James B. Connolly

“ I should like to dance your children on my knee, Guy, and lull the songs of the sea into their little ears. I've a fine collection by now, Guy—you've no idea—ringing chanties to get a ship under way, and roaring staves of the High Barbaree, ballads of the gale, and lullabies of west winds and summer nights. And your children, Guy, will grow up none the less brave gentlemen and fine ladies for the strengthening salt of the sea in their blood and the clearing whiff of the gale in their brains. ”

“ I've had that kind out on a trip with me, and I've seen them grow—actually grow to a bigger conception of things. All their lives they've been looking out of little windows on narrow streets, and suddenly they are brought out here and set face to face with one of the great works of the universe. On a black night I've seen them stand on the deck of this little vessel—no great big seven-hundred-foot ship, with her promenade rail sixty feet from the water; but on this little fisherman, where they have only to lean over the rail and trail their fingers in the ocean. And something comes to them. ”

“ One evening the skipper called the passenger on deck to view a sunset, and the passenger detached himself from the cook and his monologue on blueberries and went up, to discover that the skipper had an eye for color. It was the sea. More colors there than a man could name, coming and going on a surface that was lifting and falling to the most gentle swell, and smooth as oiled silk. ”

“ The glasses took the place of her sewing, and they were still to her eyes when a sharp "Auntie!" came to her ears. "Tention, auntie! Colors!" warned the voice. Lowering the glasses, Marie came obediently to attention.
The sun was cutting the edge of the sea. The last level light lay on the long, slow, swelling waters like a rolling, flaming carpet, and in that flaming path the gray war-ships bobbed to anchor; and on the quarter-deck of every ship a red-coated band was drawn up, and from the jack-staff of every ship an American ensign was slowly dropping down. ”

“ Inshore, they knew, the high surf was booming; and they made sail then, and for a while thought they could weather it; but when the whistling devils caught the rotten, age-eaten, untested canvas—whoosh! countless strips of dirty, rusty canvas were riding the clouded heavens like some unwashed witches.
By and by he caught an answering call
Tide and wind were taking her toward the beach, and Bowen, everybody, even the unimaginative viking in command, could picture that beach and the surf piling up on it. ”

“ Ye’ll never fish again, Martin Carr; ye’ll never haul trawl or row dory again, nor stand to a wheel, nor reef a sail. The best part of your life’s gone. Ye’re such a creature, Martin Carr, as men throw pennies to in the street. ”

“ Just to look at the young blue seas was life, and the soft salt air was a cure for whatever blue feeling a man might have had hooked into himself ashore.
A great morning. We passed two big salt fishermen bound in. From the Western Banks they were, or from Flemish Cap, half across the ocean, maybe; and the brown rocks of Cape Ann must have looked to them like mother's johnny-cake on the kitchen table that sunny morning. Swinging by like a pair of twins they went, flying both topsails the pair of them, but neither of them much more than flushing their scuppers to the fine fresh breeze. ”

“ What I want to say now is that the submarine fight had an enjoyable side to it, but as for that night run of our troop-ships in gale and sea—a big ship just ahead, a big ship just behind, big high-bowed ships plunging down at fourteen knots an hour from roaring waters in the dark—there was no fun in that!
Of the scores of devices the fleet used to beat the U-boats on that run across, a man can say nothing here. But to get back: our naval officer stuck to his bridge until one most beautiful morning he took his ship into a most beautiful port on a most beautiful shore. ”

“ The sluicing of the tide outside the old planks was there, although now much quieter; the stars were yet shining through the hatchway, though certainly more dimly; and the embers, dying a minute back, were dead altogether now. But the breathing of Tammie in the bunk—that was there. "Listen—yes he was sleeping fine. The poor lad, poor Tammie—the poor, poor little Costello childer. To all poor childer may the Lord be good!"
The pipe fell from the murmuring lips, the shaggy head settled into the peak of the hooker, and this fisherman of Costla was off to the sleep he had that day well earned. ”

