The Merry Men
The Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson relates the strange events which took place during the narrator’s last visit to his uncle on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. Glancing at the title of the story, you could be forgiven for expecting some sort of jovial farce, but it actually denotes an important and quite cheerless feature of the setting. Gordon Darnaway, the uncle, lives in a two storey house on a storm battered island known as Aros. Periodically, the island is connected to a promontory of the mainland by a narrow isthmus: at low tide, a spit of sand is exposed and the island may be reached on foot; at high tide, Gordon’s servant, Rorie, ferries visitors across in a skiff. Beyond this little stretch of water, however, the place is a roiling deathtrap for sailors owing to huge waves that break over the unchartered reefs and pitch against the granite coast. Such is the din raised by the sea that the locals, reminded of a band of drunken revellers, have named these breakers, “the Merry Men.”
We are primed early on to expect a supernatural tale by the local legends Charles Darnaway, the narrator, recalls on his walk to the isthmus: of seals which “would speak to men in their own tongue presaging great disasters” and of a piper who was sung to by a mermaid, "all one long, bright midsummer night so that in the morning he was found stricken crazy and thenceforward, till the day he died, said only one form of words; what they were in the original Gaelic I cannot tell, but they were thus translated: ‘Ah, the sweet singing out of the sea.’” But it is not until Chapter II, when Charles and Rorie are rowing to the island, that the suggestion of something uncanny appears in the narrative itself: The glimpse of a shadow scudding across the corrugated sand below the boat. “It will be a great feesh,” Rorie says but it is clear that he only wishes this to be true and is unable to conceal his unease. “Whatten fish?” growls the narrator’s salty old uncle when the subject comes up over lunch. "It was a bogle!" And then he tells them, in his thick Scottish bur, the story of a sailor who died of fright after seeing an entity clinging to the bowsprit of the ship during a storm. The theme seems to be an unhealthy preoccupation for the uncle, who throughout the rest of the meal, with flashing eyes and wild gestures, works himself into a lather over bogles and kelpies and the fundamental unholiness of the sea—which he also considers to be the logical abode of the Devil. The following morning, much of this supernatural gossamer is swept away and the situation becomes more amenable to reason. Uncle Gordon, as Charles discovers soon after his arrival, has been salvaging valuables from a recent shipwreck in which everyone was killed—but when Charles walks to the cove, he finds both the wrecked ship (the Christiana) and a fresh grave: He realises that someone survived the disaster and Gordon murdered him, thereby establishing a psychological motive for his uncle's superstitious terror of the sea and general deterioration: It is his own conscience that plagues him. And now, with all the elements in place, the climax of the story begins. Second to his designs on his pretty cousin, Mary Ellen, Charles has travelled to the island in the hope of locating a sunken galleon of the Spanish Armada. This is the reason for his walk to the cove—and while climbing the hill home after some unprofitable skinny-dipping near a reef he believes is the most likely location of the wreck, he sees a group of men milling about on the shore. Charles fears that the men are dangerous and raises the alarm. A moment later he is standing on the promontory with Rorie and Gordon (the latter already drunk and with a bottle under his arm) looking down at a schooner rounding the point and heading straight towards a vast storm that has appeared on the horizon and is rapidly bearing down on the island. It takes Charles a few moments to make sense of the scene before him. At last he realises that the men are the Spanish treasure-seekers rumoured to be in the area. Like himself, they were after the galleon, and must have anchored around the point before spotting the storm and deciding to “beat out to sea” in an attempt to put a safe distance between their ship and the coast. Being foreigners, they do not know that they are now in peril. Already the Merry Men are rolling in irresistably against the forward progress of the doomed ship. “How pleasant it is,” wrote Lucretius, “to gaze from a headland at another’s tribulation upon a high sea.” And Gordon, in the next phase of his madness, becomes the living embodiment of this sentiment as, with occasional deep draughts of the bottle, he, “pores and gloats like a connoisseur” upon the unfolding disaster, crying, “the Merry Men’ll dance bonny!” and even lying down upon his belly and clutching excitedly at the heather. And so the three men look on, two in horror, one in noisy ecstasies of schadenfreude, as the schooner and its crew are utterly destroyed. It takes little more than a brief acquaintance with nineteenth century literature to know that moral profligacy is not left to its own devices for very long. And indeed, at daybreak, when the storm has abated but the sea is still running high, and while a hungover and wobbly-gaited Gordon is picking flotsam off the rocks under the watch of his nephew, a black man steps out from behind the wreck of the Christiana. There is an old superstition in Scotland that the devil appears to the damned as a black man and the sight of the stranger strikes Holy Dread into the heart of the uncle, who starts violently, and then scurries away on all fours up the slope. Charles, though a little taken aback, approaches the man whom he assumes is a second survivor of the Christiana (and perhaps a witness to his uncle’s crime) and while the two fail to find a common language, it is soon established through an exchange of signs and gestures that the he came ashore on the schooner in search of the galleon but was then left behind by his companions in their haste to outpace the storm. Meanwhile Gordon, having descended entirely into lunacy, can by no means be persuaded to come down from his hilltop. Concerned for his wellbeing, his family eventually resort to force but the man is too nimble, and too adrenelized with fear, to be captured. A final stratagem supplies the rather comical closing scene of the story: The negro castaway (who by signs has been induced to help them) bounding in full pursuit of the shrieking madman. The idea is to exploit Gordon's fear of the black man as a means of getting him to safety; and to this end Rorie calls out directions in Gaelic “as to a dog herding sheep.” But the helpful stranger seems to have missed a vital element of the plan: Instead of returning to the house, the pair fly down the slope to the cove, to the wreck and grave and the scene of the uncle’s crime, where, first the uncle, then his pursuer, plunge into the water. The beach is steep. Neither men can swim and both are out of their depth at a bound. “The black,” recalls Charles, “rose once for a moment with a throttling cry; but the current had them.” A hapless sailor, a mad uncle, and the tragic misunderstanding that sends them both blundering into the sea. And so we close the book feeling satisfied that everything has been nicely squared away; even the romantic subplot, since Mary Ellen had only dithered over Charles' offer of marriage on the grounds that she needed to remain on the island to care for her ailing father. But a moment later we may also detect in ourselves an atom of doubt, a doubt as tiny the fullstop terminating the story, but also impossible to ignore. And this is because a supernatural explanation, while now unnecessary, nevertheless runs parallel to the rational one without contradicting it.
“Was it there?” the uncle had asked Rorie the moment his servant returned to the house with Charles, refering to the shadow of something that had, evidently, been following the skiff for some time, perhaps since the time of the murder. Recalling this, together with the uncle’s perfect candidacy for damnation (not only his crime but also his glee when watching the doomed ship, his callous disappointment when it is wrecked too far from the cove for him to be able to salvage anything of real worth, and, most signficantly of all, his open defiance of God in admitting that, during a storm, he is “wi’ the sea”—which, let us not forget—he identifies with the Devil) we may have reason to wonder again at that black man who seemed to step out of the sea behind the wreck of the Christiana, spoke in a strange tongue, and remained quietly and insistently cooperative until at last, intentionally or otherwise, he had harried Gordon into the sea and plunged in after him. In another tale by Stevenson, a minister besieged by evil forces gives a sermon on 1 Peter 5:8: "The devil as a roaring lion." For a moment, before the infinitely more probable rational explanation reasserts itself, that “throttling cry” given by the black man before he drowned may almost seem a cry not of fear but of rage and triumph. In this story, as in a Gestalt illlusion, two opposed interpretations coexist with perfect ambivalence but without any contradiction. |