Chapter III: Overheard in a Cove

(The Old Salt Talks Back)
_Swiles_=seals.
_Quintal_=cwt.

THE SCHOLAR (_recovering from heroic seizures_)

Existence in this little town I find
Much too constricted for an ample mind;
Unheeded on these vain and deafening shores
Might Wisdom cry aloud her precious stores--
Wisdom for whom the Universe unseen
An illustrated page has ever been;
Who but initiates may understand
The forms and pressures of her amorous hand!
Her thoughts that wander through Eternity
Would perish here beside this muddy sea,
For no divine afflatus ever reaches
The men who dry their fish upon these beaches.

THE SALT.

Your poor old dad and granddad, long since dead--
God rest their weary souls--were born and bred
Upon this shore, as fine God-fearin' sort
As ever brought a leaky ship to port.
They never put up any braggin' claims
To learnin'--couldn't more than write their names,
And yet, no dealer born could take 'em in,
In things of common sense, like figurin'
Accounts, or show them any solid reason
Why number one prime cod might any season
Drop in price, while the fish remained as good
As ever, and a quintal always stood
A quintal; and there never was a strait
Or gulf or cape they couldn't navigate;
And fair or foul it made no difference.

They had no learnin', but the chunk of sense
The Good Lord gave 'em for their calculation,
While other men who learned their navigation
From books, got drowned; so you for all your letters
Have got no call for sneerin' at your betters.

THE SCHOLAR (_with condescension_).

But, my dear man, I feel I must admit
To such a native modicum of wit,
By this, plus luck, if such a thing there be,
A man may wrest his living from the sea;
But on the troublous sea as on the land.
Note what we owe the scientific hand.
The world's dark secrets have been opened out
By men who forged their faith from honest doubt.
Who rounded out the universe for us
But Galileo and Copernicus?
Who gave us chart and compass, sextant, log,
And apparatus for detecting fog
And wind and currents? Who gave us thermometers?
Again, I ask; who, prisms and barometers?

THE SALT (_snortingly_).

A man that owns a hand can use a log,
An idiot with one eye can see a fog
When it is comin'.

THE SCHOLAR.

But no wit surmises
The calculated way the wind uprises;
The place it comes from, whereunto it goes,
Nor tell you to the mile the rate it blows,
A full seven days ahead. But Science draws
Exact determinations of the laws
That govern wind and waves; though, to be sure,
In charting atmospheric temperature
She may, for uninformed mentalities,
Use terms like unexplained contingencies.
But still, when all her facts are massed together,
Unerring is her forecast of the weather;
In our metropolis we have a man
Who _plots_ it every day.

THE SALT (_fired by reminiscence_).

Like hell he can.
Whenever that fool bulletin comes out,
With cock-sure talk about the heat and drought
That's bound to last a week, I always ask
The missus for me flannels and a flask
Of gin to keep me goin' through the day.
And when it says--"Look out for frost, 'twill stay
Three days or more," I know we'll have a spurt
Of heat would boil a man inside his shirt.
Its everlasting fable--"Fair and warm"
Means "brewin' for the devil of a storm."

THE SCHOLAR (_with righteous warmth_).

This open and unshamed prevarication
Perturbs my soul with moral agitation.
A votary of Truth I shall abide,
That Wisdom of her child be justified.

THE SALT.

And let me tell you this: a half a brain
Can tell a nor'-east wind will bring a rain.
A sun-hound in the evenin' or a ring
Around the moon--there is no safer thing
For prophesyin' weather; as for cold,
You boasted that your man up yonder told
That frost was comin'. Why, sure, a skunk knows
That and more; three months ahead he grows
A chunkier tail.

THE SCHOLAR.

Your language, my good sir,
Is rank: but, waiving that, I must aver
With emphasis that human life is longer,
As knowledge grows from more to more, and stronger,
With every age, the race. Take medicine,
And note its triumphs. How shall I begin
To glorify that heavenly art enough,
Since Aesculapius.

THE SALT.

I calls it bluff,
This doctorin' business. There's Jim Hennessey's lad.
When he was young his father thought he had
The makin's of a doctor in him. I,
Inquirin' like, asked him the reason why.
He said the lad was handy with a knife,
The way he'd carve a rabbit up alive,
Or a young robin, maybe, just to see
What the innerds were like.

THE SCHOLAR.

Anatomy!
A subject of minute research.

THE SALT.

Then Jim
Put no less than six years expense on him.
When he came back, some said it was decline;
He called it asthma, but he had the sign
Of a gone man; the neighbors were afraid
To have him in; their children, so they said,
Might catch the wheezin' off his chest. One case
His dad got for him--more to save his face,
I said, but let that bide--Jim got his son
A case of Jack spavin--a wicked one
I will allow it was--in Hazzard's mare.
The boy put on a apron, then a pair
Of rubber gloves, and then he said he'd freeze
The leg and dose her up with fumes to ease
The pain; and afterwards he'd operate.
Then sew her up and leave the rest to fate.
He did his honest bit--at least he tried;
The mare kicked down the stalls before she died.

