I, Daniel Mylrea, the son (God forgive me!) of Gilcrist Mylrea, Bishop of Man—grace and peace be with that saintly soul!—do set me down in the year (as well as my reckoning serves me) 1712, the month September, the day somewhere between the twentieth and the thirtieth, to begin a brief relation of certain exceeding strange accidents of this life that have befallen me since, at the heavy judgment of God, I first turned my face from the company of men. Not, as the good Bunyan was, am I now impelled to such a narration—bear with me though I name myself with that holy man—by hope or thought that the goodness and bounty of God may thereby be the more advanced before the sons of men, though it is for me also to magnify the Heavenly Majesty, insomuch as that by this door of my outcast state He has brought me to partake of grace and life. Alone I sit to write what perchance no eye may read, but it is with hope, perhaps only vain, that she who is dear to me beyond words of appraisement may yet learn of the marvels which did oft occur, that I try in these my last days to put my memory under wardship. For it has fastened on me with conviction that God has chosen me for a vessel of mercy, and that very soon he will relieve me from the body of the death I live in. If I finish this writing before I go hence, and if when I am gone she reads it, methinks it will come to her as a deep solace that her prayer of long since was answered, and that, though so sorely separated, we twain have yet been one even in this world, and lived together by day and hour in the cheer of the spirit. But if the gracious end should come before I bring my task to a period, and she should know only of my forlorn condition and learn nothing of the grace wherein much of its desolation was lost, and never come to an understanding of such of those strange accidents as to her knowledge have befallen, then that were also well, for she must therein be spared many tears.
It was on May 29, 1705—seven years and four months, as I reckon it, back from this present time—that in punishment of my great crime the heavy sentence fell on me that cut me off forever from the number of the people. What happened on that day and on the days soon following it I do partly remember with the vividness of horror, and partly recall with difficulty and mistrust from certain dark places of memory that seem to be clouded over and numb. When I came to myself as I was plodding over the side of Slieu Whallin, the thunder was loud in my ears, the lightning was flashing before my eyes, and the rain was swirling around me. I minded them not, but went on, hardly seeing what was about or above me, on and on, over mountain road and path, until the long day was almost done and the dusk began to deepen. Then the strength of the tempest was spent, and only the hinder part of it beat out from the west a thin, misty rain, and I found myself in Rushen, on the south brow of the glen below Carny-Gree. There I threw myself down on the turf with a great numbness and a great stupor upon me, both in body and in mind. How long I lay there I know not, whether a few minutes only, or, as I then surmised, near four-and-twenty hours; but the light of day was not wholly gone from the sky when I lifted my head from where it had rested on my hands, and saw that about me in a deep half-circle stood a drift of sheep, all still, save for their heavy breathing, and all gazing in their questioning silence down on me. I think in my heart, remembering my desolation, I drew solace from this strange fellowship on the lone mountain-side, but I lifted my hand and drove the sheep away, and I thought as they went they bleated, but I could hear nothing of their cry, and so surmised that under the sufferings of that day I had become deaf.
I fell back to the same stupor as before, and when I came to myself again the moon was up, and a white light was around the place where I sat. With the smell of the sheep in my nostrils I thought they might be standing about me again, but I could see nothing clearly, and so stretched out my hands either way. Then, from their confusion in scurrying away, I knew that the sheep had indeed been there, and that under the sufferings of that day I had also failed in my sight.
The tempest was over by this time, the mountain turf had run dry, and I lay me down at length and fell into a deep sleep without dreams; and so ended the first day of my solitary state.
When I awoke the sun was high, and the wheat-ear was singing on a stone very close above me, whereunder her pale-blue egg she had newly laid. I know not what wayward humor then possessed me, but it is true that I reached my hand to the little egg and looked at it, and crushed it between my finger and thumb, and cast its refuse away. My surmise of the night before I now found to be verified, that hearing and sight were both partly gone from me. No man ever mourned less at first knowledge of such infirmities, but in truth I was almost beyond the touch of pain, and a sorer calamity would have wanted strength to torture me. I rose and set my face southward, for it was in the Calf Sound, as I remembered, that I was to find my boat, and if any hope lived in my heart, so numb of torpor, it was that perchance I might set sail and get myself away.
I walked between Barrule and Dalby, and came down on the eastward of Cronk-na-Irey-Lhaa. Then I, who had never before known my strength to fail, grew suddenly weary, and would fain have cast me down to rest. So to succumb I could not brook, but I halted in my walking and looked back, and across the plain to the east, and down to the Bay of Fleswick to the west. Many times since have I stood there and looked on sea and sky, and mountain and dale, and asked myself was ever so fair a spot, and if the plains of heaven were fairer? But that day my dim eyes scoured the sea for a sail and the mountains for a man, and nothing did they see of either, and all else was then as nothing.
Yet, though I was so eager to keep within sight of my fellow-man, I was anxious not to come his way, and in choosing my path I walked where he was least likely to be. Thus, holding well to the west of Fleswick, I took the cliff-head toward Brada, and then came down between Port Erin and Port-le-Mary to the moors that stretch to the margin of the sound. Some few I met, chiefly shepherds and fishermen, but I lifted my eyes to none, and none gave me salutation. This was well, for my heart was bitter, and if any had spoken, not knowing me, I doubt not I should have answered ill. In my great heart-torpor, half-blind, half-deaf, I was that day like a wounded beast of the field, ranging the moorland with a wild abandonment and dangerous to its kind.
When I came to Cregneesh and saw it for the first time, a little disjointed gipsy encampment of mud-built tents pitched on the bare moor, the sky was reddening across the sea, and from that I knew how far advanced the day must be, how slow my course had been, and how low my strength. In half an hour more I had sighted my boat, the "Ben-my-Chree," where she lay in the Doon Creek of the sound, at the length of some fifty fathoms inside the rocks of Kitterland. When I came up to her I found her anchored in some five fathoms of water, with the small-boat lying dry on the shingly beach. Her cabin contained provisions enough for present needs, and more than that I was in no mood to think about. Since the morning of the day before I had not broken fast, but now I ate hungrily of oaten and barley cake. Later in the evening, when the stars were out and the moon, which was in its last quarter, was hanging over the Calf, I mixed myself some porridge of rye-meal and cold water, and ate it on the deck, and then went below to my bunk and lay me down alone. Between sleeping and waking I tried to think of my position and to realize it, but an owl was hooting somewhere on the land, and somewhere over the waters of the sound a diver was making his unearthly laugh. I could not think save of the hooting owl and the screaming diver, and when I thought of them, though their note was doleful and seemed to tell of suffering, or perhaps of demoniac delight, I could not thank God that I had been made a man. Thus, feeling how sore a thing it is to be a creature living under the wrath of God, I tossed on my bunk until I fell to sleep; and so ended the second day of my unblessed condition.
To follow closely all that befell on the next day, or the many days thereafter whereof I kept no reckoning, were to weary my spirit. One thing I know, that a sudden numbness of the spiritual life within me left me a worse man than I had been before the day of my cutting off, and that I did soon lose the little I had of human love and tenderness. My gun had been put in the boat, and with that I ranged the cliffs and the moor from the Mull Hills that lie to the west of Cregneesh to the Chasms that are to the east of it. Many puffins I shot, that much frequent these shores, but their flesh was rank and salt, and they were scarcely worth the powder I spent on them. Thus, it sometimes happened that, being in no straits for food, I cast the birds away, or did not put myself to the pains of lifting them up after they fell to my gun, but went on, nevertheless, to destroy them in my wanton humor. Rabbits I snared by a trick I learned when a boy, and sometimes cooked them in the stove and ate them like a Christian man, and at other times I sat me down on the hillside and rived them asunder as a wild creature of the hills might do. But whether I ate in my boat or on the cliff I took no religion to my table, and thought only that I liked my food or misliked it.
