on the slimy, wave-lapped ledge overhanging the swirl of water, and watched the spent breaker, streaked with current and flecked with fragments; and he watched, too, the cowering ledge beyond, and the great wave from the sea's restlessness as it thundered into froth and swept on, and the cliff in the mist, and the approach of the offshore ice, and the woeful departure of the last light of day. But he took no pencil to the ledge; he memorized in his way. He kept watch; he brooded.

In this way he came to know in deeper truth the menace of the sea; not to perceive and grasp it fleetingly, not to hold it for the uses of the moment, but surely to possess it in his understanding.

His purpose, avowed with a chuckle, was to convey fear to the beholder of his work. It was an impish trick, and it brought him unwittingly into peril of his soul.

"I 'low," says he between his teeth to Skipper Tom, "that she'll scare the wits out o' _you_, father."

Skipper Tom laughed.

"She'll have trouble," he scoffed, "when the sea herself has failed."

"You jus' wait easy," Terry grimly promised him, "till I gets her off the stocks."

At first Terry Lute tentatively sketched. Bits of the whole were accomplished,--flecks of foam and the lines of a current,--and torn up. This was laborious. Here was toil, indeed, and Terry Lute bitterly complained of it. 'Twas bother; 'twas labor; there wasn't no _sense_ to it. Terry Lute's temper went overboard. He sighed and shifted, pouted and whimpered while he worked; but he kept on, with courage equal to his impulse, toiling every evening of that summer until his impatient mother shooed him off to more laborious toil upon the task in his nightmares. The whole arrangement was not attempted for the first time until midsummer. It proceeded, it halted, it vanished. Seventeen efforts were destroyed, ruthlessly thrust into the kitchen stove with no other comment than a sigh, a sniff of disgust, and a shuddering little whimper.

It was a windy night in the early fall of the year, blowing high and wet, when Terry Lute dropped his crayon with the air of not wanting to take it up again.

He sighed, he yawned.

"I got her done," says he, "confound her!" He yawned again.

"Too much labor, lad," Skipper Tom complained.

"Pshaw!" says Terry, indignantly. "I didn't _labor_ on her."

Skipper Tom stared aghast in the presence of this monstrously futile prevarication.

"Ecod!" he gasped.

"Why, father," says Terry, airily, "I jus'--sketched her. Do she scare you?"

From Terry Lute's picture Skipper Tom's glance ran to Terry Lute's anxious eyes.

"She do," said he, gravely; "but I'm fair unable t' fathom"--pulling his beard in bewilderment--"the use of it all."

Terry Lute grinned.

* * * * *

It did not appear until the fall gales were blowing in earnest that "The Fang" had made a coward of Terry Lute. There was a gray sea that day, and day was on the wing. There was reeling, noisy water roundabout, turning black in the failing light, and a roaring lee shore; and a gale in the making and a saucy wind were already jumping down from the northeast with a trail of disquieting fog. Terry Lute's spirit failed; he besought, he wept, to be taken ashore. "Oh, I'm woeful scared o' the sea!" he complained. Skipper Tom brought him in from the sea, a whimpering coward, cowering degraded and shamefaced in the stern-sheets of the punt. There were no reproaches. Skipper Tom pulled grimly into harbor. His world had been shaken to ruins; he was grave without hope, as many a man before him has fallen upon the disclosure of inadequacy in his own son.

It was late that night when Skipper Tom and the discredited boy were left alone by the kitchen fire. The gale was down then, a wet wind blowing wildly in from the sea. Tom Lute's cottage shook in its passing fingers, which seemed somehow not to linger long enough to clutch it well, but to grasp in driven haste and sweep on. The boy sat snuggled to the fire for its consolation; he was covered with shame, oppressed, sore, and hopeless. He was disgraced: he was outcast, and now forever, from a world of manly endeavor wherein good courage did the work of the day that every man must do. Skipper Tom, in his slow survey of this aching and pitiful degradation, had an overwhelming sense of fatherhood. He must be wise, he thought; he must be wise and very wary that fatherly helpfulness might work a cure.

The boy had failed, and his failure had not been a thing of 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."

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.