THE SCHOLAR.

But your example only serves to show
What dire results from ignorance may flow.
He had no skill for equine malady--
No special training.

THE SALT.

Just what Hennessey,
His father, thought. So the old man, grown wise,
Gave him another year to specialize--
This time in spavins.

THE SCHOLAR.

How does this impugn
The Science by which man is made immune
From all those fearsome, devastating ills,
From cholera morbus to domestic measles,
That swept the cosmos? Tell me, has not man
Added by this to his allotted span
Two decades?

THE SALT.

I don't see it with my eyes.
This generation's dyin' off like flies;
And why? Each mother son of them and daughter
Are bred on arrowroot, with milk and water.
They're all a scraggy lot; too much spoon-fed;
Wants water bottles when they go to bed;
Smokes cigarettes and drinks vile, home-made wine.
Rhubarb will corn 'em; so will dandyline.
'Tis not the same as what it was. I know,
Away back in the sixties, when our crew
Was home from swilin' and a regular streak
Of thirst had struck us, how, one night a week,
And after lodge was out, each man would take a
Good, long and steady swig of old Jamaica,
And never feel the worse on it. 'Twould blow
A colony like you to Jericho.
As tough as staragons, they had no call
For other medicine. A swig was all
They asked for, and a swig was all they got.
It cooled them off when they were dry, and shot
Them up, when they were cold. And, say, what can,
Within a lifetime, come to any man,
Except a burnin' fever or a freezin'?

THE SCHOLAR.

Your argument is void of rhyme or reason;
Your observations on disease, mere chatter.

THE SALT.

Maybe 'tis so; but I looks at the matter
Quite different wise. I holds that not in strength,
Nor muscle, nor in gumption, nor in length
Of days, are young folks like they used to be.
I minds how in a blinkin' storm at sea,
When both the captain and the mate were drowned,
Under a double reef we had to round
The Cape, on a lee coast, and, undermanned,
And the taffrail blown to bits, the youngest hand
On board, Sam Drake, took his turn at the wheel.
He couldn't see the mainmast--had to feel
The schooner's course, yet brought her down the bay,
With every shred of canvas swept away.

THE SCHOLAR.

Is not the clamant menace of the sea
Silenced by steam, by electricity,
By gasoline?

THE SALT.

My notion's still the same,
That folks were better off before they came.
More swiles were taken in the spring; more fish
Were dried upon the flakes, and if you wish
To get my views on gasoline, I think
The racket of the engine and the stink
Is drivin' all the cod out of the bay.
'Tis gettin' hopeless quite--no fish, no pay.
But there's a worse account I feel like makin'
Against new-fangled notions. They are takin'
The backbone from the lads--initiation
You called it--

THE SCHOLAR.

No. Allow my emendation--
Initiative! However, I understand.

THE SALT.

Maybe you're right; maybe you're not. 'Tis sand,
I calls it; but no matter what 'tis called,
With any kind of little snag they're stalled.
They'd starve and die with plenty all around 'em.
I minds when our supplies ran out we found 'em,
Sometimes when we were in the bush, with tea
And baccy gone--no drink or nothin'--we
Would fetch a kettle full of juniper
And boil it for an hour or so, and stir
Barbados black-strap with it--

THE SCHOLAR (_in deep spiritual reflection_).

Do I see,
In its archetypal form, Zymology,
That most potential art?

THE SALT.

Yes, sir, the brew
Would grow a jumper on your chest. We'd chew
The dried sap of the spruce, and then we'd take
Dried tea-leaves with the chips of bark and make
A powerful, fine smoke. You never saw,
I suppose, a man rig up a lobster claw
With quid, to get a drag when he had lost
His pipe? I needn't ask. That never crossed
Your mind. I'd like to see a good round score
Like you, a-headin' all for Labrador,
Stowed in a fore-and-after with the sea,
A-ragin' through the scuppers. It would be
A sight for Satan, every time the ship,
With not too much of ballast, took a dip
To come right up again with soakin' jibs--
To watch your queasy stomachs and your ribs
In need of oilin'.

THE SCHOLAR.

Trivial your words,
Your passions bestial. The irrational herds
Roaming the plains would scorn such thoughts as these;
The ox, the zebra and the ass appease
Their several hungers, earth-born as they are--
Without afflatus, without mind--with far
More worthy satisfactions. What care you
(_recurrence of symptoms_)
For the primrose by the river's brink, the blue
Within the violet's eye, in fine, for flowers?
Eating and drinking you lay waste your powers,
The world being too much with you. Have you felt
A presence that disturbs you? Have you knelt
At Nature's shrine, bathed at her crystal fount,
And found her central peace? Say, do you count
By figures or by heart-throbs? Have you never
Listened to brooks that babble on for ever?
Sermons there are in stones; alas, they stir
You not.