Many times in these first days I had to tear myself away from thinking of my condition, for to do so was like the stab of a knife to my brain, and I plainly saw that in that way madness itself would lie. If I told myself that other men had been cast alone ere now in desolate places where no foot of man was and no sound of a human voice, a great stroke would come upon my spirit with the thought that only their bodies had been cast away, but that my soul was so. The marooned seaman on an uninhabited island, when at length he set eyes on his fellow-man, might lift up his heart to God, but to me the company of men was not blessed. Free I was to go where men were, even to the towns wherein they herded together, but go where I would I must yet be alone.
With this thought, and doubting not that for me the day of grace was past and gone, since God had turned His face from the atonement I had erewhile been minded to make, I grew day by day more bitter in my heart, and found it easiest to shut my mind by living actively from hour to hour. Then, like a half-starved hound, I went abroad at daybreak and scoured the hills the day long, and returned to my bed at night. I knew I was a baser thing than I had been, and it brought some comfort then to know that I was alone and no eye saw me as I now was. Mine was a rank hold of life, and it gave me a savage delight unknown before to live by preying on other creatures. I shot and slew daily and hourly, and if for a moment I told myself that what I had killed held its life on the same tenure that I did, my humanity was not touched except to feel a strange wild thrill that it was not I that lay dead. Looking back over these seven years, it comes to me as an unnatural thing that this mood can ever have been mine; but mine it was, and from the like of it may God in His mercy keep all Christian men.
One day—I think it must have been somewhere toward the end of the first month of my outcast state—I was ranging the cliff-side above the gray rocks of the Black Head, when I chanced on a hare and shot it. On coming up with it I found it was lean and bony, and so turned aside and left it as it squeaked and bounced from my feet. This was in the morning, and toward nightfall I returned by the same way and saw the hare lying by a brookside, ragged and bleeding, but still alive. At sight of me the wee thing tried to move away, but its weakness and a clot of its blood kept it down, and, feeling its extremity, it lifted its two slender paws in the air, while its glistening eyes streamed visibly, and set up a piteous cry like the cry of a little child. I can not write what then I did, for it wounds me sore to think of it, but when it was done, and that piteous cry was no more in mine ears, suddenly I said with myself this awful word, "I am no longer a man, but a beast of the field; and the God of mercy and of tenderness has cast me forever out of the hollow of His hand."
This meeting with the poor hare, though now it looks so trivial a thing, did then make a great seizure upon my mind, so that it changed my course and habit of life. For ceasing not to believe that I was wholly given over to a reprobate soul, I yet laid my gun aside, and locked my shot and powder in a drawer beneath my bunk, and set my face toward new ways of living. First I put myself to counting all that I possessed. Thus I found that of rye and Indian meal I had a peck each, of barley a peck, with two quarters of fine barley flour, of oats a peck, with two quarters of oaten meal, of potatoes two kischen, besides onions and a little common salt. In the hold under the hatches there were stored sundry useful implements—a spade, a fork, a hedge-knife, some hempen rope and twine, and with the rest were the four herring-nets which belonged to the boat, a mackerel-net, and some deep-sea lines. Other things there were that I do not name—wanting memory of them at this time of writing—but enough in all for most uses that a lone man might have.
And this had ofttimes set me wondering why, if it had been meant that I should be cast utterly away, I had been provided with means of life, who could well have found them for myself. But after that meeting with the hare I perceived the end of God in this, namely, that I should not, without guilt, descend from the state of a Christian man when hunger had to be satisfied.
And herein also I found the way of the stern Judge with guilty man, that, having enough for present necessities, I had little for the future, beyond the year that then was, and that if I must eat, so I must work. Thus, upon a day somewhere, as I reckon, about a month after my cutting off, I rose early, and set myself to delve a piece of fallow ground—where all was fallow—two roods or more in extent, lying a little to the north of the Black Head, and to the south of the circle of stones that stand near by. All day I wrought fasting, and when darkness fell in the fallows were turned. Next morning I put down my seed—of potatoes a half-kischen, cut in quarters where the eyes were many and also of barley and oats half a peck each, keeping back my other half-peck lest the ground were barren, or the weather against it, or the year too far worn for such-like crops.
And that day of the delving, the first on which I wrought as a man, was also the first on which I felt a man's craving for the company of other men. The sun was strong all the fore part of the day, and its hot rays scorched the skin of my back—for I had stripped to my waist for my labor—and that set me thinking what month it was, and wondering what was doing in the world, and how long I had been where I then was. When I returned to my boat at nightfall, the air, as I remember it, was quiet over the sound as it might be in a cloister, and only the gulls were jabbering on Kitterland and the cormorants at the water's edge. And I sat on the deck while the sun went down in the sea, and the red sky darkened and the stars began to show and the moon to look out. Then I went below and ate my barley bread and thought of what it was to be alone.
It was that night that I bethought me of my watch, which I had not once looked for since the day of my immersion in the Cross Vein on Orrisdale, when I found it stopped from being full of water. In my fob it had lain with its seals and chain since then, but now I took it out and cleaned it with oil from the fat of the hare and wound it up. For months thereafter I set a great store by it, always carrying it in my fob when I went abroad, and when I came home to the boat always hanging it on a nail to the larboard of the stovepipe in the cabin. And in the long silence of the night, when I heard it, sure, I thought, it is the same to me as good company. Very careful I was to wind it when the sun set, but if perchance it ran down, and I awoke in my bunk, and, listening, heard it not, then it was as if the pulse had stopped of the little world I lived in, and there was nothing but a great emptiness.
But withal my loneliness increased rather than diminished, and though I had no longer any hankering after my old way of life in ranging the moorlands with my gun, yet I felt that the activity of that existence had led me off from thinking too much of my forlorn condition. Wherefore, when my potatoes had begun to show above the ground, and I had earthed them up, I began to bethink me touching my boat, that it must be now the time of the herring-fishing come again, and that I would go out of nights and see what I could take. So, never doubting that single-handed I could navigate the lugger, I hoisted the nets out of the hold athwart the bunk-board, and took them ashore to mend and to bask them on the beach. I had spread them out on the shingle, and was using my knife and twine on the holes of the dogfish, when suddenly from behind me there came the loud bark of a dog. Well I remember how I trembled at the sound of it, for it was the nearest to a man's voice that I had heard these many lonesome days, and how fearfully I turned my head over my shoulder as if some man had touched me and spoken. But what I saw was a poor mongrel dog, small as a cur, and with ragged ears, a peaky nose, and a scant tail, which for all its loud challenge it dangled wofully between its legs. Until then I had never smiled or wept since my cutting off, and I believed myself to have lost the sense of laughter and of tears, but I must have laughed at the sight of the dog, so much did it call to mind certain brave vaunters I had known, who would come up to a bout of wrestling with a right lusty brag, and straightway set to trembling before one had well put eyes on them. At the sound of my voice the dog wagged his tail, and crept up timidly with his muzzle down, and licked the hand I held out to him. All day he sat by me and watched me at my work, looking up in my face at whiles with a wistful gaze, and I gave him a morsel of oaten cake, which he ate greedily, seeming to be half-starved of hunger. And when at dusk my task was finished and I rose and got into the dingey, thinking now he would go his ways and be seen of me no more, he leaped into the boat after me, and when we reached the lugger he settled himself in the corner under the locker as if he had now fully considered it that with me he would make his habitation henceforth.
