The Seiners Part 23

"The thirst of Tantalus ain't a patch on the thirst I got. And this is something better than cold sparkling water. That's you all over, Tommie--joking at serious times," wailed Parsons.

"Is it as bad as that with you, Eddie? Well, let's forget Tantalus and drink instead to the able-est, handsom-est, fast-est vessel that ever weathered Eastern Point--to the Johnnie Duncan--and her skipper."

"And Mr. Duncan, Tommie--he's all right, too."

"Yes, of course, Mr. Duncan. And while we're at it, here's to the whole blessed gang of us--skipper, owner and crew--we're all corkers."

"Drive her, Tommie!" roared a dozen voices, and Tommie drove her for a good pint before he set the cup down again.

It was a great celebration altogether. Wherever one of our gang was there was an admiring crowd. n.o.body but us was listened to. And the questions we had to answer! And of course we were all willing enough to talk. We must have told the story of the race over about twenty times each. After a while, of course, some of our fellows, with all the entertaining and admiration that was handed out to them, had to put a touch or two to it. It was strong enough to tell the bare facts of that race, I thought, but one or two had to give their imaginations a chance. One man, a fisherman, one of those who had been on one of the excursion boats, and so didn't see the race at all, came along about two hours after the Duncan crew struck the Anchorage and listened to Andie Howe for a while. And going away it was he who said, "It must have been a race that. As near as I c'n make it out the Johnnie sailed most of that race keel up."

"Oh, don't go away mad," Andie called after him. "Come back and have a little touch of carte blanche--it's on the old man."

"I'll take it for him," came a voice. It was old Peter of Crow's Nest, who took his drink and asked for Clancy. Clancy was in the back part of the room, and I ran and got him. Peter led the way to the sidewalk.

"Tommie, go and get Maurice, if it ain't too late."

"What is it?"

"It's Minnie Arkell. Coming up the dock after the race she ran up and grabbed him and threw her arms about his neck. 'You're the man to sail a race in heavy weather,' she hollers, and a hundred people looking on. And there's half a dozen of those friends of hers and they're up to her house and now making ready for a wine celebration. Go and get him before it is too late."

x.x.xV

CLANCY LAYS DOWN THE LAW

Clancy started on the run and I after him. "We'll go to his boarding-house first, Joe, and if he's not there, to Minnie Arkell's."

He wasn't in his boarding-house, and we hurried out. On the sidewalk we almost ran into little Johnnie Duncan.

"Oh, Captain Clancy--or you, Joe Buckley--won't you tell me about the race? Grandpa was too busy to tell me, but went down the wharf with a lot of people to show them the Johnnie Duncan. They all left the office and told me to mind it. And my cousin Alice came in with Joe's cousin Nell. And I saw Captain Blake with some people and ran after him and I just caught up with him and they went off and left me. And then a little while ago he came back by himself and ran toward the dock and didn't even see me. And Captain Blake used to be so good to me!" Poor Johnnie was all but crying.

"Toward the dock? That's good," breathed Clancy. "Stay here, Johnnie, and we'll tell you about the race when we get back," and led the way to Mr. Duncan's office.

We found the skipper in the outer office, standing beside the bookkeeper's desk and looking out of the window next the slip. Hearing us coming he turned and then we saw that he held in his hands an open box with a string of beautiful pearls. Noticing us gaze at the pearls in surprise, he said, "Mr. Duncan gave me these for winning the race.

And I took them, thinking that somebody or other might like them."

"And don't she?" asked Clancy--it seemed to slip out of Tommie without his knowing it.

"I guess not," said Maurice. Only then did it flash on me what it all might mean.

"Did you try?" asked Clancy.

"Try! Yes, and was made a fool of. Oh, what's the use--what in h.e.l.l's the use?" He stood silent a moment. "I guess not," he said then--looked out the window again, and hove the whole string out of the open window and into the slip.

Clancy and myself both jumped to stop him, but we weren't quick enough. They were gone--the whole beautiful necklace. The skipper fixed his eyes on where they had struck the water. Then he turned and left the office. At the door he stopped and said: "I don't know--maybe I won't take the Johnnie next trip, and if I don't, Tommie, I hope you'll take her--Mr. Duncan will let you have her if you want. I hope you'll take her anyway, for you know what a vessel she is. You'll take care of her--" and went and left us.

