James B. Connolly

“ Through this play of fire the Johnnie leaped with great bounds. She boiled her way, and astern she left a wake in which the seine-boat was rearing and diving with a fine little independent trail of its own.
Two men forward––the watch––were leaning over the windlass and peering into the night. They were there for whatever they might see, but particularly were they looking for the double white light of Five Fathom Bank lightship. The skipper was at the wheel. ”

“ And so the idea in everybody’s mind that day was to make this test as nearly fair as could be and see who had the fastest and most weatherly boat in the fleet. There were men to the wheel that day who could handle big fishermen as if they were cat-boats, who would have dared and did, later, dare to sail their vessels as close to a mark in this sea as men sail a twenty-foot knockabout in the smoothest of waters inshore––only with the fishermen a slip-up meant the loss of a vessel, maybe other vessels too, and twenty-five or fifty lives perhaps. ”

“ Hogan, a fleshy man for a fisherman, who minded his way and remained unmoved at the compliments paid his vessel, one of the prize beauties of the fleet. The Marguerite, Charley Falvey, a dog at seining, always among the high-liners, who got more fun out of a summer’s seining than most men ever got out of yachting, who bought all the latest inventions in gear as fast as they came out and who had a dainty way of getting fish. The Marguerite dipped her bow as she passed, while her clever skipper nodded along the line. ”

“ Well, good-luck to you, old girl, and your skipper, whoever he is, and I guess if your canvas 103 stays on you’ll be to anchor before a great while, for you’re making steamboat time. Go it, old girl, and your little baby on behind, go it! There ain’t nothing short of an ocean liner could get you now. Go it! a sail or two don’t matter––if it’s a good mackerel season I s’pose the owners don’t mind if you blow away a few sails. Go it, God bless you! Go it! you’re the lads can sail a vessel, you fishermen of Gloucester. ”

“ I tell you she knows men. She don’t care whether a man is rich or poor, tall or short, thin or fat, so long as she likes him. And I tell you she loves Maurice––as well as she can love––and she’s not a good enough woman––there it is. And they’re all saying you’re likely to marry Withrow. Wait now. Withrow, I’m telling you, isn’t fit to wash the gurry off Maurice’s jack-boots. I’m a careless man, Miss Foster, and in my life I’ve done things I wish now I hadn’t, but I draw the line above the head of a man like Withrow. Whatever I am, I’m too good to be company for Fred Withrow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When he got through you could hear them all breathing––men and women both, like people who had just run a race. “Two hundred and odd men sailing out of Gloucester,” he said, “went down that night. There weren’t too many came safe out of that blow. The father of this boy here was lost––the Mary Buckley warn’t it, Joe?––named for your mother?”
“And my father, too, was lost soon after,” said Minnie Arkell, and the glance she gave me melted a lot of prejudice I had felt for her. That was the good human side to her.
“No better man ever sailed out of Gloucester, Mrs. Miner,” said Clancy. ”

“ Day and night in and day and night out and driving all the time is the way a fisherman wants it. Any sort of racing machine could be built to stand a little hard going for a while. But that wouldn’t be living through a long hard winter’s gale on the Banks––one of those blows where wind and sea––and in shoal water at that––have a chance to do their worst. Fishermen are built for that sort of work and on their sea-worthiness depends not only the fortunes of owners but the lives of men––of real men––and the happiness and comfort of wives and children ashore. ”

“ Clancy noticed him. “There’s a man for you, Joey. Think what it meant to a young skipper with a new vessel––the loss of that school and the seine on top of it the very first day he struck fish. If we’d got that, he might have been the first vessel 92 of the year into the New York market. And think of the price the first fish fetch!––and the honor of it––and he breaking his heart to make a reputation this year. And yet not a yip out of him––not a cranky word to one of the gang all night. A great man I call him––and a fisherman.” ”

“ The heavy tan of his face and the grip of his jaw would spoil almost anybody for a beauty man, I suppose, but he had fine eyes and his mouth was all right, and he had a head that you’d like to stand off one side and look at, with hair that seemed to lift and wave with every breath of wind, and when he smiled you felt somehow that he’d saved that particular smile for you. ”