Having all things in readiness for the fishing, I slipped anchor upon an evening toward autumn, as I reckoned, for the leaves of the trammon were then closing like a withered hand and the berries of the hollin were reddening. When the stars were out, but no moon was yet showing, I put about head to the wind, and found myself in nowise hampered because short-handed, for when I had to take in my sails I lashed my tiller, and being a man of more than common strength of arm, it cost me nothing to step my mainmast.
That night, and many nights thereafter, I had good takings of fish, and in the labor of looking after my corks and making fast my seizings the void in my mind was in somewise filled with other matter than thoughts of my abject state. But one thing troubled me at first, namely, that I took more fish by many meshes than I could ever consume. To make an end of my fishing was a thing I could not bring myself to, for I counted it certain that so to do would be to sink back to my former way of living. Wherefore I thought it safest to seek for some mode of disposing of my fish, such as would keep me at my present employment and do no harm to my feelings as a man, for with this I had now to reckon watchfully, being in constant danger, as I thought, of losing the sense of manhood.
So I soused some hundreds of my herrings with rought salt, which I distilled from the salt water by boiling it in a pan with pebbles. The remainder I concluded to give to such as would consume them, and how to do this, being what I was, cost me many bitter thoughts, wherein I seemed to be the most unblessed of all men. At length I hit on a device, and straightway brought it to bear. Leaving my fishing-ground while the night was not yet far spent, I ran into the sound before dawn, for soon I learned those narrow waters until they grew familiar as the palm of my hand. Then, before the sun rose above the Stack of Scarlet, and while the eastern sky was only dabbled with pink, I, with a basket of herrings on my shoulder, crossed the moor to Cregneesh, where the people are poor and not proud, and creeping in between the cabins, laid my fish down in the open place that is before the little chapel, and then went my way quickly lest a door should suddenly open or a window be lifted, and a face look forth. Thrice I did this before I marked that there were those who were curious to know whence the fish came, and then I was put on my nettle to go into the village and yet to keep myself from being seen, for well I knew that if any eye beheld me that knew who I was, there would thenceforward be an end of the eating of my herrings, even among the poorest, and an end of my fishing also. But many times I went into Cregneesh without being seen of any man, and now I know not whether to laugh or to weep when I look back on the days I write of, and see myself like a human fox stealing in by the gray of dawn among the sleeping homes of men.
All that autumn I followed the herrings, choosing my ground mainly by guess, but sometimes seeing the blue lights of the herring fleet rise close under my quarter, and at other times, when the air was still, hearing voices of men or the sound of laughter rumored over the quiet waters. But ever fanciful to me, as a dream of a friend dead when it is past, was that sound on the sea, and as often as I heard it I took in my nets and hauled my sails, and stood out for the sound. Putting no light on my mitch-board, I would ofttimes pass the fleet within a cable's-length and yet not be known, but once and again I knew by the hush of voices and the dying away of laughter on the boats about me that my dark craft was seen scudding like a black bird of evil omen through the night.
In my cabin I was used to burn a tallow dip made of the fat of the birds I had shot and rushes from the soft places of the moor, and while my boat drifted under the mizzen between take and take of herrings I would go below and sit with my dog. He grew sleek with the fare I found him, and I in these days recovered in a measure my sense of sight and hearing, for the sea's breath of brine is good to man. Millish veg-veen I called him, and, though a man of small cheer, I smiled to think what a sorry misname that name would seem in our harder English tongue. For my poor mongrel cur had his little sorry vices, such as did oft set me wondering what the chances of his life had been, and whether, like his new messmate, he had not somewhere been driven out. Nevertheless, he had his good parts, too, and was a creature of infinite spirits. I think we were company each to the other, and if he had found me a cheerier mate-fellow, I doubt not we should have had some cheerful hours together.
But in truth, though my fishing did much to tear me away from the burden of myself, it yet left me many lonesome hours wherein my anguish was sore and deep, and, looking to the years that might be before me, put me to the bitter question whether, being a man outside God's grace, I could hold out on so toilsome a course. Also, when I fell to sleep in the daytime, after my work of the night was done, I was much wrought upon by troublous dreams, which sometimes brought back the very breath-odor of my boyish days with the dear souls that filled them with joy, and sometimes plagued me with awful questions which in vain I tried to answer, knowing that my soul's welfare lay therein. And being much followed by the thought that the spirit of the beast of the field lay in wait to fall on the spirit of the man within me, I was also put to great terror in my watchfulness and the visions that came to me in hours of idleness and sleep. But suddenly this sentence fell on my mind: Thou art free to go whithersoever thou wilt, though it be the uttermost reaches of the earth. Go, then, where men are, and so hold thy soul as a man.
Long did this sentence trouble me, not being able to make a judgment upon it, but at length it fastened on me that I must follow it, and that all the dread I had felt hitherto of the face of man was no more than a think-so. Thereupon I concluded that I would go into Castletown at high fair on the next market-day, which I should know from other days by the carts I could descry from the top of the Mull going the way of Rushen Church and Kentraugh. This resolve I never brought to bear, for the same day whereon I made it a great stroke fell upon my spirit and robbed me of the little wherewith I had tried to comfort me.
Going out of the sound that night by the Spanish Head, for the season was far worn, and the herrings lay to the eastward of the island, I marked in the dusk that a smack that bore the Peel brand on its canvas was rounding the Chicken Rocks of the Calf. So I stood out well to sea, and did not turn my head to the wind, and cast my nets, until I was full two leagues from shore. Then it was black dark, for the night was heavy, and a mist lay between sea and sky. But soon thereafter I saw a blue light to my starboard bow, and guessed that the smack from Peel had borne down in my wake. How long I lay on that ground I know not, for the takings were good, and I noted not the passage of time. But at short whiles I looked toward the blue light, and marked that as my boat drifted so did the smack drift, and that we were yet within hail. The moon came out with white streamers from behind a rack of cloud, and knowing then that the fishing was over for that night—for the herring does not run his gills into mischief when he has light to see by—I straightway fell to hauling my nets. And then it was that I found the smell of smoke in the nostrils, and heard loud voices from the Peeltown smack. Lifting my eyes, I could at first see nothing, for though the moon's light was in the sky, the mist was still on the sea, and through it there seemed to roll slowly, for the wind was low, a tunnel of smoke-like fog. Well I knew that something was amiss, and soon the mist lifted like a dark veil into the air, and the smoke veered, and a flash of red flame rose from the smack of the Peel-men. Then I saw that the boat was afire, and in two minutes more the silence of the sea was lost in the fire's loud hiss and the men's yet louder shouts. It was as if a serpent in the bowels of the boat struggled to make its way out, and long tongues of fire shot out of the scuttle, the hold, the combings, and the flue of the stove. Little thought had I then of those things, though now by the eye of memory I see them, and also the sinuous trail of red water that seemed to crawl over the dark sea from the boat afire to the boat I sailed in. I had stepped my mast and hoisted sail before yet I knew what impulse possessed me, but with my hand on the tiller to go to the relief of the men in peril. On a sudden I was seized with a mighty fear, and it was as though a ghostly hand laid on me from behind, and a voice above the tumult of that moment seemed to cry in my ears: "Not for you, not for you." Then in great terror I turned my boat's head away from the burning smack, and as I did so the ghostly hand did relax, and the voice did cease to peal in mine ears.
