Harbor Tales Down North.
by Norman Duncan, et al.
NORMAN DUNCAN
An Appreciation by
WILFRED T. GRENFELL, M.D.
As our thoughts fly back to the days when the writer of these stories was a guest aboard our little hospital vessel, we remember realizing how vast was the gulf which seemed to lie between him and the circ.u.mstances of our sea life in the Northland. Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, do the cold facts of life call for a more unrelieved material response. It is said of our people that they are born with a netting needle in their hand and an ax by the side of their cradle.
Existence is a daily struggle with adamantine facts and conditions; and quick, practical response, which leaves little encouragement or opportunity for dreamers, is, often enough, the only dividing line between life and death. As I write these lines the greatest physical battle the world has ever seen is being fought. Yet here, as my eyes wander over the great ocean around me, nothing but absolute peace meets my view. But it too has its stormy times and its days when its strength and its mighty depths of possibilities are the most insistent points about it. And this spirit of the deep Norman Duncan seems to have understood as did no other of our visitors.
Our experience of the men from the hubs of existence had led us to regard them all as hardened by a keener struggle than ours, and critical, if not suspicious, of those who were satisfied to endure greater physical toil and discomfort than they for so much smaller material return. In the Labrador even a dog hates to be laughed at, and the merest suspicion of the supercilious makes a gap which it is almost impossible to bridge. But Norman Duncan created no such gap. He was, therefore, an anomaly to us--he was away below the surface--and few of us, during the few weeks he stayed, got to know him well enough to appreciate his real worth. Yet men who "go down to the sea in ships" have before now been known to sleep through a Grand Opera, or to see little to attract in the works of the Old Masters. And so we gather comfort for our inability to measure this man at his full stature.
All who love men of tender, responsive imagination loved Duncan. It was quite characteristic of the man that though he earned large sums of money by his pen, he was always so generous in helping those in need--more especially those who showed talents to which they were unable, through stress of circ.u.mstances, to give expression--that he died practically a poor man. He was a high-souled, generous idealist.
All his work is purposeful, conveying to his readers a moral lesson.
He had the keenest appreciation of the feelings of others and understood the immense significance of the little things of life--a fact evidenced by his vivid descriptions of the beauties of Nature, which he first appreciated and then, with his mastery of English, so ably described. His own experience of poverty and struggle after leaving the university opened to him channels for his sympathetic portrayal of humble life. Physically he was never a fighter or an athlete; but he proved himself possessed of singular personal courage.
He fought his best fights, however, on fields to which gladiators have no entry and in battles which, unlike our physical contests, are not spasmodic, but increasing and eternal. Norman Duncan"s love and affection for the people whom we also found joy in serving naturally endeared him to us. He was ever a true knight, entering the lists in behalf of those principles which make up man"s real inner life; and we realize that his love for men who embody characteristics developed by constant contact with the sea--fort.i.tude, simplicity, hardiness--died only with his own pa.s.sing.
The stories here brought together are woven out of experiences gathered during his brief periods of contact with our life. But how real are his characters! Like other famous personalities in fiction--Mr. Pickwick, Ebenezer Scrooge, Colonel Newcome, Tom Jones, and a thousand others--who people a world we love, they teach us, possibly, more of high ideals, and of our capacities for service than do the actual lives of some saints, or the biographies of philosophers. And how vivid the action in which his characters take part! In the external circ.u.mstances of his life and in his literary art and preferences he was singularly like his elder brother in romance, Robert Louis Stevenson. Both were slight in physique but manly and vigorous in character and mission in life. Both were wanderers over the face of the globe. Both loved the sea pa.s.sionately, and were at their best in telling of the adventures of those who spend their lives on the great waters. Both, finally, died at the height of power, literally with pen in hand, for both left recent and unfinished work. And the epitaph of either might well be the n.o.ble words of Stevenson from his brave essay on the greatness of the stout heart bound with triple bra.s.s:
"Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he pa.s.ses at a bound on the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land."