Clancy swore to himself for a while. He hadn't quite done when the door of the rear office opened and Miss Foster herself came out. She greeted me sweetly--she always did--but was going out without paying any attention to Clancy. She looked pale--although perhaps I would not have noticed her paleness particularly only for what had just happened.

I was surprised to see then what Clancy did. Before she had got to the door he was beside her.

"Miss Foster, Miss Foster," he said, and his tone was so different from what I had ever heard from him before that I could hardly believe it. He was a big man, it must be remembered, and still on him were the double-banked oilskins and heavy jack-boots he wore through the race.

Also his face was flushed from the excitement of the day--the salt water was not yet dry on him and his eyes were s.h.i.+ning, s.h.i.+ning not alone with the glow of a man who had been lashed to a wheel steering a vessel in a gale--and, too, to victory--for hours, and not alone with the light that comes from two or three quarts of champagne--it was something more than that. Whatever it was it surprised me and held Alice Foster's attention.

"Mister Clancy," she said, and turned to him.

"Yes, Mister Clancy--or Tommie Clancy--or Captain Clancy, as it is at times--master of an odd vessel now and again--but Clancy all the time--just Clancy, good-for-nothing Clancy--hard drinker--reveller--night-owl--disturber of the peace--at best only a fisherman who'll by and by go out and get lost like thousands of the other fishermen before him--as a hundred every year do now and have three lines in the paper--name, age, birthplace, street and number of his boarding-house, and that will be the end of it. But that don't matter--Tommie Clancy, whatever he is, is a friend of Maurice Blake's. And he means to speak a word for Maurice.

"For a long time now, Miss Foster, Maurice has thought the world of you. He never told me--he never told anybody. But I know him. He waited a long time, I'm sure, before he even told himself--maybe even before he knew it himself. But I knew it--bunk-mates, watch-mates, dory-mates we've been. He's master of a fine vessel now and I'm one of his crew. He's gone ahead and I've stayed behind. Why? Because he's carried in his heart the picture of a girl he thought could be all a woman ought to be to a man. And that was well A man like Maurice needs that, and maybe--maybe--you're all that he thought and more maybe, Miss Foster. Wait--he had that picture before his eyes all the time. I hadn't any picture. Years ago, when I was Maurice's age, I might have had something like it, and now look at me. And why? Why, Miss Foster, you're a woman--could you guess? No? Think. What's running in a man's head, do you think, in the long winter nights when he's walking the deck, with the high heavens above and the great, black rolling sea around him? What's in his head when, trawls hauled and his fish aboard, when the danger and the hard work are mostly by, his vessel's going to the west'ard? What when he's an hour to rest and he's lying, smoking and thinking, in his bunk? What's been in Maurice's head and in his heart all the years he's loafed with the likes of me and yet never fell to my level? Anything he ever read anywhere, do you think, or was it a warm image that every time he came ash.o.r.e and was lucky enough to get a look at you he could see was true to the woman it stood for? When you had no more idea of it than what was going on at the North Pole he was watching you--and thinking of you. Always thinking of you, Miss Foster. He never thought he had a chance. I know him. Who asks a woman like you to share a fisherman's life? Is it a man like Maurice? Sometimes--maybe with the blood racing through him after a great race he might. A while ago he did, Miss Foster. And what gave him the courage?

"Listen to me now, Miss Foster, and say what you please afterward.