THE SALT.

Shame on you, you idolater,
For worshippin' stocks and stones. I see you took
All your religion from a bot'ny book,
And a dry, small lump it is, by every sign
That I can see, you heathen. I gets mine
From another kind of book. You don't need learnin'
Neither, the kind that kills the soul's discernin'
Of spiritual things. That's what our parson said,
And he had learnin', too. It killed him dead
Before he gave it up, like a dry rot
That puts the blight on damson plums--that's what
It is. Give me what makes a critter whole,
And pours the blazin' glory on his soul,
And saves him from the horrors.

THE SCHOLAR (_on the verge of a paroxysm_).

A most rude
Conception of the spirit's growth--mere food
For sucklings, for the race at those low stages
Of history that form the world's Dark Ages.
From your contentions, then, must I assume
That in your mind's horizon is no room
For formulæ that dominate our times;
For laws that tell how by successive climbs
Our common human nature has become
The paragon magnificent for dumb
And erring brutes? Millions of years have passed
Between the first crude cycle and the last,
In which, despite the bludgeonings of chance
And fate, has man his own deliverance
Wrought out; survived the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. In the eternal rocks
Engraven is the epic.

THE SALT.

Pedley's lad,
When he came back from learnin', was as bad
As Hennessey. I might say worse, for he
Lacked any bit of skill that Hennessey
Might seem to own if he got started right.
Pedley, for so his old man thought, was quite
A brainy boy when growin' up. He'd shirk
Any and every job that looked like work.
He wouldn't run, he wouldn't walk; he'd fetch
A book, and then for hours at a stretch
He'd squat down on the wharf--takin' the air,
I said it was. He wouldn't read. He'd stare,
Then drowse, then stare again, just like a sheep.
Whose brains the wise God only gave for sleep,
When Jeff, his younger brother, might be seen
Shapin' the model of a brigantine,
Or doin' something handy, steepin' bark,
Or renderin' out the liver of a shark.
Well, when the old man finally understood
He could do nothin' with him, for the good
Of his soul--the last thing left--he thought he'd send
Him off to join the Church; thought if he'd spend
Ten years wearin' a collar or a satin
Gown, and got crammed right to the neck with Latin,
And the seven tongues, and all the other learnin',
He'd be a thumpin' wonder on returnin'.
He was. As bad as you for gall, he'd chin
The Lord out of his job, on points like sin,
Damnation and the rest of it. He told
Us how the world--I can't just mind how old,
He said it was; but just to illustrate
His point, he took a pencil and a slate,
Marked five in the left-hand corner near the top,
And added zeros till he had to stop
For want of room, and added more by tongue,
Then ended, claimin' that the world was young.
Just like a mushroom, so to speak; and when
He thought he'd finished his explainin', then
Our pastor put a poser to him straight.
Just how, he asked him, did he calculate
It out?--the parson, I'll allow, was rough
On questions--Was the slate not big enough?
Did he run out of zeros? Was he sure
He had the tally right? A zero more,
What mattered it, and how did he arrive
By any kind of reckonin' at that five?
It looked so lonesome by itself. Would not
Another zero do instead? And what
Do you allow his answer was? I've heard
Some blasphemy against the Livin' Word
Within my time--the Livin' Word that says
The world's bin waggin' now, omittin' days,
Six thousand years; but Word and Church and Lord,
The evidence of the Fathers and the Sword
Of the Spirit, everything--he cast them out
With one deliberate, sacrilegious clout.
He told us--and it sounded like a boast--
He told us--are you listenin'?--that the most
Of all his facts he got from skulls; from graves
Of savages that one time lived in caves;
From skeletons of serpents, elephants;
I think he mentioned bugs and bees and ants
And frogs' backbones and such, but most of it
He got from skulls so old that not a bit
Of chop was left upon the jowls. He said--
Grantin' the man who owned the skull was dead
So long, the crown had rotted--yet he'd tell
The story from the jaw-bone just as well.

THE SCHOLAR (_delivering le grand coup_).

Thanks to the scientist's imagination,
The point is proven to a demonstration,
Your patriarchal history is a fable,
A groundless fiction like your Tower of Babel,
Your Samson or your Jonah. Had you sense
To follow while I forge the evidence,
How from the void of dancing vortices,
The human mind has wrought its destinies,
You'd gather what the Universe discloses.

THE SALT (_with profound disgust_).

I'm done with you, my lad--I stands by Moses.