"They will drop into their dingey," I said with myself. "Yes," I said, as the sweat started cold from my forehead, "they will drop into the dingey and be saved;" and turning my head I saw, by the flame of the fire, that over the bulwark at the stern two men were tumbling down into the small-boat that they hauled behind. And I sped away in agony, for now I knew how deep was the wrath upon me, that it was not for me so much as to stretch my accursed hand to perishing men to save them. Scarce had I gone a cable's-length when a great shout, mingled with oaths, made me turn my head, thinking the crew of the boat were crying curses down on me, not knowing me, for deserting them in their peril, but I was then in the tunnel of smoke wherein I might not be seen, and, lo, I saw that the dingey with the two men was sheering off, and that other two of their mates were left on the burning boat.
"Haul the wind and run the waistrels down, d—— them," shouted one of the two men on the smack, and amid the leaping flames the mainsail shot up and filled, and a man stood to the tiller, and with an oath he shouted to the two in the small-boat that for their treachery they should go down to hell straightway.
In the glare of that fierce light and the turmoil of that moment my eyes grew dim, as they had been on the day of my cutting off, and I squeezed their lids together to relieve them of water. Then I saw how fearful a thing was going on within my cable's-length. Two men of a crew of four in the burning smack had got themselves into the small-boat and cleared off without thought of their comrades who were struggling to save their craft, and now the two abandoned men, doomed to near death in fire or water, were with their last power of life, and in life's last moments—for aught they could tell—thirsting for deadly vengeance. On the smack went, with its canvas bellied, and the flames shooting through and hissing over it, but just as it came by the small-boat the men therein pulled to the windward and it shot past.
Ere this was done, and while the smack's bow was dead on for the dingey, I too had sheered round and was beating up after the burning boat, and when the men thereon saw me come out of the smoke they ceased to curse their false comrades and made a great cry of thanks to God. At a distance of six fathoms I laid to, thinking the men would plunge into the sea and come to me, but, apprehending my thoughts, one shouted me to come closer, for that he could not swim. Closer to the burning smack I would not go from fear of firing my own boat, and I dared not to risk that fate wherein we might all have been swallowed up together. For despair, that fortifies some men, did make of me a coward, and I stood in constant terror of the coming of death. So I stripped me of my jacket and leaped into the water and swam to the boat, and climbed its open combings as best I could through the flame and heat. On the deck the two men stood, enveloped in swirling clouds of smoke, but I saw them where they were, and pulling one into the water after me, the other followed us, and we reached my boat in safety.
Then, as I rubbed my face, for the fire had burned one cheek, the men fell to thanking me in a shamefaced way—as in the manner of their kind, fearing to show feeling—when on a sudden they stopped short, for they had lifted their eyes, and in the flame of their boat had seen me, and at the same moment I had looked upon them and known them. They were Illiam Quilleash and Edward Teare, and they fell back from me and made for the bow, and stood there in silence together.
Taking the tiller, I bore in by tacks for Port-le-Mary, and there I landed the men, who looked not my way nor ever spoke word or made sign to me, but went off with their heads down. And when I stood out again through the Poolvash to round the Spanish Head and make for my moorings in the sound, and saw the burning smack swallowed up by the sea with a groan that came over the still waters, its small-boat passed me going into harbor, and the men who rowed it were Crennell and Corkell, and when they saw me they knew me, and made a broad sweep out of my course. Now all this time the ghostly hand had been on my shoulder, and the strange voice had pealed in mine ears, and though I wanted not to speak with any man, nor that any man should speak with me, yet I will not say but that it went to my heart that I should be like as a leper from whose uncleanness all men should shrink away.
For many days hereafter this lay with a great trouble upon me, so that I let go my strong intent of walking into Castletown at high fair, and put this question with myself, whether it was written that I should carry me through this world down to death's right ending. Not as before did I now so deeply abhor myself; but felt for myself a secret compassion. In truth, I had no bitterness left in my heart for my fellow-men, but tossed with the fear that if I lived alone much longer I must surely lose my reason, and hence my manhood, sinking down to the brute, this consideration fell with weight upon me. What thou hast suffered is from men who know thy crime, and stand in terror of the curse upon thee, wherein thou art so blotted out of the book of the living that without sin none may look thy way. Go therefore where no man knows thee, and the so heavy burden thou bearest will straightway fall from thee. Now, at this thought my heart was full of comfort, and I went back to my former design of leaving this place forever. But before I had well begun what I was minded to do a strange accident befell me, and the relation thereof is as followeth.
By half-flood of an evening late in autumn—for though the watch showed short of six the sun was already down—I left my old moorings inside the rocks of Kitterland, thinking to slip anchor there no more. The breeze was fresh in the sound, and outside it was stiff from the nor'east, and so I ran out with a fair wind for Ireland, for I had considered with myself that to that country I would go, because the people there are tender of heart and not favored by God. For a short while I had enough to think of in managing my cordage, but when I was well away to sou'west of the Calf suddenly the wind slackened. Then for an hour full I stood by the tiller with little to do, and looked back over the green waters to the purple mountains vanishing in the dusk, and around to the western sky, where over the line of sea the crimson streamers were still trailing where the sun had been, like as the radiance of a goodly life remains a while after the man has gone. And with that eye that sees double—the thing that is without and that which is within—I saw myself then in my little craft on the lonely sea like an uncompanionable bird in the wide sky, and my heart began to fail me, and for the first time since my cutting off I must have wept. For I thought I was leaving forever the fair island of my home, with all that had made it dear in dearer days. Though it had turned its back on me since, and knew me no more, but had blotted out my name from its remembrance, yet it was mine, and the only spot of earth on all this planet, go whither I would, that I could call my own. How long this mood lasted I hardly can say, but over the boat two gulls hovered or circled and cried, and I looked up at their white transparent wings, for lack of better employment, until the light was gone and another day had swooned to another night. The wind came up with the darkness, and more in heart than before, I stood out for the south of Ireland, and reached my old fishing port of Kinsale by the dawn of the next day.
Then in the gentle sun of that autumn morning I walked up from the harbor to the market-place, and there found a strange company assembled about the inn, and in the midst were six or seven poor ship-broken men, shoeless, half-naked, and lean of cheek from the long peril and privation that eats the flesh and makes the eyes hollow. In the middle of the night they had come ashore on a raft, having lost their ship by foundering twelve days before. This I learned from the gossip of the people about them, and also that they had eaten supper at the inn and slept there. While I stood and looked on there came out in the midst of the group two other men, and one of them was their captain and the other the innkeeper. And I noted well that the master of the inn was suave to his tattered customers, and spoke of breakfast as being made ready.
"But first go to the Mayor," said he, addressing the captain, "and make your protest, and he will lend whatever moneys you want."
The captain, nothing loth, set out with a cheerful countenance for the Mayor of the town, a servant of the inn going with him to guide him. The ship-broken crew stayed behind, and I, who was curious to learn if their necessities would be relieved, remained standing in the crowd around them. And while we waited, and the men sat on the bench in front of the inn, there came down on them from every side the harpies that find sea-going men with clothes. There was one with coats and one with guernseys, and one with boots of leather and one of neat's-skin, and with these things they made every man to fit himself. And if one asked the price, and protested that he had got no money, the Samaritans laughed and bade them not to think of price or money until their captain should return from the treasury of the Mayor. The seamen took all with good cheer, and every man picked out what he wanted, and put it on, throwing his rags aside, laughing.
But presently the master of the crew returned, and his face was heavy; and when his men asked how he had fared, and if the Mayor had advanced him anything, he told them No, and that the Mayor had said he was no usurer to lend money. At that there were groans and oaths from the crew, and looks of bewilderment among those who had fetched the clothes; but the innkeeper said all would be well, and that they had but to send for a merchant in the next street who made it his trade to advance money to ship-broken men. This news brought back the light to the dark face of the captain, and he sent the servant of the inn to fetch the merchant.