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
In the blood of Norman Duncan lived a spirit of romance and a love of adventure which make the chronicle of his short life a record of change and movement. He was born in Brantford, on the Grand River, in Western Ontario, July 2, 1871, and though he pa.s.sed most of the years of his manhood in the United States, he never took out citizenship papers in the Republic. After a boyhood spent in various towns in Canada, he entered Toronto University, where in his four years of undergraduate life he partic.i.p.ated eagerly in all forms of social and literary activity.
In 1895 he joined the reportorial staff of the _Auburn_ (N.Y.) _Bulletin_, which position he held for two years. Then followed four years of congenial work on the staff of the _New York Evening Post_, where he served successively as reporter, copy editor on city desk, special writer for the city, and, finally, editor of the Sat.u.r.day supplement. The editors of the _Post_ were quick to recognize Duncan"s ability in descriptive writing and character delineation, and under the spur of their encouragement he did his first important literary work, a series of short-stories of life in the Syrian quarter of New York City, published first in _The Atlantic Monthly_ and _McClure"s Magazine_ and gathered subsequently into a book ent.i.tled _The Soul of the Street_.
About the time of the appearance of this book the author"s temperament reacted against the atmosphere which it embodied, and in the summer of 1900 by an arrangement with _McClure"s Magazine_ he went to Newfoundland to gather impressions and material for a series of sea-tales. Up to this time he had never spent a night on the ocean nor been at sea on a sailing vessel; in his boyhood he had rather feared the great gray ocean, and only later in life did he become so strongly attracted by its power and mystery and by the impression of its eternal struggle against those who must wrest a precarious living from its depths that it provided the background for his most striking and characteristic stories. Three summers in Newfoundland and one on the Labrador Coast resulted in _The Way of the Sea_, _Doctor Luke of the Labrador_, and other books and short-stories, including those of the present collection.
In 1901 Duncan was appointed a.s.sistant to the professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College, and one year later he was elected Wallace Professor of Rhetoric at the same inst.i.tution, a post which he held until 1906. His duties were comparatively light so that he was able to devote much of his time to literary work. While occupying this position he enjoyed the companionship of his brother, Robert Kennedy Duncan, Professor of Chemistry at the college and later President of the Mellon Inst.i.tute of the University of Pittsburgh, and the prominent author of a well-known series of text books in chemistry, who died in 1914.
In 1907 and 1908 Norman Duncan was special correspondent for _Harper"s Magazine_ in Palestine, Arabia, and Egypt, and in 1912 and 1913 he was sent by the same magazine to Australia, New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, and the Malay States. Between these travel periods he acted for two years as adjunct professor of English at the University of Kansas. Not any of Duncan"s foreign travel seems to have impressed him as did his visits to Newfoundland and the Labrador coast, and some of his best tales are those of the Northland--powerful stories of life reduced to its elements. Of these tales those of the present collection are a good representation.
The creator of these great stories was cut off at the height of his power; he died very suddenly of heart-disease while playing a golf-match in Fredonia, New York, on October 18, 1916. He lies buried in Brantford, Ontario, the town of his birth.
Few modern writers of tales and short-stories have drawn their materials from sources as scattered as those which attracted Norman Duncan. Among the immigrants of the East Side of New York, the rough lumber-jacks of the Northwest, and the trappers and deep-sea fishermen of Newfoundland and The Labrador he gathered his ideas and impressions. But though his characters and incidents are chosen from such diverse sources, the characteristics of his literary art remain constant in all his books, for the personality of the author did not change.
Norman Duncan was a realist in that he copied life. But his realism is that of d.i.c.kens and Bret Harte and Kipling rather than that of Mrs.
