The Conjured Poet ...Contd.

She was a part of a prosperous and distinguished family once, when her father captained a ship called ‘The Northern Mermaid’. Her younger brother, in a chivalrous profession of coin diving was the only member accompanying her on the beach after ‘the mermaid’ got wrecked on a protruding and invisible in dark rock a couple of miles off the coast. There started the penury of these two siblings. Diving earned the lad some coins and sun tan. The girl’s once nice voice gradually coarsened as she rang up every bar on the beach with some old sea songs, like the one in her father’s narration of ‘The Treasure Island’-

‘ Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!’,

as she tried raising her petite voice among the burly sea faring men yelling over their nauseating drinks. The two lived near the beach in a self erected shack as most of their neighbors did. The slum dwellers had among them Mr. Finn, the poor poet. He was one of the few resources of entertainment for the beach children, they mocked, mimed and when at their worst they even pelted him with sea shells and pebbles for his shabby looks and gaudy talks. The siblings, Mary and Tim being the immediate neighbors to Finn also enjoyed the show.
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There was a change the bars saw after Mary got Finn’s poem. Somewhere she identified herself with the winter rose. She would sing ‘The Adventure of a Winter Rose’ whenever she felt like mixed up between sanguinity and glumness. Her employers did not like the change as the atmosphere created by the song and the desire in the bars had a wide rift between them. She was allowed to sing that ‘the rose song’ in the mornings as then the bars used to be scantly occupied.

Finn passed by that inn one sunny morning and he got held around the entrance to catch something on air. The song caught hold of his attention and imagination like a wandering traveler lost while through some jungle starts following the aroma emanating from a musk deer, unconscious and that moment lets him not think of anything else. The atmosphere inside was heavy with the melancholy of the ‘rose song’. Suddenly it struck him, many thoughts flashed across his mind in a moment. He grew impatient to explore the face behind the voice. Mr. Finn advanced slowly in the direction where the voice came from. His gait became startled when he recognized the face. The somber beauty of Mary’s turned into an image of a girl whom he has always seen mocking him. He went up close and Mary’s violin almost touched him. The song lost its charm as Mary got petrified by the presence of the weirdo. Finn’s eyes had thousands of questions for her in that moment which took ages to pass by for Mary. Next moment he rushed out of the rickety place. He was not able to decide in what form he should react, once he feared wild mock that was always in waiting if he prompts the incidence to anybody, at the same time he felt like burgled. Even after his return to his shack the disturbance deceived the sleep out of him and he strolled out to the beach, half asleep.

Finn returned to the senses when his mind could not camouflage the hoots coming from his back. They were young lads who were laughing over Finn’s unmindful walk into the water unaware of the wetness of his ambience. He glanced back to have a look and his eyes got into tete-a-tete with Mary witnessing all from far in her return. It felt to him as if she was saying ‘you deserve this.’ Actually it was only Finn’s idea to apprehend her sight like that.

Mary too got disturbed with different feelings at different times. The thoughts roaming around her mind after her return were different from her reactions in the bar. She was quizzed over the very thought of the descent of Finn to such a place where his whereabouts were till now unheard of, that too in the morning. His entry, stay and exit, all had different essences of mysteries for her. His vibes expressed though his face came back to her again and again, until she had to attend to Tim’s bruises of the coin diving day.