Maurice and I are friends. Friends. I've been with him on the bottom of a capsized dory when we both expected we'd hauled our last trawl--with the seas was.h.i.+ng over us and we both getting weak and him getting black in the face--and maybe I was, too. I told you this once before, but let me tell it again. 'Come and take the plug strap, Tommie,' he says to me. 'Come and take the plug strap.' Do you know what that means, Miss Foster?--and the seas sweeping over you and your whole body getting numb? And I've been with him four days and four nights--astray in the fog of the Western Banks in winter, and, for all we knew and believed, we were gone. In times like those men get to know each other, and I tell you, Miss Foster--" Clancy choked and stopped. "To-day he sailed a race the like of which was never sailed before. A dozen times he took the chance of himself going over the rail. And why? The better to keep an eye on things and help his vessel along? Yes. But why that? For that cup we've drowned a dozen times in wine to-day? He never looked twice at it when he got ash.o.r.e. He hasn't seen it since he handed it to me on the dock. The boys might like to look at it, he said. He's forgot he ever won it by now. He let us take it up to a rum-shop and drink out of it the same as if it was a tin-pail--the beautiful gold and silver cup--engraved. We used it for a growler for all Maurice cared for the value of it, and there's forty men walking the streets now that's got a list they got out of that cup. We might have lost it, battered each other's drunken heads in with it, and he wouldn't have said a dozen words about it. But there was a necklace of pearls, and he thought you'd like them. 'To you, Maurice, for winning the race,' says Mr. Duncan, 'for winning the race,' and hands Maurice the pearls--your own guardian, Miss Foster, and most crazy, he was that pleased. And that's what Maurice ran up to get when the race was over--there was something a girl might like, or thought so. And then what? On the way down a woman that I know--that you know--tried to hold him up. Kissed him before a hundred people--she knew you were waiting--she knew, trust a woman--and walked down part way with him, because you were looking. And he being a man, and weak, and only twenty-six--and the racing blood still running through him--maybe forgot himself for five minutes--not knowing you were within a mile. That doesn't excuse him? No, you're right, it don't. But he, poor boy, knowing nothing--what does a boy of twenty-six know?--knowing nothing--suspecting nothing--and yet, if he forgot himself, he never really forgot you. He hurries on to you and offers you the necklace that he risked his life to get. And you--what did you say?"

"What did I say? I told him that perhaps he knew somebody that he'd rather give it to before me----"

"Before you? There's a woman. You're not satisfied when a man fights all the devil in himself for you, but you must rub it into him while he's doing it. Maurice--or maybe you don't understand. You could say things like that to a dog--if a dog could understand--and he'd come back and lick your hand. Maurice has blood and fire in him. And here's a woman--whatever else she is--is warm-blooded too. She wants Maurice, and, by G.o.d, she'll get him if you keep on. 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 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. And why didn't he stay? Why, do you suppose? Didn't he tell you a while ago? Good G.o.d! Look here--you're no fool. Look at me--ten years ago I was another Maurice. And this woman--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. And on top of all that he's so carried away with this other woman--this same woman--and she caring more for Maurice's eyelash than Withrow's whole two hundred and ten pounds--Withrow is so carried away with her that he is ready to elope with her--elope with her! I know that--never mind how. Bring Withrow and me together, and I'll tell him--tell him, yes, and throw him through the door afterward if he denies it. This woman is enough of a woman to want Maurice--Maurice with nothing at all--before Withrow with all he's got and all he can get her or give her--and she's clever enough to come pretty near getting what she wants. And now, Miss Foster, suppose you think it over. I'm going to hunt up Maurice, though I'm not too sure we'll find him in a hurry. Good-by."

He swept his sou'wester wide to her and went out the door. I said good-by without looking at her. I was too ashamed--and went after Clancy. But I think she was crying to herself as I went out.

x.x.xVI

MAURICE BLAKE IS RECALLED

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. It was worth while to be alive, and everything tasted so good.

I had put away six fried eggs and about fourteen of those little slices of bacon before I even thought of slacking up (with my mother piling them up as fast as I lifted them off)--and maybe I wouldn't have slacked then only my cousin Nell came skipping in.

She kissed my mother half a dozen times, and danced around the room.

"Four vessels off the Johnnie Duncan's model have already been ordered. Four, auntie--four. There will be a fleet of them yet, you'll see. And how are you, Joe?"

"Fine," I said, and kept on eating.

Nell didn't like my not noticing how glad she was feeling, I suppose, for all at once, as I was about to sugar another cup of coffee, she ran her hands through my hair and yanked till I couldn't pretend any longer.

"There, now, with your mind off your stomach, perhaps you'll look up and converse when a lady deigns to notice you. How much money did Mr.

Withrow lose on the race?"

"I don't know, but it was a good pile; I know that."

"And how much did Mr. Duncan win?"