“ I tried to look at Maurice like my oldest brother used to look at me sometimes when he tried to make me feel that I was a very green kid indeed, and said, “Well, if she’s the kind to care for a man like Withrow, all I’ve got to say is that she’ll deserve all she’ll get. He’s no good.”
“That may be, but how’s she to know? I know, you know, and half the men in Gloucester know that he’s rotten; but take a woman who only sees him at his best and when he’s watching out––how’s she to know?” ”

“ Coming on to dark that night a gig put off from the schooner-yacht and rowed over to us. On the way she was hailed and passed a few words with a steam-yacht anchored in between. The man in the stern of the gig was not satisfied until he had been rowed three times around the Johnnie. When he had looked his fill he came alongside.
He mistook Clancy for the skipper. I suppose he couldn’t imagine a man of Clancy’s figure and bearing to be an ordinary hand on a fisherman. So to Clancy he said, “Captain, you’ve got a wonderful vessel here. Put a single stick in her and she’ll beat the world.” ”

“ Only the cook, just done with mixing bread, seemed to have ever done a lick of work in his life, and he was now standing by the 125 galley fire rolling the dough off his fingers. The cook on a fisherman is always a busy man.
Down the companionway and into the thick of this dropped Clancy, oiled up and all ready to go aloft. To the mast-head of a vessel, even on an April night in southern waters, it is cold enough, especially when, like a seiner, she is nearly always by the wind; and Clancy was wrapped up. “I think,” said Clancy, as his boot-heels hit the floor, “I’ll have a mug-up.” ”

“ Her hull was as long as ours, but she didn’t begin to be sparred as we were. We must have had ten feet on her main-boom and ten feet more bowsprit outboard, and yet under her four lower sails she seemed to be making heavy going of it. It’s a good yacht that can hold a fisherman in a breeze and a sea-way. We beat this one about as bad as we beat the blue-fisherman. As we went by we tried to look as though we had beaten so many vessels that we’d lost all interest in racing, and at the same time we were all dancing on our toes to think what a vessel we had under us. ”

“ The discipline of a yacht, so far as I know it, is baby play to what they have on a good fisherman. The discipline aboard a warship is nothing to that aboard a fisherman, like Captain Blake’s vessel say, when there is anything to be done. Fishermen, it’s true, don’t have to touch their caps and say, ‘Very good, sir,’ to a man who may be no more of a real man than themselves. On your yacht I suppose you’d discharge a man who didn’t do what he was told, and on a warship he would be sent to the brig, I suppose. ”

“ Scales flew. We found some next morning glued to the mast-head. I never can get some people to believe that it is so––mackerel scales to the mast-head.
“He-yew!” called the skipper, “Oy-hoo!” hollered the halyards gang, “Hi-o!” sung out Clancy and Parsons cheerily at the rail. “Fine fat fish,” commented the men in the seine-boat, the only men who had time to draw an extra breath.
Blazing torches were all around us. Arms worked up and down, big boots stamped, while inboard and out swung the dip-net, and onto the deck flopped the mackerel. “Drive her!” called the skipper, and “He-yew!” ”

“ All this time we in the dory were coming on behind, Clancy and I having to beat their dory just as our boat had to beat their boat. And we were driving, too, you may be sure. Clancy was making his oars bend like whips. “Blast ’em! There’s no stiffness to ’em,” he was complaining. And then, “Sock it to her,” he would call out to our fellows in the seine-boat. “We’ve got the porgy crew licked––that’s the stuff,” came from the skipper. From on top of the seine he was watching the fish, watching the gang, watching the other boats, watching us in the dory––watching everything. ”

“ But as Clancy used to say, after he’d left you, and you had time to think it over, you’d see where here and there his story wasn’t well-calked. My own idea was that he wanted a reputation so that he could pose as a devil of a fellow with certain people ashore. It is easy enough to see that even a more careful man than Sam Hollis might take a chance for a smile from a woman like Minnie Arkell. ”

“ With everything on and tearing through the water like a torpedo-boat, one puff rolled her down till she filled herself chock up between the house and rail, but she kept right on going. Some vessels can’t sail at all with decks under, but the Johnnie never stopped. “She’s all right, this one,” said everybody then. A second later she took a slap of it over her bow, nearly smothering the cook, who had just come up to dump some potato parings over the rail. The way he came up coughing and spitting and then his dive for the companionway––everybody had to roar. ”

