Roy Norton

“ Too late? Who knows how the living voice carries beyond the veil that divides us from immortality? To Captain Paul came the conviction that his words had been heard, understood and weighed. And that all the old love had survived and in the greater understanding pity and forgiveness had cleansed the blots from the long smirched page.
The face of his dead son appeared to take on the gentle and benignant cast of consummate peace and rest. The lips, somehow, lost the distortion of terror and death, and the dead mouth gently smiled. ”

“ He did not hear the clumping of sea boots or the slipping of heavily laden baskets on the deck above his head. No bump of the landing boat alongside, as the slow waves thrust it against the hull, was audible to him.
All that he could think of was this tragedy of hope, this end of great dreams, this death of future. He recalled the glories of that dawn when a woman whom he had loved as only men of his kind can love, had lifted wearied eyes to his as he took into his trembling hands the woolen blankets that held his first and only born. ”

“ It was the immemorial custom that the head of the steps belonged to those, be they men or women, who met their own men folk returning from the sea. Sometimes, after great disasters, the market bells had been hushed and women and children thronged therein, sobbing, hoping until the last, going meekly and slowly away with covered heads when hope was done. Theirs was palpable tragedy, but it was scarcely greater than that which was hidden in Captain Paul's heart as he climbed upward to face his son. ”

“ She braided trawl nets faster than anyone along that entire sweep of beach where so many had gained rapidity and deftness by long practice. But her scorn and defiance of all that rigid convention which binds and holds those who live by the trawls brought her into disrepute. And an angel, let alone the mother of a fatherless child, could scarcely have maintained an unsmirched reputation in such an environment after the evil bearers of bad rumor had begun their charge in full cry. ”

“ The swarming millions in London, whither they would almost instantly depart, must have fish.
When the Curlew blew in and reached for her buoy there was scarcely a half-score of the fleet ahead of her, and Captain Paul's rough old face relaxed somewhat from its habitual grimness in the knowledge that his haul would be landed before the possibility of a glut and a break in price. The baskets that had been from the iced bunkers in the Curlew's hold were so heavily laden with turbot, brill, and ray-fans, all “top-price” fish, that this should prove a noteworthy catch. ”

“ The “scruffer” he, whose duty it was to assist the tired crew to sort the fish into the baskets piled forward on the broad deck and help lower them into the huge rowboat that would convey them to the shallower waters of the inner harbor. The crew of the trawling ship, sometimes grimed and hollow-eyed from loss of sleep, would then clamber stiffly off into the boat, their great sea boots clumping awkwardly, to follow their catch, pathetically intent on the price it might bring—for the crews of the trawlers, save the cabin boy, work on shares. ”

“ It was the final hurt to one who as a boy had admired and loved him, and as a man had come to plead when in his strength he would have pled to no other being on earth. Always thereafter, though the Marthy B. came first to port, no one waited for Captain Paul at the landing head.
Perhaps Captain Paul missed the sight of that imploring face, the willing hand, the welcome to port. But if so, his demeanor was unchanged. Always, as before, as his forbears for long generations had done, he came and went, stodgily, intent on the market alone. ”

“ He skippers his own boat, he do. My dad says he's finest sailor in the world.”
“Paul? Paul what?”
“Paul Hurd Norcott. Hurd don't really belong because that was my mother's name. What's your name?”
And the boy could not understand why, and was momentarily hurt, when the white-headed old man with the roll of the seas in his legs suddenly turned and walked away. Even adamant can melt. High and stern cliffs must yield to the persistent batterings of a sea. Each resists to the very last.
It was in a morning of tempestuous March when the trawler fleet jostled out of the harbor on a high tide. ”

“ Nearly two hundred vessels there were with red and numbered mains'ls creaking aloft, with mizzens taut and jibs bellied, with block and tackle whining, all behaving as if glad to be away in quest of those grounds where swells run deep and each has combat or adventure of its own. ”

“ It do be fearsome hard luck to lose a trawl gear what be wuth more as eighty quid in these times. Poor blokes!”
The storm climbed upward to its very apex, in which every stay and piece of rigging whined and thrummed in the wind. Then, less quickly than it came, it died away, leaving but a good “pulling wind.” Again Captain Paul bellowed orders, the huge red mainsail creaked upward, and the Curlew shot her trawl. ”

“ The prodigious and simple superstitions of those men of the seas, the innate and inherited religion that underlies them all, exaggerated the terror and tragedy of a father's curse into something of appalling magnitude. ”

“ Captain Paul stepped over unfalteringly, and standing below in the rocking boat, with a hand clutching the ship's strake said to the scruffer, “Joe, keep a weather eye on that galley stove. Some of the brick is cracked and if them coals was to fall through, you might have a fire.”
He sat down upon a thwart, his weight appreciably adding to the boat's lack of trim, shifted to better it, and said, “Lay into it, boys. The market's not out here. It's over there—on the pier. What's the good of fish that ain't sold? ”

“ Here she comes!”
“Douse that tops'l there!” a voice bellowed, as the first blast of a squall increased, and men ran sweating here and there, the skipper himself hauling as sturdily as the others, and the cabin boy impressed into service. At last she lay under nothing more than a double reefed mains'l, her mizzen and a jib to hold her head into the wind, and the men found time to breathe.
“Croaker, be I?” growled the old man, wiping his damp forehead with the sleeve of his wet jersey. “And I'd be bettin' the Marthy B. wishes now her'd have had a croaker aboard, before her shot her trawl.” ”

“ They seem momentarily. paralyzed, these men of bodily action, into stone-like immobility. And then that aged veteran of the seas whose kindly face quivered with emotion and sympathy, laid a hand upon the stalwart, drooping shoulder beside him and said, “Willum, thee must aye forgive him. He be thy fayther, lad, and is sore hurt. He meant naught. It were because he was so suddint and powerful upset. He were on beam ends, lad, in a heavy sea, and by now is sorrier than sorrow herself for what said and didn't mean.” ”

“ And Skipper seems to forget we be fishermen workin' on shares. If us catch no fish, us do be workin' without a farden of pay. My eighth of the last catch wan't enough to buy my two kids new boots, what with the bad market, and all they Londing buyers blatherin' about the big catches brought in by they Grimsby and Lowestoft trawlers. ”