Freeman and Arthur Morrison and the Russian story-tellers. He cared less for the accuracy of details than for the vividness of his general impressions and the force of his moral lessons. Like Bret Harte he idealized life. Like Harte, too, he was fond of dramatic situations and striking contrasts, of mixing the bitter and the sweet and the rough and the smooth of life; his introduction of the innocent baby into the drunkard-filled bar-room in _The Measure of a Man_ is strikingly like Bret Harte"s similar employment of this sentimental device in _The Luck of Roaring Camp_, and the presence of Patty Batch among the soiled women of Swamp"s End in the same tale and of the tawdry Millie Slade face to face with the curate in _The Mother_ is again reminiscent of Harte"s technique. Like d.i.c.kens and like Bret Harte, Duncan was a frank moralist. His chief concern was in winnowing the souls of men and women bare of the chaff of petty circ.u.mstances which covered them. His stories all contain at least a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte"s sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and maudlin. He has all the tenderness of d.i.c.kens; his _Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle_ may well be compared with _A Christmas Carol_. Norman Duncan never married, but few Canadian or American authors have understood women as did the creator of high-spirited Bessie Roth and her n.o.ble mother in _Doctor Luke of the Labrador_, of naive little Patty Batch, and of Millie Slade, glorified by her love for her son. In the delicacy and sensibility of his delineation of women he undoubtedly surpa.s.ses Bret Harte, most of whose women are either exaggerated or colorless.
Moreover, Norman Duncan possessed a very genuine understanding of children, particularly of young boys, of whom he was exceedingly fond.
There are few more sympathetic pictures of children in American literature than those of David Roth and the Lovejoy twins in _Doctor Luke of the Labrador_, and of Donald, Pale Peter"s lad, in _The Measure of a Man_; and in Billy Topsail Duncan has created a real boy, a youngster as red-blooded and manly and keen for excitement in his numerous thrilling adventures in the frozen North as are any of Stevenson"s boy heroes.
Variety and color in characters and situations, vividness of descriptions--especially in those of the stormy sea--rapidity of movement and dramatic intensity in narratives, genuine sentiment and real tenderness, humor, and pathos, and, above all, a healthy, vigorous, Anglo-Saxon morality--all of these qualities make of Norman Duncan"s books and short-stories literature that is distinctly worthy and permanent in character.
I
MADMAN"S LUCK
It was one thing or the other. Yet it might be neither. There was a disquieting alternative. No doubt the message disposed of the delicate affair for good and all in ten terse words. The maid had made up her mind; she had disclosed it in haste: that was all. It might be, however, that the dispatch conveyed news of a more urgent content. It might be that the maid lay ill--that she called for help and comfort.
In that event, nothing could excuse the reluctance of the man who should decline an instant pa.s.sage of Scalawag Run with the pitiful appeal. True, it was not inviting--a pa.s.sage of Scalawag Run in the wet, gray wind, with night flowing in from the sea.
No matter about that. Elizabeth Luke had departed from Scalawag Harbor in confusion, leaving no definite answer to the two grave suggestions, but only a melting appeal for delay, as maids will--for a s.p.a.ce of absence, an interval for reflection, an opportunity to search her heart and be sure of its decision. If, then, she had communicated that decision to her mother, according to her promise to communicate it to somebody, and if the telegram contained news of no more consequence, a good man might command his patience, might indulge in a reasonable caution, might hesitate on the brink of Black Cliff with the sanction of his self-respect. But if Elizabeth Luke lay ill and in need, a pa.s.sage of Scalawag Run might be challenged, whatever came of it. And both Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl knew it well enough.
Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl, on the return from Bottom Harbor to Scalawag Run, had come to Point-o"-Bay Cove, where they were to lie the night. They were accosted in haste by the telegraph operator.
"Are you men from Scalawag?" she inquired.
She was a brisk, trim young woman from St. John"s, new to the occupation, whose administration of the telegraph office was determined and exact.
"We is, ma"am," Sandy Rowl replied.
"It"s fortunate I caught you," said the young woman, glowing with satisfaction. "Indeed it is! Are you crossing at once?"
Sandy Rowl smiled.
"We hadn"t thought of it, ma"am," said he. "I "low you don"t know much about Scalawag Run," he added.
The young woman tossed her red head.
"When you _have_ thought of it, and made up both your minds," she replied tartly, "you might let me know. It is a matter of some importance."
"Ay, ma"am."
By this time Tommy Lark had connected the telegraph operator"s concern with the rare emergency of a message.
"What you so eager t" know for?" he inquired.
"I"ve a dispatch to send across."
"Not a telegram!"
"It is."
"Somebody in trouble?"
"As to that," the young woman replied, "I"m not permitted to say. It"s a secret of the office."
"Is you permitted t" tell who the telegram is from?"