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Updated: August 17, 2024
"It's been a mistake, Mate, and I am she is little Hope is " He fell back a step, letting the man lop over suddenly on his doubled knees, and stared blankly at a tiny drug-phial, uncorked and empty, rolling away across the floor. He passed a slow hand across his eyes. "Why why I I'm afraid Mate is isn't very well." Urkey had held its tongue too long.
And later that night, what better for a man on the way to exile than a heaven-sent, outbound India ship, hove to under the lee of the Head. Yes, yes, it was so it must be so. And when they laughed at her in Urkey Village and winked sagely at her assumption of faith, then she asked them to tell her one thing: had any one's eyes seen Andrew's boat go down actually.
Urkey village at the beginning of my 'teens seemed to me much the same Urkey village upon which I had first opened my eyes. And then I went to make a visit with my uncle Orville Means in Gillyport, just across the Sound, and when I came back on the packet I could assure myself with all the somber satisfaction of the returning exile that I would scarcely have known the old place.
How gaily we used to chant it over Yen Sin's scow when I was a boy on Urkey water-front, and how unfailingly it brought the minister charging down upon us. I can see him now, just as he used to burst upon our vision from the wharf lane, face paper-white, eyes warm with a holy wrath, lips moving uncontrollably. And I can hear his voice trembling at our heels as we scuttled off: "For shame, lads!
But as I look back now on the blunt end of those Urkey days, I seem to see Minister Malden growing smaller as he comes nearer, and Mate Snow growing larger Mate Snow browbeating the congregation with a more and more menacing righteousness Minister Malden, in his protecting shadow, leaner, grayer, his eyes burning with an ever fiercer zeal, escaping Center Church and slipping away to redeem the Chinaman.
The thing began when I was too young to make much of it yet, a wonder of less than seven days among all the other bright, fragmentary wonders of a boy's life at six. Mainly I remember that Mary Matheson was a fool; every one in Urkey Village was saying that. I can't tell how long the Blake boys had been courting her.
And now it's Mate Snow who is the big man of this island, and it's the minister that eats the crumbs that fall from his table, and folks pity you and honor him because he's so good to you, and " And this was Urkey village, and night, and Yen Sin was dying. "And he's down to the Chinaman's now!" I screamed, walking out of my dream.
And this was just as well, perhaps, for our minds had enough to take them up just then with all the things overlooked, chairs to fetch, plants to borrow, girls' giggling errands and in the very midst of this eleventh-hour hub-bub, the sudden advent of storm. What a catastrophe that was! What a voiceless wail went up in that hour from all the bureaus and washstands in the length of Urkey Village!
Heaven knows she had had bad enough luck with Gibbs, a sallow devil of a whaler who never did a fine act in his life till he went down with his vessel and all hands in the Arctic one year and left Sympathy Gibbs sitting alone in the Pillar House on Lovett's Court, pretty, plump, and rather well-to-do as Urkey goes.
But of all the changes in the village, the most momentous to me was the change in Yen Sin. I don't know why it should have been I, out of all the Urkey youth, who went to the Chinaman's; perhaps it was the spiritual itch left from that first adventure on the scow. At any rate, I had fallen into a habit of dropping in at the cabin, and not always with a collar to do.
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