When this man came my mind misgave, for I saw the stamp of uncharity in his face. But the captain told his story, whereof the sum was this: That they were the English crew of the brig "Betsy," and were seven days out from Bristol, bound for Buenos Ayres, when they foundered on a rock, and had made their way thither on a raft, suffering much from hunger and the cold of the nights, and that they wanted three pounds' advance on their owners to carry them to Dublin, whence they could sail for their own port. But the merchant curled his hard lip and said he had just before been deceived by strangers, and could not lend money except to men of whom he knew something; that they were strangers, and, moreover, by their own words, entitled to no more than six days' pay apiece. And so he went his way.
Hardly had he gone when the harpies of the coats and boots and guernseys called on the men to strip off these good garments, which straightway they rolled in their several bundles, and then elbowed themselves out of the crowd. The poor seamen, resuming their rags, were now in sad case, scarce knowing whether most to curse their misfortunes or to laugh at the grim turn that they were taking, when the captain, in a chafe, called on the innkeeper to give breakfast to his men, for that he meant to push on to the next town, where people might be found who had more humanity. But the innkeeper, losing his by-respects, shook his head, and asked where was his pay to come from for what he had already done.
Now, when I heard this, and saw the men rise up to go on their toilsome way with naked, bleeding feet, suddenly I bethought me that, though I had little money, I had what would bring money, and before I had taken time to consider I had whipped my watch from my fob to thrust it into the captain's hands. But when I would have parted the crowd to do so, on a sudden that same ghostly hand that I have before mentioned seemed to seize me from behind. Then on the instant I faced about to hasten away, for now the struggle within me was more than I could bear, and I stopped and went on, and stopped again and again went on, and all the time the watch was in my palm, and the ghostly hand on my shoulder. At last, thinking sure that the memory of the seven sea-going men, hungry and ill-clad, would follow me, and rise up to torment me on land and sea, I wheeled around and ran back hot-foot and did as I was minded. Then I walked rapidly away from the market-place, and passing down to the harbor, I saw a Peeltown fisherman, and knew that he saw me also.
Now, I should have been exceeding glad if this thing had never befallen, for though it made my feeling less ungentle toward the two men, my old shipmates, who had turned from me as from a leper when I took them from the burning boat, yet it brought me to a sense that was full of terror to my oppressed spirit, namely, that though I might fly to lands where men knew nothing of my great crime, yet that the curse thereof was mostly within mine own afflicted soul, from which I could never flee away.
All that day I stayed in my boat, and the sun shone and the sky was blue, but my heart was filled with darkness. And when night fell in I had found no comfort, for then I knew that from my outcast state there was no escape. This being so, whether to go back to mine own island was now my question. Oh, it is a goodly thing to lie down in the peace of a mind at ease and rise up from the refreshment of the gentle sleep. But not for me was that blessed condition. The quaking of my spirit was more than I could well stand under without losing my reason, and in the fear of that mischance lay half the pain of life to me. Long were the dark hours, and when the soft daylight came again I did resolve that go back to my own island I would. For what was it to me though the world was wide if the little place I lived in was but my own narrow soul?
That night in the boat for lack of the tick of my watch there seemed to be a void in the air of my cabin. But when the tide was about the bottom of the ebb I heard the plash of an oar alongside and presently the sound of something that fell overhead. Next morning I found my watch lying on the deck, by the side of the hatches.
At the top of the flood I lifted anchor, and dropped down the harbor, having spoken no word to any man since I sailed into it.
Back at my old moorings inside the rocks of Kitterland I knew full well that the Almighty Majesty was on this side of me and on that, and I had nothing to look for now or hereafter. But I think the extremity of my condition gave me some false courage, and my good genius seemed to say, What have you to lament? You have health and food and freedom, and you live under no taskmaster's eye. Let the morning see you rise in content, and let the night look on you lying down in thankfulness. And turn not your face to the future to the unsettling of your spirit, so that when your time comes you may not die with a pale face. Then did I laugh at my old yearning for fellowship, and asked wherefore I should be lonely since I lived in the same planet with other men, and had the same moon and stars above my sleep as hung over the busy world of men. In such wise did I comfort my torn heart, and shut it up from troubling me, but well I knew that I was like to one who cries peace where there is no peace, and that in all my empty sophistry concerning the moon and the stars there was no blood of poor human neighborliness.
Nevertheless, I daily went about my businesses, in pursuance whereof I walked up to the place over the Black Head where I had planted my corn and potatoes. These in their course I reaped and delved, cutting the barley and rye with my clasp-knife for sickle, and digging a burrow in the earth for my potatoes. Little of either I had, but enough for my frugal needs until more might grow.
When my work was done, and I had no longer any employment to take me ashore, the autumn had sunk to winter, for in this island of Man the cold and the mist come at a stride. Then sitting alone in my boat, with no task save such as I could make for myself, and no companion but little Veg-veen, the strength of the sophistry wherewith I had appeased myself broke down pitifully. The nights were long and dark, and the sun shone but rarely for many days together. Few were the ships that passed the mouth of the sound, either to east or west of it, and since my coming to moorage there no boat had crossed its water. Cold and bleak and sullen it lay around my boat, reflecting no more the forehead of the Calf, and lying now under the sunless sky like a dead man's face that is moved neither to smiles nor tears. And an awful weariness of the sea came to me then, such as the loneliest land never brought to the spirit of a Christian man, for sitting on the deck of my little swaying craft, with the beat of the sea on its timbers, and the sea-fowl jabbering on Kitterland, and perhaps a wild colt racing the wind on the Calf, it came into my mind to think that as far as eye could see or ear could hear there was nothing around me but the hand of God. Then all was darkness within me, and I did oft put the question to myself if it was possible for man to be with God alone and live.
Now it chanced upon a day that I wanted potatoes out of my burrow over the Black Head, and that returning therefrom toward nightfall, I made a circuit of the stone circle above the Chasm, and the northernmost side of it, midway to Cregneesh, came on a sight that arrested my breath. This was a hut built against a steepness of rugged land from which stones had sometimes been quarried. The walls were of turf; the roof was of gorse and sticks, with a hole in it for chimney. Window there was none, and the doorway was half closed by a broken gate whereof the bars were intertwined with old straw.
Mean it was, and desolate it looked on the wild moorland, but, it was a mark of the hand of man, and I, who had dwelt so long with God's hand everywhere about me, was touched with a sense of human friendliness. Hearing no voice within, I crept up and looked into the little place. A bed of straw was in one corner, and facing it was a lump of freestone hollowed out for the bed of a fire. A broken pipe lay near this rude hearth, and the floor was of mountain turf worn bare and hard. Two sacks, a kettle, a saucepan, and some potato-parings were the only other things in the hut, and poor as it all was it touched me so that in looking upon it I think my eyes were wet, because it was a man's habitation. I remember that as I turned to go away the rain began to fall, and the pattering drops on the roof seemed to my eye and ear to make the place more human.
In going back to my boat that day I came nearer to Cregneesh than was my wont in the daytime, and though the darkness was coming down from the mountains, I could yet see into the streets from the knoll I passed over. And there in the unpaved way, before a group of houses I saw a witless man in coat and breeches, but no vest or shirt, and with a rope about his waist, dancing and singing to a little noisy crowd gathered about him.
