they would kiss me upon every coming, and if I had nothing to order ’twas a kiss for my virtue, and if I drank ’twas a smack for my engaging manliness; and my only satisfaction was to damn them heartily––under my breath, mark you! lest I be soundly thrashed on the spot for this profanity, my uncle, though you may now misconceive his character, being in those days quick to punish me. But such are women: in a childless place, being themselves childless, they cannot resist a child, but would kiss queer lips, and be glad o’ the chance, because a child is lovely to women, intruding where no children are.
As a child of seven I hated the bar-maids of the Anchor and Chain, because they would kiss me against 12 my will when the whiskered skippers went untouched. But that was long ago. …
I must tell that at the Anchor and Chain my uncle blundered in with Tom Bull, of the Green Billow, the owner and skipper thereof, trading the ports of the West Coast, then coast-wise, but (I fancy) not averse to a smuggling opportunity, both ways, with the French Islands to the south of us; at any rate, ’twas plain, before the talk was over, that he needed no lights to make the harbor of St.-Pierre, Miquelon, of a dark time. ’Twas a red-whiskered, flaring, bulbous-nosed giant, with infantile eyes, containing more of wonder and patience than men need. He was clad in yellow oil-skins, a-drip, glistening in the light of the lamps, for he was newly come in from the rain: a bitter night, the wind in the northeast, with a black fog abroad (I remember it well)––a wet, black night, the rain driving past the red-curtained windows of the Anchor and Chain, the streets swept clean of men, ourselves light-hearted and warm, indifferent, being ashore from the wind, the cloudy night, the vicious, crested waves of the open, where men must never laugh nor touch a glass.
They must have a dram together in a stall removed from the congregation of steaming men at the long bar. And when the maid had fetched the bottle, Tom Bull raised it, regarded it doubtfully, cocked his head, looked my shamefaced uncle in the eye.
“An’ what might this be?” says he.
13
“ ’Tis knowed hereabouts, in the langwitch o’ waterside widows,” replies my uncle, mildly, “as a bottle o’ Cheap an’ Nasty.”
Tom Bull put the bottle aside.
“Tis cheap, I’ll be bound,” says my uncle; “but ’tis not so wonderful nasty, Tom,” he grieved, “when ’tis the best t’ be had.”
“Skipper Nicholas,” says Tom, in wonder, “wasn’t you give aforetime t’ the use o’ Long Tom?”
My uncle nodded.
“Dear man!” Tom Bull sighed.
My uncle looked away. Tom Bull seemed now first to observe his impoverished appearance, and attacked it with frankly curious eyes, which roamed without shame over my uncle’s shrinking person; and my uncle winced under this inquisition.
“Pour your liquor,” growls he, “an’ be content!”
Tom Bull grasped the bottle, unafraid of the contents, unabashed by the rebuke. “An’ Skipper Nicholas,” asks he, “where did you manage t’ pick up the young feller?”
My uncle would not attend.
“Eh?” Tom Bull persisted. “Where did you come across o’ he?”
“This,” says my uncle, with a gentle tug at my ear, “is Dannie.”
“Ay; but whose young one?”
“Tom Callaway’s son.”
“Tom Callaway’s son!” cries Tom Bull.
There was that about me to stir surprise; with those 14 generous days so long gone by, I will not gainsay it. Nor will I hold Tom Bull in fault for doubting, though he stared me, up and down, until I blushed and turned uneasy while his astonished eyes were upon me.
“Tom Callaway’s son!” cries he again.
That I was.
“The same,” says my uncle.
Forthwith was I once more inspected, without reserve––for a child has no complaint to make in such cases––and with rising wonder, which, in the end, caused Tom Bull to gape and gasp; but I was now less concerned with the scrutiny, being, after all, long used to the impertinence of the curious, than with the phenomena it occasioned. My uncle’s friend had tipped the bottle, and was now become so deeply engaged with my appearance that the yellow whiskey tumbled into his glass by fits and starts, until the allowance was far beyond that which, upon information supplied me by my uncle, I deemed proper (or polite) for any man to have at one time. The measurement of drams was in those bibulous days important to me––of much more agreeable interest, indeed, than the impression I was designed to make upon the ’longshore world.
“No such nonsense!” exclaims Tom Bull. “Tom Callaway died ’ithout a copper t’ bury un.”
“Tom Callaway,” says my uncle, evasively, “didn’t have no call t’ be buried; he was drown-ded.”
My uncle’s old shipmate sipped his whiskey with absent, but grateful, relish, his eyes continuing to wander over so much of me as grew above the table, 15 which was little enough. Presently my uncle was subjected to the same severe appraisement, and wriggled under it in guilty way––an appraisement of the waterside slops: the limp and shabby cast-off apparel which scantily enveloped his great chest, insufficient for the bitter rain then sweeping the streets. Thence the glance of this Tom Bull went blankly over the foggy room, pausing nowhere upon the faces of the folk at the bar, but coming to rest, at last, upon the fly-blown rafters (where was no interest), whence, suddenly, it dropped to my hand, which lay idle and sparkling upon the sticky table.
“Tom Callaway’s son!” he mused.
My hand was taken, spread down upon the calloused palm of Tom Bull, in disregard of my frown, and for a long time the man stared in puzzled silence at what there he saw. ’Twas very still, indeed, in the little stall where we three sat; the boisterous laughter, the shuffling and tramp of heavy boots, the clink of glasses, the beating of the rain upon the windows seemed far away.
“I’d not be s’prised,” says Tom Bull, in the low, hoarse voice of awe, “if them there was di’monds!”
“They is,” says my uncle, with satisfaction.
“Di’monds!” sighs Tom Bull. “My God!”
’Twas boredom––the intimate inspection, the question, the start of surprise. ’Twas all inevitable, so familiar––so distastefully intrusive, too. ’Twas a boredom hard to suffer, and never would have been borne had not the occasion of it been my uncle’s delight. 16 ’Twas always the same: Diamonds? ay, diamonds! and then the gasped “My God!” They would pry into this, by the Lord! and never be stopped by my scowl and the shrinking of my flesh. It may be that the parade my misguided guardian made of me invited the intimacy, and, if so, I have no cry to raise against the memory of it; but, whatever, they made free with the child that was I, and boldly, though ’twas most boresome and ungrateful to me. As a child my hand was fingered and eyed by every ’longshore jack, coast-wise skipper, and foreign captain from the Turkey Cock to the sign of The King George. And wherever I went upon the streets of St. John’s in those days there was no escape: the glitter of me stopped folk in their tracks––to