“ Under the yellow and smoky light of the torches I could see nothing but mackerel or the insides of mackerel in the air. Keelers, deck, rail, our hands, faces, boots and oilskins were sticky with the blood and gurry. At top speed we raced like that through the night. Once in a while a man would drop his knife or snap off his gibbing mitt, rinse his hand in the brine barrel by his side, slap his hand across the hoops, and condemn the luck of a split finger or a thumb with a fish-bone in it. ”

“ I said when the lemonades had come. "There she was, sort of standing on one foot like she wanted to talk to somebody, and I know that somebody wasn't me, when 'Marguerite!' a voice called—like that—and whing! she was gone, with sighs soft as the bubbles in the wake of a torpedo to mark her going."
"Marguerite?" says the young fellow, coming wonderfully back to life. "What did she look like?"
"Queen o' the Movies—nothing less for looks, but with a touch o' home and mother and little babies clinging to her neck."
"That's Marguerite! Why didn't you call me?" he says. ”

“ The lawyer stood on the ballast and watched the fierce surf as it broke over the rocks that edged the little bay. He could not quite see the full glory of the surf of the greater bay outside, the bay they were soon to attempt to cross, but he saw enough to get a faint idea of what it might be like, and as he pondered over the prospect he began to experience his first slight sinking of the heart since he left Galway, and almost to wish that to somebody else had fallen what now promised to be a hazardous undertaking. ”

“ And for a woman that warn’t worth Dan Spring’s little finger. That’s the truth, George Hoodley. But if you’d been brought up different, if you’d studied to understand the good side of people, instead of the other side, and how to get the best of them and to make money out of them and save it, you both might’ve come safe out of it. But you warn’t that kind. ’Twarn’t in your blood, nor in none of your people. Wrong’s wrong— I got nothing to say about that—but human nature’s human nature. Why should you expect, George Hoodley, to get the fine things in life? Why warn’t you content with money? ”

“ Down, down, down she went—the long green finger on the broad-faced gauge walking around at a fine clip. Dropping so—on an even keel, by the way—she gave out no sense of action such as a man gets on an aeroplane. Flying around in the air, you see what's doing every second. If anything happens, you know you will see it coming, and—perhaps—going: your eyes, ears, brains, and nerves prove things to you.
But action in a submarine lies largely in a man's imagination, unless he be the periscope man; and even there, when she is completely submerged, he sees no more than the others. ”

“ And the little Henriette rolled down, and the solid water began to come aboard; and by and by a buoy-keg went floating off her house and overboard. A fine half-barrel of a buoy-keg it was, too, neatly black and white painted, smooth and tight as a drum; a beauty of a buoy, which later, on the end of a fifty-fathom warp, ought rightly to be towing after a fat swordfish; but now she was dancing to no purpose whatever atop of the swirling seas astern. We thought the skipper would put back after it, but not so. "To the devil with it! Buy a new one—and next time you'll learn to lash it." ”

“ Alone at sea before the dawn—it is a wonderful hour for a man to cross-question himself, Simon; and not many nights of late years that I haven't seen the first light of dawn creeping up over the edge of the ocean. You marry Mary Snow, Simon. ”

“ Lavis let his eyes roam above and about him. Andie observed the direction of his gaze. "A wonderful sight, aren't it?" he commented. "What wi' so many polished rods an' shafts all whity-gray, an' all them many beams an' bars so beautiful green an' red-painted!"
Lavis, still interested in the wonderful machinery, felt the deck lifted the least bit under him. It was as if the ship had risen to a rolling head sea. He laid hold of a handy stanchion to steady himself, but he saw Andie, unsupported, go sliding easily, gently, irresistibly to the bulkhead behind them. ”