After that I had come upon the hut my mind ran much on the thought of it, and in three days or thereabouts I went back to look at it again, and coming near to it from behind, saw sundry beehives of a rude fashioning, made of straw and sticks. Veg-veen was with me, for he was now my constant company, and in a moment he had bounced in at the doorway and out again at yet more speed, with three of his kind close at his tail. Before I could turn me about to go away a man followed the dogs out of the hut, and he was the same witless being that I had seen at his dancing in the streets of Cregnesh. His lip lagged low and his eyes were dull as a rabbit's; on his head was a crownless hat through which his hair was seen, and I saw that his breast, where his shirt would be, was blackened as with soot. I would have gone about my own employments, but he spoke, telling me not to fear him, for it was false that he was possessed, as hard-spoken people said, with the spirit of delusion. I answered nothing to this, but stood and listened with eyes turned aside, while the broken brain of the poor creature rambled on.
"They call me Billy the Bees," he said, "because I catch them and rear them—look," and he pointed to his hives. He talked of his three dogs and named them, saying that they slept in a sack together, and that in the same sack he slept with them. Something he said of the cold that had been coming latterly, and pointed to the soot on his breast, saying that it kept him warm. He told how he made a circuit of the farmhouses once a week, dancing and singing at all of them, and how the people gave him barley-meal and eggs. Much more he said, but because the method of it—where method there was any—has gone from my memory I pass it. That the world was night about its end he knew of a surety, because he saw that if a man had money and great store of gear it mattered not what else he wanted. These with other such words he spoke ramblingly, and I stood aside and answered him nothing, neither did I look up into his face. At last he said, timidly, "I know I have always been weak in my intellects," and hearing that, I could bear to hear no more, but went about my business with a great weight of trouble upon me. And "O God," I cried that night in my agony, "I am an ignorant sot, without the grace of human tenderness, or the gift of understanding. I am guilty before Thee, and no man careth for my soul, but from this affliction, O Almighty Master save me; save me from this degradation, for it threatens me, and when death comes that stands at the foot of life's awful account, I will pay its price with thankfulness."
Now, after this meeting with the witless man the weariness that I had felt of my home on the sea lay the heavier on my spirits, and I concluded with myself that I should forsake my boat and build me a home on the land within sight of man's habitation. So I walked the cliffs from the Mull Hills to the Noggin Head, and at last I lit on the place I looked for. Near to the land where I had lately broken the fallows and grown me a crop of corn and potatoes, there were four roofless walls. Some time a house had stood there, but being built on the brink of the great clefts in the earth that we call the Chasms, it had shrunken in some settlement of the ground. This had affrighted the poor souls who inhabited it, and they had left it to fall into ruins. Such was the tale I heard long afterward, but none came near it then, and none have come near to it since. Save the four bare walls, and a wall that crossed it midway, nothing was left. Where the floor had been the grass was growing; wormwood was in the settle nook, and whinberries had ripened and rotted on the hearth. The door lintel was gone, and the sill of the window was fallen off. There was a round patch of long grass where the well had been, and near to where the porch once stood the trammon-tree still grew; and thus, though the good people who had lived and died there, been born and buried, were gone from it forever, the sign of their faith, or their superstition, lived after them.
Better for me than this forsaken place it was hard for any place to be. On a dangerous spot it stood, and therefore none would come anigh it. Near to Cregneesh it was, and from the rising ground above it I could look down on the homes of men. Truly it looked out on the sea, and had a great steepness of shelving rocks going down to an awesome depth, where, on the narrow beach of shingle, the tide beat with a woful moan; but though the sea was so near, and the sea-fowl screamed of an evening from the great rock like a cone that lifted its gaunt finger a cable's length away, yet to me it was within the very pulse of human life.
So I set to work, and roofed it with driftwood and turf and gorse; and then, with lime from a cliff at the Tubdale Creek in the Calf, I whitened it within and without, walls and roof. A door I made in somewise, and for a window I had a piece of transparent skin, having no glass. And when all was made ready I moved my goods from the boat to my house, taking all that seemed necessary—flour, and meat, and salt, and my implements, as well as my bed and the spare clothes I had, which were not many.
I had been in no haste with this work, being well content with such employment, but it came to an end at last, and the day that I finished my task was a day late in the first year after my cutting off. This I knew because the nights were long, and I had been trying with my watch to cast on the shortest day, and thereby recover my lost count of time. On the night of my first sleeping in my new home there came a fierce storm of wind and rain from the east. Four hours the gale lasted, and often the gulls were dashed screaming at the walls wherein I sat by the first fire I had yet kindled on my hearth. Toward midnight the wind fell suddenly to a dead calm, and, looking out, I saw that the moon was coming very bright in its rising from behind a heavy cloud over the sea. So, wondering what chance had befallen my boat—for though I had left it I had a tenderness for it and meant perchance to use it again—I set out for the sound. When I got to the head of the cliff I could plainly see the rocks of Kitterland, and the whole length of the Doon Creek, but where my boat had been moored no boat could I see, nor any trace of one from Fistard Head on the east to Half-Walk Rock on the west. Next morning, under a bright winter's sun, I continued the search for my boat, and with the rising tide at noon I saw her thrown up on to the beach of the Doon, dismasted, without spar or boom, bilged below her water-line, and altogether a hopeless hulk. I made some scabbling shift to pull her above high-water mark, and then went my ways.
Now this loss, for so I considered it, did at first much to depress me, thinking, with a bitter envy of my late past, that my future showed me a far more unblessed condition, seeing that I was now forever imprisoned on this island and could never leave it again whatsoever evil might befall. But when I had thought twice upon it, my mind came to that point that I was filled with gratitude; first, because the wrecking of my boat on the very day of my leaving it seemed to give assurance that, in making my home on the land, I had done that which was written for me to do; and next, because I must inevitably have been swallowed up in the storm if I had stayed on the sea a single night longer. And my terror of death was such that to have escaped the peril of it seemed a greater blessing than releasement from this island could ever be.
Every day thereafter, and oftenest at daybreak, I walked up to the crest of the rising ground at the back of my house, and stood awhile looking down on Cregneesh, and watching for the white smoke that lay like a low cloud over the hollow place wherein Port Erin lay. After that I had done this I felt strangely refreshed, as by a sense of companionship, and went about my work, such as it was, with content. But on a bitter morning, some time in December, as I thought, I came upon a sight that wellnigh froze my heart within me; for, outstretched on the bare moorland, under the bleak sky and in the lee of a thick gorse bush tipped with yellow, I found the witless man, Billy the Bees, lying cold and dead. His bare chest was blue, as with starvation, under the soot wherewith in his simpleness he had blackened it, and his pinched face told of privation and of pain. And now that he lay stretched out dead, I saw that he had been a man of my own stature. In his hut, which was farther away than my own house from the place where he lay, there was neither bite nor sup, and his dogs seemed to have deserted him in his poverty, for they were gone. The air had softened perceptibly for some minutes while I went thither, and as I returned to the poor body wondering what to do with it, the snow began to fall in big flakes. "It will cover it," I said with myself. "The snow will bury it," I thought; and casting a look back over my shoulder, I went home with a great burden of trouble upon me.
All that day, and other two days, the snow continued to fall, until the walls of my house were blocked up to the level of my window, and I had to cut a deep trench to the gable where I piled my wood. And for more than a week following, shut in from my accustomed walk I sat alone in the great silence and tried to keep my mind away from the one fearful thought that now followed it. Remembering those long hours and the sorry employments I found for them—scrabbling on all-fours in play with Millish-veg-veen, laughing loud, and barking back at the dog's shrill bark, I could almost weep while here I write to think of the tragic business that was at the same time lying heavy on my spirit. Christmas Day fell while thus I was imprisoned, for near to midnight I heard the church bells ring for Oiel Verree.
