Читать книгу A Tangled Web - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 10

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“Little” Sam Dark—who was six-feet-two—and “Big” Sam Dark—who was five-feet-one—were first cousins. “Big” Sam was six years the elder, and the adjective that had been appropriate in childhood stuck to him, as things stick in Rose River and Little Friday Cove, all his life. The two Sams were old sailors and longshore fishermen, and they had lived together for thirty years in Little Sam’s little house that clung like a limpet to the red “cape” at Little Friday Cove. Big Sam had been born a bachelor. Little Sam was a widower. His marriage was so far in the dim past that Big Sam had almost forgiven him for it, though he occasionally cast it up to him in the frequent quarrels by which they enlivened what might otherwise have been the rather monotonous life of retired sea-folk.

They were not, and never had been, beautiful, though that fact worried them little. Big Sam had a face that was actually broader than it was long and a flaming red beard—a rare thing among the Darks, who generally lived up to their name. He had never been able to learn how to cook, but he was a good washer and mender. He could also knit socks and write poetry. Big Sam quite fancied himself as a poet. He had written an epic which he was fond of declaiming in a surprisingly great voice for his thin body. Drowned John himself could hardly bellow louder. When he was low in his mind he felt that he had missed his calling and that nobody understood him. Also that nearly everybody in the world was going to be damned.

“I should have been a poet,” he would say mournfully to his orange-hued cat—whose name was Mustard. The cat always agreed with him, but Little Sam sometimes snorted contemptuously. If he had a vanity it was in the elaborate anchors tattooed on the back of his hands. He considered them far more tasty and much more in keeping with the sea than Drowned John’s snake. He had always been a Liberal in politics and had Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s picture hanging over his bed. Sir Wilfrid was dead and gone but in Big Sam’s opinion no modern leader could fill his shoes. Premiers and would-be premiers, like everything else, were degenerating. He thought Little Friday Cove the most desirable spot on earth and resented any insinuation to the contrary.

“I like to have the sea, ‘the blue lone sea,’ at my very doorstep like this,” he boomed to the “writing man” who was living in a rented summer cottage at the cove and had asked if they never found Little Friday lonesome.

“Jest part of his poetical nature,” Little Sam had explained aside, so that the writing man should not think that Big Sam had rats in his garret. Little Sam lived in secret fear—and Big Sam in secret hope—that the writing man would “put them in a book.”

By the side of the wizened Big Sam Little Sam looked enormous. His freckled face was literally half forehead and a network of large, purplish-red veins over nose and cheeks looked like some monstrous spider. He wore a great, drooping moustache like a horse-shoe that did not seem to belong to his face at all. But he was a genial soul and enjoyed his own good cooking, especially his famous pea soups and clam chowders. His political idol was Sir John Macdonald, whose picture hung over the clock shelf, and he had been heard to say—not in Big Sam’s hearing—that he admired weemen in the abstract. He had a harmless hobby of collecting skulls from the old Indian graveyard down at Big Friday Cove and ornamenting the fence of his potato plot with them. He and Big Sam quarrelled about it every time he brought a new skull home. Big Sam declared it was indecent and unnatural and unchristian. But the skulls remained on the poles.

Little Sam was not, however, always inconsiderate of Big Sam’s feelings. He had once worn large, round, gold earrings in his ears, but he had given up wearing them because Big Sam was a fundamentalist and didn’t think they were Presbyterian ornaments.

Both Big and Little Sam had only an academic interest in the old Dark jug. Their cousinship was too far off to give them any claim on it. But they never missed attending any clan gathering. Big Sam might get material for a poem out of it and Little Sam might see a pretty girl or two. He was reflecting now that Gay Penhallow had got to be a regular little beauty and that Thora Dark was by way of being a fine armful. And there was something about Donna Dark—something confoundedly seductive. William Y.’s Sara was undeniably handsome, but she was a trained nurse and Little Sam always felt that she knew too much about her own and other people’s insides to be really charming. As for Mrs. Alpheus Penhallow’s Nan, about whom there had been so much talk, Little Sam gravely decided that she was “too jazzy.”

But Joscelyn Dark, now. She had always been a looker. What the divvle could have come between her and Hugh? Little Sam thought “divvle” was far less profane than “devil”—softer like. For an old sea-dog Little Sam was fussy about his language.

Oswald Dark had been standing at the far end of the verandah, his large, agate-grey, expressionless eyes fixed on the sky and the golden edge of the world that was the valley of Bay Silver. He wore, as usual, a long black linen coat reaching to his feet and, as usual, he was bareheaded. His long brown hair, in which there was not a white thread, parted in the middle, was as wavy as a woman’s. His cheeks were hollow but his face was strangely unlined. The Darks and Penhallows were as ashamed of him as they had once been proud. In his youth Oswald Dark had been a brilliant student, with the ministry in view. Nobody knew why he “went off.” Some hinted at an unhappy love affair; some maintained it was simply overwork. A few shook their heads over the fact that Oswald’s grandmother had been an outsider—a Moorland from down east. Who knew what sinister strain she might have brought into the pure Dark and Penhallow blood?

Whatever the reason, Oswald Dark was now considered a harmless lunatic. He wandered at will over the pleasant red roads of the Island, and on moonlight nights sang happily as he strode along, with an occasional genuflection to the moon. On moonless nights he was bitterly unhappy and wept to himself in woods and remote corners. When he grew hungry he would call in at the first house, knock thunderingly on the door as if it had no right to be shut, and demand food regally. As everybody knew him he always got it, and no house was shut to him in the cold of a winter night. Sometimes he would disappear from human ken for weeks at a time. But, as William Y. said, he had an uncanny instinct for clan pow-wows of any sort and invariably turned up at them, though he could seldom be persuaded to enter the house where they were being held. As a rule he took no notice of people he met in his wanderings—except to scowl darkly at them when they demanded jocularly, “How’s the moon?”—but he never passed Joscelyn Dark without smiling at her—a strange eerie smile—and once he had spoken to her.

“You are seeking the moon, too. I know it. And you’re unhappy because you can’t get it. But it’s better to want the moon, even if you can’t get it—the beautiful silvery remote Lady Moon—as unattainable as things of perfect beauty ever are—than to want and get anything else. Nobody knows that but you and me. It’s a wonderful secret, isn’t it? Nothing else matters.”