“ Eddie Parsons whispered in my ear.
The owner of the steam-yacht was trying to convince Tommie that yachting would be more in his line than fishing, but Tommie couldn’t see it.
“But why not?” he asked at last. “Why not, Mr. Clancy? Is it a matter of money? If it is, I’ll make that right. I pay ordinary hands twenty-five and thirty dollars a month and found, but I’ll pay you fifty––sixty––seventy dollars a month to go with me. I’m going to race this steamer this summer and I want a quartermaster––a man like you that can steer to a hair-line. Seventy dollars a month now––what do you say?” ”

“ We found her in a place run by her father, a sort of lodging house and “pub,” with herself serving behind the bar––a bold-looking young woman, not over-neat––and yet attractive in her way––good figure, regular features, and good color. “There, Joe, if you brought a girl like that home your mother would probably die of a broken heart, but there’s the kind that a foolish man like Dave Warner would sell his soul for.” Then Clancy explained while we were waiting for her to see us privately, “I don’t know if she’ll remember me, but I met her two or three times in Gloucester.” ”

“ I didn’t stop there. ‘You’re handsome, and you’re rich, Minnie Arkell; got a lot of life left in you yet, and go off travelling with people who get their names regularly in the Boston papers; but just the same, Minnie Arkell, there are women in jail not half so bad as you––women doing time who’ve done less mischief in the world than you have.’”
“Wasn’t that pretty rough, Tommie?”
“Rough? Lord, yes––but true, Joe, true. And if you’d only see poor Maurice lying there! Cried? I could’ve cried, Joe––not since my mother died did I come so near to it. ”

“ All the time they were driving the seine-boat to its limit, and the skipper was laying to the big steering oar, the longest of them all and taking a strong man to handle it properly––laying to it, swinging from the waist like a hammer-thrower, and the boat jumping to it. She came jumping right for us in the dory in a little while. It doesn’t take a good gang long to put a quarter mile of netting around a school of mackerel. ”

“ He did not pretend any longer now that he was not interested in Miss Foster, and from my cousin Nell I got occasional hints, most of which I confided to Clancy, who explained them as if they were so many parables.
“It’ll be all right,” said Clancy, “if only Minnie Arkell stands clear. I’m glad she’s away for the summer, but she’ll turn up in the fall. You’ll see her just before the race large as life, and some of her swell-dressed friends, and a yacht, I’ll bet.” ”

“ He asked Clancy what he thought, and Clancy said he didn’t know––time enough yet.
Maurice Blake himself dropped down then. He was looking better, and everybody was glad to see it. He’d quit drinking––that was certain; and now he was a picture of a man––not pretty, but strong-looking, with his eyes glowing and his skin flushing with the good blood inside him. He took 48 a seat on the lockers and began to whittle a block of soft pine into a model of a hull, and after a while, with a squint along the sheer of his little model, he asked if anybody had seen Tom O’Donnell or Wesley Marrs. ”

“ From the row of figures that were seen to be crowding gunnel and thwarts and hauling on the seine, one shadow straightened up beside the smoky torch and spoke. “Can’t be sure yet, Tommie, but things look all right so far. A fair-sized school if we don’t lose ’em.”
“Lord, don’t lose ’em, skipper, though I think you’ve got ’em fast enough now. Sounds natural to hear ’em flipping inside the corks, don’t it? Ought to be hurrying ’em up, skipper––it’s getting along in the night.”
Clancy, very well satisfied, stood away again and continued to sail triangles around boat and dory. ”

“ Reaching across from Half-Way Rock to Minot’s the fleet began to overhaul her. She, making bad weather of it along here, started to turn around. But, rolling to her top-rail, it was too much for them, and her captain kept her straight on for Boston. That was all right, but her action threw Ohlsen off. She was right in the Nannie O’s way, and to save the steamer and themselves from a collision and certain loss of life, Ohlsen had to jibe the Nannie O, and so suddenly that the Nannie O’s gaff broke under the strain. And that lost Ohlsen his chance for the race. ”

“ Do you remember the night of the Master Mariners’ ball––the night before we sailed on the Southern cruise? Well, that night this woman, she waits for Maurice and stops him on his way home. But she didn’t get him. He was up in the wind for a minute or two, but one spoke of the wheel and he found his head again. Again last June in Newport on a 279 warm summer’s night––flowers, music, wine––the cabin of a beautiful yacht––she asks him to wait over a day or two in Newport harbor. Does he? Does he? Not Maurice. With never a touch of the wheel, off he swings and drives for home. ”