When the snow began to melt I saw that the dog put his muzzle to the bottom of the door instantly, and as often as I drove him away he returned to the same place. I will not say what awful thing came to my mind, knowing a dog's nature, and how near to my door lay the body of the witless man; only that I shuddered with a fear that was new to me when I remembered that, by the curse I lived under, the time would come when my unburied bones would lie on the bare face of the moor.
As soon as the snow had melted down to within a foot's depth of the earth I went out of my house and turned toward where my poor neighbor lay; but before I had come close to him I saw that three men were coming over the hillside by way of Port-le-Mary, and, wishing not to be seen by them, I crept back and lay by the hinder wall of my house to watch what they did. Then I saw that they came up to the body of the witless man and saw it, and stood over it some minutes talking earnestly, and then passed along on their way. And as they walked they turned aside and came close up by the front of my house, and looked in at the window, pushing the skin away. Standing by the wall, holding Veg-veen by the throat lest he should betray me, I heard some words the men said each to the other before they went on again.
"Well, man, he's dead at last, poor craythur," said one, "and good-luck too."
And the other answered, "Aw, dear, to think, to think! No man alive could stand up agen it. Aw, ter'ble, ter'ble!"
"I was at the Tynwald myself yander day," said the first, "and I'll give it a year, I was saying, to finish him, and behould ye, he's lying dead in half the time."
Then both together said, "God bless me!" and passed on.
At that moment my eyes became dim, and a sound as of running water went through my ears. I staggered into my house, and sat down by the cold hearth, for in my eagerness to go forth on my errand at first awakening, no fire had I kindled. I recalled the words that the men had spoken, and repeated them aloud one by one, and very slowly, that I might be sure I took their meaning rightly. This done, I said with myself, "This error will go far, until the wide island will say that he who was cut off, he who is nameless among men, is dead." Dead? What then? I had heard that when death came and took away a bad man, its twin-angel, the angel of mercy, bent over those who were left behind on the earth, and drew out of their softened hearts all evil reports and all uncharity.
And a great awe slid over me at that thought, and the gracious dew of a strange peace fell upon me. But close behind it came the other thought, that this error would reach my father also—God preserve him!—and Mona—God's holy grace be with her!—and bring them pain. And then it came to me to think that when men said in their hearing, "He whom you wot of is newly dead," they would take heart and answer, "No, he died long ago; it was only his misery and God's wrath that died yesterday."
With this thought I rose up and went out, and put some shovels of earth over the body of my poor neighbor, that his face might be hidden from the sky.
The great snow lay long on the mountains, and died off in its silence like one who passes away in sleep. And the spring came, the summer and the winter yet again, and to set down in this writing all that befell would be a weariness, for I feel as I write that the pulse of my life is low; and neither am I one who can paint his words with wit. My way of life has now grown straight and even, and at my simple employments I wrought early and late, that by much bodily toil I might keep in check the distempers of my mind.
With my fishing-boat, my gun, which I had left behind me of design, had been carried to the bottom of the sound, and when the hulk of the lugger drifted up with the tide the gun was no longer within her. This I took for a direction to me that I should hunt no more. Nevertheless, for some while I went on to fish with a line from my small-boat, which, being on the beach, the storm had spared. But soon it was gotten into my head that, if to shoot a hare was an ill deed, to take a cod was but a poor business. Well I knew that there was some touch of insanity in such fancies, and that for man to kill and eat was the law of life, and the rather because it was enjoined of God that so he should do. But being a man like as I was, cut off from the land of the living, never more to have footing there for the great crime committed of spilling blood, I think it was not an ungentle madness that made me fear to take life, whether wantonly or of hunger's need. This dread lay close to me, and got to extremities whereat one of healthy mind might smile. For, being awakened some nights in succession by the nibble of a mouse, I arose from my bed in the dawn, and saw the wee mite, and struck it with an iron rod and killed it, and then suffered many foolish twitches, not from pity for the mouse, for of humanity I had none left, but from the sudden thought that the spirit of its life, which I had driven from its harmless body, was now about me as an invisible thing. Though I had fallen into such a weakness, yet I think that where choice was none for one like me between the weakness of a man and the strength of a beast, I did least injury to my own nature and disposition by yielding with childish indulgence toward the gentler side.
And truly, it is a beautiful thing to mark how the creatures of earth and air will answer with confidence to man's tenderness, whether, as with my saintly father, it comes of the love of them, or, as with me, of the love of myself. The sea-fowl flew in at my door and pecked up the morsels that fell at my feet; the wild duck on the moor would not rise though I walked within a stride of it; a fat hare nested in a hole under my house and came out at dusk to nibble the parings of potatoes that I threw at the door, and, but for Millish-veg-veen and his sly treacheries, with the rabbits of the Black Head I might have sported as with a kitten.
I could fill this account with the shifts I was put to by want of many things that even a lone man may need for his comfort or his cheer. Thus, I was at pains to devise a substitute for tinder, having lost much of all I had in the wrecking of my boat; and to find leather for the soles of my shoes when they were worn to the welt was long a search.
Yet herein my case was but that of many another man who has told of his privation, and the less painful was my position for that I had much to begin my battle of life with. In this first year of my unblessed condition my senses not only recovered their wonted strength, but grew keener than before my cutting off. Oft did my body seem to act without help of my intelligence, and, with a mind on other matters, I would find my way over the trackless moor back to my home in the pitch of darkness, and never so much as stumble by a stone. When the wind was from the north, or when the air lay still, I could hear the church bells that rang in the market square at Castletown, and thereby I knew what the day of the week was. None came nigh to my dwelling, but if a man passed it by at the space of two furlongs, I seemed to feel his tread on the turf.
And now, as I hold the pen for these writings, my hand is loth and my spirit is not fain to tell of the strange humors of these times. So ridiculous and yet so tragic do they look as they come back to me in the grave-clothes of memory, that my imagination, being no longer turned wayward, shrinks from them as sorry things that none shall see to be of nature save he who has lived in an outcast state. But if the eyes I look for should ever read these lines, the tender soul behind them will bring me no laughter for my pains, and I ask no tears. Only for my weakness let it be remembered that the terror of my life was, that the spirit of madness and of the beast of the field waited and watched to fall upon me and to destroy the spirit of the man within me.
It is not to be expressed with what eagerness I strove to live in my solitude as a man should live in the company of his fellows. Down to the pettiest detail of personal manners, I tried to do as other men must be doing. Whatsoever seemed to be the habit of a Christian man that I practised, and (though all alone and having no man's eye to see me) with a grim and awesome earnestness. Thus before food, I not only washed but dressed afresh, taking off the sea-boots or the curranes I worked in, and putting on my shoes with silver buckles. My seaman's jacket I removed for a long coat of blue, and I was careful that my shirt was spotless. In this wise I also never failed to attire myself in the evening of the day for the short hours of rest between my work and my bed. That my cheeks should be kept clean of hair, and that the hair of my head should never outgrow itself, was a constant care, for I stood in fear of the creeping consciousness which my face in the glass might bring me, that I was other than other men. But I am loth to set down my little foolish formalities on sitting to meat and rising from it, and the silly ceremonies wherewith I indulged myself at going abroad and coming home. Inexpressibly comic and ridiculous some of them would seem to me now, but for the tragic meaning that in my terror underlay them. And remembering how much a defaulter I had been in all such courtesies of life when most they were called for, I could almost laugh to think how scrupulous I was in their observance when I was quite alone, with never an eye to see me, what I did or how I was clad, or in what sorry fashion I in my solitude acquitted myself like a man.
