Doctor Luke of the Labrador Part 1

Doctor Luke of the Labrador.

by Norman Duncan.

I

OUR HARBOUR

A cl.u.s.ter of islands, lying off the cape, made the shelter of our harbour. They were but great rocks, gray, ragged, wet with fog and surf, rising bleak and barren out of a sea that forever fretted a thousand miles of rocky coast as barren and as sombre and as desolate as they; but they broke wave and wind unfailingly and with vast unconcern--they were of old time, mighty, steadfast, remote from the rage of weather and the changing mood of the sea, surely providing safe shelter for us folk of the coast--and we loved them, as true men, everywhere, love home.

"'Tis the cleverest harbour on the Labrador!" said we.

When the wind was in the northeast--when it broke, swift and vicious, from the sullen waste of water beyond, whipping up the grey sea, driving in the vagrant ice, spreading clammy mist over the reefs and rocky headlands of the long coast--our harbour lay unruffled in the lee of G.o.d's Warning. Skull Island and a shoulder of G.o.d's Warning broke the winds from the north: the froth of the breakers, to be sure, came creeping through the north tickle, when the sea was high; but no great wave from the open ever disturbed the quiet water within. We were fended from the southerly gales by the ma.s.sive, beetling front of the Isle of Good Promise, which, grandly unmoved by their fuming rage, turned them up into the black sky, where they went screaming northward, high over the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas they brought--gigantic, breaking seas--went to waste on Raven Rock and the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the basin. The west wind came out of the wilderness, fragrant of the far-off forest, lying unknown and dread in the inland, from which the mountains, bold and blue and forbidding, lifted high their heads; and the mist was then driven back into the gloomy seas of the east, and the sun was out, s.h.i.+ning warm and yellow, and the sea, lying in the lee of the land, was all aripple and aflash.

When the spring gales blew--the sea being yet white with drift-ice--the schooners of the Newfoundland fleet, bound north to the fis.h.i.+ng, often came scurrying into our harbour for shelter. And when the skippers, still dripping the spray of the gale from beard and sou'wester, came ash.o.r.e for a yarn and an hospitable gla.s.s with my father, the trader, many a tale of wind and wreck and far-away harbours I heard, while we sat by the roaring stove in my father's little shop: such as those which began, "Well, 'twas the wonderfullest gale o' wind you ever seed--snowin' an' blowin', with the sea in mountains, an' it as black as a wolf's throat--an' we was somewheres off Cape Mugford. She were drivin' with a nor'east gale, with the sh.o.r.e somewheres handy t'

le'ward. But, look! nar a one of us knowed where she were to, 'less 'twas in the thick o' the Black Heart Reefs...." Stout, hearty fellows they were who told yarns like these--thick and broad about the chest and lanky below, long-armed, hammer-fisted, with frowsy beards, bushy brows, and clear blue eyes, which were fearless and quick to look.

"'Tis a fine harbour you got here, Skipper David Roth," they would say to my father, when it came time to go aboard, "an' here, zur," raising the last gla.s.s, "is t' the rocks that make it!"

"T' the schooners they shelter!" my father would respond.

When the weather turned civil, I would away to the summit of the Watchman--a scamper and a mad climb--to watch the doughty little schooners on their way. And it made my heart swell and flutter to see them dig their noses into the swelling seas--to watch them heel and leap and make the white dust fly--to feel the rush of the wet wind that drove them--to know that the grey path of a thousand miles was every league of the way beset with peril. Brave craft! Stout hearts to sail them! It thrilled me to watch them beating up the suddy coast, lying low and black in the north, and through the leaden, ice-strewn seas, with the murky night creeping in from the open. I, too, would be the skipper of a schooner, and sail with the best of them!

"A schooner an' a wet deck for me!" thought I.

And I loved our harbour all the more for that.

Thus, our harbour lay, a still, deep basin, in the shelter of three islands and a cape of the mainland: and we loved it, drear as it was, because we were born there and knew no kinder land; and we boasted it, in all the harbours of the Labrador, because it was a safe place, whatever the gale that blew.