“ Did you ever, when you were walking along the street, hear a child utter some foul word that he probably no more knew the meaning of than if 'twas a bit of some foreign language? Yes, of course. We all have; and never heard but what we felt—not angry, altogether, but grieved and shocked to think of what an upbringing that child was getting. Well, that was something like the way I felt to-night when up on deck young Russell, because some little thing went wrong, had to curse and swear and blaspheme as he did. ”

“ The skipper rose on his toes—with that long right arm raised above and behind his head, he looked seven feet tall—and waited. We feared he was waiting too long, when whing!—a backward swoop of the arm, a downward thrust of the pole, and "Gottim!" said the cook, and tossed the bight of the warp over the rail and calmly bent on a new warp for the skipper's pole. The skipper took a backward look at the flying fish; then quickly, but with never a hurry, rigged a fresh iron and line to his pole. After a man has ironed a few thousand swordfish it is probably hard to get excited over one more. ”

“ I waited—one, two, three days, and then I went also—to Savannah, where I saw the Bess, but so altered that it needed a lifetime's intimacy to hail her in the stream. Her spars had been sent down and her name was now the Triton, and to her bow and stern was clamped the false work which left her with no more outward grace than any clumsy coaster; and by these signs I knew that Mr. Villard of Villard Manor would once more disappear and that Captain Blaise would soon again be sailing the Dancing Bess overseas. ”

“ In ten fathoms of water, say, with a big sea and strong tide running, there were rip waters to send the foam mast-high, to catch the vessel up and spin{254} her about as if she were a top such as boys whip around in spring-time. Small wonder fishermen dread shoal water on Georges in a breeze; small wonder that the smart trawlers hustle dories in and bear off in a hurry when they find themselves in less than twenty-five fathoms and a breeze making; small wonder that even the hand-liners quite often jeopardize their chances for a good trip and up anchor and away when it looks too bad. ”

“ Certainly they were making that boat hop along! Ten good men, with every man a long, broad blade, and double banked, so that every man might encourage his mate and be himself spurred on by desperate effort. Legs, arms, shoulders, back, all went into it and their wake alive with smoke and fire to tell them they were moving! To be in that?––The middle of a black night on the Atlantic was this, and the big seine-heaver was throwing the seine in great armfuls. And Hurd and Parsons in the little dory tossing behind and gamely trying to keep up! ”

“ It is something to know that, no matter what else happens, there are hot meals waiting a man three times a day, and a dry change of clothing, and a dry hammock to turn into nights. Even on deck duty in bad weather a man can get into slicker, rubber boots, and rain-hat, and at the worst be almost comfortable.
Navy life is not meant to be a perpetual entertainment—not though they do hold regular smokers on the quarter-decks of the big ships. To lie for months off a tropic port waiting for something to happen—that is not exhilarating; and coaling ship, even with the band playing—that is no joy. ”

“ O my soul, there's a girl in Gloucester!"
He stopped to look over his shoulder at me. "Simon, boy, I mind the days when there was no stopping the songs in me. Rolling to my lips o' themselves they would come, like foam to the crests of high seas. The days of a man's youth, Simon! All I knew of a gale of wind was that it stirred the fancies in me. It's the most wonderful thing will ever happen you, Simon."
"What is, skipper?"
"Why, the loving a woman and she loving you, and you neither knowing why, nor maybe caring." [Pg 52]
"No woman loves me, skipper." ”

“ And the last passenger on this ship should be such as he, a strong man with the innocence of the child." He turned from the older to the younger man. "You are creative in thought, powerful, direct, tireless in action, Mr. Cadogan. Every new experience still comes to you with the dew of the morning on it. You should die hard, with your eyes open to the last. ”

“ The morning after the race I was eating breakfast at home and I could not remember when I enjoyed a meal like that one. I had had a fine long sleep and the sleep that comes to a man after he’s been through a long and exciting experience does make him feel like a world-beater. I felt that I could go out and about leap the length of a seine-boat or rip up a plank sidewalk. ”