But though I could be well disposed to laugh at my notions of how to keep my manhood while compelled to live the life of a beast, alone like a wolf and useless for any purposes of man or the world, it is not with laughter that I recall another form of the insanity that in these times possessed me. This was the conviction that I was visited by Ewan, Mona, and my father. Madness, I call it, but never did my pulse beat more temperately or my brain seem clearer than when conscious of these visitations. If I had spent the long day delving, or gathering limestone on the beach of the sound, and returned to my house at twilight, I would perhaps be suddenly aware as I lifted the latch—having thought only of my work until then—that within my kitchen these three sat together, and that they turned their eyes to me as I entered. Nothing would be more convincing to my intelligence than that I actually saw what I say, and yet I always seemed to know that it was not with my bodily eyes that I was seeing. These indeed were open, and I was broad awake, with plain power of common sight on common things—my stool, my table, the settle I had made myself, and perhaps the fire of turf that burned red on the hearth. But over this bodily vision there was a spiritual vision more stable than that of a dream, more soft and variable than that of material reality, in which I clearly beheld Ewan and Mona and my father, and saw their eyes turned toward me. Madness it may have been, but I could say it at the foot of the White Throne that what I speak of I have seen not once or twice, but many times.
And well I remember how these visitations affected me: first as a terror, for when on a sudden they came to me as I lifted the latch I would shrink back and go away again, and return to my house with trembling; and then as a strange comfort, for they were a sort of silent company in my desolation. More than once, in these days of great loneliness, did I verily believe that I had sat me down in the midst of the three to spend a long hour in thinking of the brave good things that might have been for all of us but for my headstrong passion, helped out by the cruel tangle of our fate.
One thing I noted that even yet seems strange in the hours when my imagination is least given to waywardness. Throughout the period wherein I lived in the boat, and for some time after I removed me to my house, the three I have named seemed to visit me together; but after that I had found my witless neighbor lying dead on the moor, and after that I had heard the converse of the men who mistook his poor body for my own, the visitations of Mona and my father ceased altogether, and Ewan alone did I afterward seem to see. This I pondered long, and at length it fastened on me with a solemn conviction that what I had looked for had come about, and that the error that I was a dead man had reached the ears of my father and of Mona. With Ewan I sat alone when he came to me, and oft did it appear that we were loving company, for in his eyes were looks of deep pity, and I on my part had ceased to rail at the blind passion that had parted us flesh from flesh.
These my writings are not for men who will look at such words as I have here set down with a cold indifference, or my hand would have kept me back from this revelation. But that I saw apparently what I have described is as sure before God as that I was a man cut off from the land of the living.
A more material sequel came of the finding of the body on the moor. I was so closely followed by dread of a time that was coming when I must die, and stretch out my body on the bare ground with no man to give it Christian burial in the earth, that I could take no rest until I had devised a means whereby this terror might not haunt me in my last hours. In front of my house there were, as I have said, the places we call the Chasms, wherein the rock of this hungry coast is honeycombed into a hundred deep gullies by the sea. One of these gullies I descended by means of a cradle of rope swung overthwart a strong log of driftwood, and there I found a long shelf of stone, a deep fissure in the earth, a tomb of shelving rock coated with fungus and mold, whereto no dog could come, and wherein no bird of prey could lift its wing. To this place I resolved that I would descend when the power of life was on the point of ebbing away. Having lowered myself by my cradle of rope, I meant to draw the cordage after me, and then, being already near my end, to lie down in this close gully under the earth, that was to serve me for grave and death-bed.
But I was still a strong man, and, ungracious as my condition was, I shrank from the thought of death, and did what I could to put by the fear of it. Never a day did I fail to walk to the crest of the rising ground behind me and look down to where in the valley lay the habitations of men. Life, life, life, was now the constant cry of the voice of my heart, and a right goodly thing it seemed to me to be alive, though I might be said not to live, but only to exist.
Whether, from the day whereon I heard the converse of the two men who went by my house, I was ever seen of any man for a twelvemonth or more, I scarce can tell. Great was my care to keep out of the ways wherein even the shepherds walked, and never a foot seemed to come within two furlongs of these abandoned parts from the bleak Black Head to the margin of the sound. But it happened, upon a day toward winter, beginning the second year since my cutting off, that I turned toward Port-le-Mary, and walking on with absent mind, came nearer than I had purposed to the village over the Kallow Point. There I was suddenly encountered by four or five men who, much in liquor, were playing at leap-frog among the gorse. English seamen they seemed to be, and perhaps from the brig that some time before I had noted where she lay anchored to the lee of the Carrick Rock, in the Poolvash below. At sight of them I was for turning quickly aside, but they raised such a cry and shot out such a volley of levities and blasphemies that, try how I would to go on, I could not but stop on the instant and turn my face to them.
Then I saw that of me the men took no note whatever, and that all their eyes were on my dog Millish-veg-veen, who was with me, and was now creeping between my feet with his stump of a tail under his belly, and his little cunning face full of terror. "Why, here's the dog that killed our monkey," said one, and another shouted, "It's my old cur, sure enough," and a third laughed and said he had kept a rod in pickle for more than a year, and the first cried again, "I'll teach the beast to kill no more Jackeys." Then, before I was yet fully conscious of what was being done, one of the brawny swaggerers made toward us, and kicked at the dog with the fierce lunge of a heavy seaman's boot. The dog yelped and would have made off, but another of the blusterers kicked him back, and then a third kicked him, and whatever way he tried to escape between them, one of them lifted his foot and kicked again.
While they were doing this I felt myself struggling to cry out to them to stop, but not a syllable could I utter, and, like a man paralyzed, I stood stock-still, and did nothing to save my housemate and only companion in life. At length one of the men, laughing a great roistering laugh, stooped and seized the dog by the nape of the neck and swung him round in the air. Then I saw the poor cur's piteous look toward me, and heard its bitter cry; but at the next instant it was flying ten feet above our heads, and when it fell to the ground it was killed on the instant.
At that sight I heard an awful groan burst from my mouth, and I saw a cloud of fire flash before my eyes. When next I knew what I was doing I was holding one of the men by a fierce grip about the waist, and was swinging him high above my shoulders.
Now, if the good God had not given me back my consciousness at that moment, I know full well that at the next he who was then in my power would have drawn no more the breath of a living man. But I felt on a sudden the same ghostly hand upon me that I have written of before, and heard the same ghostly voice in mine ear. So, dropping the man gently to his feet, as gently as a mother might slip her babe to its cot, I lifted up my poor mangled beast by its hinder legs and turned away with it. And as I went the other men fell apart from me with looks of terror, for they saw that God had willed it that, with an awful strength, should I, a man of great passions, go through life in peril.
When I had found coolness to think of this that had happened, I mourned for the loss of the only companion that had ever shared with me my desolate state; but more than my grief for the dog was my fear for myself, remembering with horror that when I would have called on the men to desist I could not utter one word. Truly, it may have been the swift access of anger that then tied my tongue, but I could not question that my sudden speechlessness told me I was losing the faculty of speech. This conclusion fastened upon me with great pain, and I saw that for a twelvemonth or more I had been zealously preserving the minor qualities of humanity, while this its greatest faculty, speech, that distinguishes man from the brute, had been silently slipping from me. Preserve my power of speech also I resolved I would, and though an evil spirit within me seemed to make a mock at me, and to say, "Wherefore this anxiety to keep your speech, seeing that you will never require it, being a man cut off forever from all intercourse with other men?" yet I held to my purpose.