II

The WORLD From The WATCHMAN

The Watchman was the outermost headland of our coast and a landmark from afar--a great gray hill on the point of Good Promise by the Gate; our craft, running in from the Hook-an'-Line grounds off Raven Rock, rounded the Watchman and sped thence through the Gate and past Frothy Point into harbour. It was bold and bare--scoured by the weather--and dripping wet on days when the fog hung thick and low. It fell sharply to the sea by way of a weather-beaten cliff, in whose high fissures the gulls, wary of the hands of the lads of the place, wisely nested; and within the harbour it rose from Trader's Cove, where, snug under a broken cliff, stood our house and the little shop and storehouse and the broad drying-flakes and the wharf and fish-stages of my father's business.

From the top there was a far, wide outlook--all sea and rock: along the ragged, treeless coast, north and south, to the haze wherewith, in distances beyond the ken of lads, it melted; and upon the thirty wee white houses of our folk, scattered haphazard about the harbour water, each in its own little cove and each with its own little stage and great flake; and over the barren, swelling rock beyond, to the blue wilderness, lying infinitely far away.

I shuddered when from the Watchman I looked upon the wilderness.

"'Tis a dreadful place," I had heard my father say. "Men starves in there."

This I knew to be true, for, once, I had seen the face of a man who came crawling out.

"The sea is kinder," I thought.

Whether so or not, I was to prove, at least, that the wilderness was cruel.

One blue day, when the furthest places on sea and land lay in a thin, still haze, my mother and I went to the Watchman to romp. There was place there for a merry gambol, place, even, led by a wiser hand, for roaming and childish adventure--and there were silence and sunlit s.p.a.ce and sea and distant mists for the weaving of dreams--ay, and, upon rare days, the smoke of the great s.h.i.+ps, bound down the Straits--and when dreams had worn the patience there were huge loose rocks handy for rolling over the brow of the cliff--and there was gray moss in the hollows, thick and dry and soft, to sprawl on and rest from the delights of the day. So the Watchman was a playground for my mother and me--my sister, my elder by seven years, was all the day long tunefully busy about my father's comfort and the little duties of the house--and, on that blue day, we climbed the broken cliff behind our house and toiled up the slope beyond in high spirits, and we were very happy together; for my mother was a Boston maid, and, though she turned to right heartily when there was work to do, she was not like the Labrador born, but thought it no sin to wander and laugh in the sunlight of the heads when came the blessed opportunity.

"I'm fair done out," said I, at last, returning, flushed, from a race to Beacon Rock.

"Lie here, Davy--ay, but closer yet--and rest," said she.

I flung myself at full length beside her, spreading abroad my st.u.r.dy little arms and legs; and I caught her glance, glowing warm and proud, as it ran over me, from toe to crown, and, flas.h.i.+ng prouder yet through a gathering mist of tears, returned again.

"I knows why you're lookin' at me that way," said I.

"And why?" said she.

"'Tis for sheer love o' me!"

She was strangely moved by this. Her hands, pa.s.sionately clasped of a sudden, she laid upon her heart; and she drew a sharp, quivering breath.

"You're getting so--so--strong and--and--so _big_!" she cried.

"Hut!" said I. "'Tis nothin' t' cry about!"

"Oh," she sobbed, "I'm _proud_ t' be the mother of a son!"

I started up.

"I'm that proud," she went on, hovering now between great joy and pain, "that it--it--fair _hurts_ me!"

"I'll not have you cry!" I protested.

She caught me in her arms and we broke into merry laughter. Then to please her I said that I would gather flowers for her hair--and she would be the stranded mermaid and I the fisherman whom she besought to put her back in the sea and rewarded with three wishes--and I sought flowers everywhere in the hollows and crevices of the bald old Watchman, where, through years, some soil had gathered, but found only whisps of wiry gra.s.s and one wretched blossom; whereupon I returned to her very wroth.

"G.o.d made a botch o' the world!" I declared.

She looked up in dismay.

"Ay," I repeated, with a stamp of the foot, "a wonderful botch o' the world He's gone an' made. Why, they's but one flower on the Watchman!"

She looked over the barren land--the great gray waste of naked rock--and sighed.

"But one?" she asked, softly.

"An I was G.o.d," I said, indignantly, "I'd have made _more_ flowers an'

made un _bigger_."

She smiled in the way of one dreaming.