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."
"Yes," said Clancy, "and she'd be a hell of a fine fisherman then,
wouldn't she?"
The rest of us had to roar at that. We at once pictured the Johnnie
rigged up as a sloop out on the Grand Banks, trawling or hand-lining,
with the crew trying to handle her in some of the winter gales that
struck in there. And a great chance she would have rigged as a sloop
and her one big sail, making a winter passage home eight or nine or
ten hundred miles, when as it was, with the sail split up to schooner
rig, men found it bad enough.
The master of the yacht had a message for our captain, he said, and
Clancy told him the skipper was below. There they talked for a while
and after the yachtsman had gone Maurice, inviting four or five of us
along, dressed up, called for the seine-boat, got in and was rowed
over to a steam-yacht that we now remembered had hailed the
schooner-yacht's gig. All brass and varnish and white paint and gold
she would be in the daytime, but now she was all lit up with electric
lights below and Japanese lanterns on deck.
When we came alongside, who should come to the gangway of the yacht
and welcome Maurice but Minnie Arkell--Mrs. Miner. She greeted all of
us for that matter--she never pretended not to see people--and invited
us all below for refreshments. There was a good lay-out there and we
pitched into it. Seiners are great people at table or in a bunk. They
can turn to and eat, or turn in and sleep any minute, day or night. So
now we turned to. Clancy did great things to the wine. Generally he
took whiskey, but he did not object to good wine now and then. He and
one fellow in a blue coat, white duck trousers, and a blue cap that
never left his head, had a great chat.
"I callate that if he didn't have that cap with the button on front
nobody'd know he was a real yachtsman, would they?" 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?"
"Come now, my good man, what do you say?" Clancy got that off without
so much as a smile. "But you couldn't make it seventy-five now, could
you? No, I didn't mean that quite, though I've been out the dock in
Gloucester of a Saturday noon and back again to the dock of a Tuesday
noon--three days--and shared two hundred dollars--not as skipper, mind
you, but just as hand. There now, I hope you're not going to get
angry. Hadn't we better have another little touch? But I can see
myself in a suit of white duck, touching my cap, and saying, 'Aye,
aye, sir,' to some slob--no reference to you, mind you--but some slob
in a uniform that's got a yacht, not because he loves the sea, but
because he wants to butt in somewhere--who lives aboard his yacht just
the same as he does in his house ashore--electric bells, baths,
servants, barber and all--and hugs the shore so close that he gets the
morning paper as regularly as when he's at home. When that kind go
yachting all they miss are the tables on the lawn and the automobiles
going by the door. They even have canary-birds--some of them--in
cages. Yes, and wouldn't be caught twenty miles off shore--no, not
even in a summer's breeze for--And where would he be in a winter's
gale? I can see myself rowing a gig with somebody like that in the
stern giving orders and fooling--well, some simple-minded women folks,
maybe, who know as much of the sea as they do of the next world--most
of them--fooling them into believing that he's a devil--yes, a clean
devil on the water. Seventy a month for that?--couldn't you make it
seventy-five?"
"You don't mean to say that----"
"Yes," said Clancy, "I do. I'd rather stick to fishing than--but
here's a shoot and let's call the quartermaster's job off."
Minnie Arkell chimed in here. "A real fisherman, you must remember,
Mr. Keith, doesn't care much for yachting because--leaving out the
question of wages, for he does make more at fishing--he can remain a
fisherman and yet be independent."
"You mean they don't have to take orders as if they were on a yacht,
Mrs. Miner?"
"No, no--don't make any mistake there. 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. On
a fisherman he'd be put ashore. On a fisherman they not only obey
orders, but they carry them out on the jump. And why? Because they've
always done it. Why, deep-sea fishermen are always getting into places
where only the best of seamanship can save them, and they very early
get in the way of doing things up quick and right. When a Gloucester
skipper orders in the sail, say in a gale of wind, and more than apt
to be in the middle of the night--you don't see men trying to see how
long it will take them to get into oilskins--or filling another pipe
before they climb on deck. No, sir--the first man out on the bowsprit,
if it's the jib to come in--or out on the foot-ropes, if it's the
mainsail to be tied up--he's the man that will have a right to hold
his head high next day aboard that vessel. And so the crew of a
fisherman jump to their work--if they didn't there'd be a lot more of
them lost than there are."
"Dear me," said Mr. Keith, "that never occurred to me before. But how
is it, Mrs. Miner, that you have it down so fine?"
"My father was a Gloucester skipper, and since I was that high"--she
put her hand on a level with her knee--"I've been listening to
fishermen. And yachting life does tend to spoil a fisherman," she went
on to explain. "After a summer of yachting a fisherman will begin to
think that a winter of fishing is going to be a serious thing." She
was warmed up then and went on talking at a great rate. And listening
to her I could understand better why men took to her. She had warm
blood in her. If it were not for her weakness to be admired by men,
she would have been a great woman. "And they get so, that what seems
extraordinary work to you is only an every-day matter to them. Do you
remember that last schooner-yacht race across the Atlantic?--when two
or three reporters went along, and after they got back wrote all kinds
of stories of what a desperate trip it was--how rough it was and
dangerous! Well, that time there were three or four Gloucestermen
making the run to Iceland. Now, they were not as big as the racing
yachts and they were loaded down with all the stores for a long salt
trip--their holds full of salt, for one thing--and yet they made about
as good time to Iceland as that yachtsman made to Queenstown. And they
weren't driving their vessels either--they don't drive on the way out.
It's only coming home that they try to make passages. Now, they must
have got the same weather and yet nobody ever heard them in their
letters home report a word of bad weather, or ever afterward, either.
And yet--but were you to Iceland that time, Maurice?"
"No," said the skipper, "but you were, Tommie?"
"Yes," answered Clancy, "in the Lucy Foster. We made Rik-ie-vik inside
of fourteen days, carrying both tops'ls all the way. Wesley--Wesley
Marrs--wasn't hurrying her, of course. As Mrs. Miner says, the vessels
going to the east'ard don't hurry, except now and then when two of
them with records get together. And the Lucy was logy, of course, with
the three hundred and odd hogsheads of salt and other stuff in her.
If we'd been driving her going to Iceland that time we'd have had the
stays'l and balloon to her--and she'd have gone right along with them,
too."
Mrs. Miner looked around at her yachting friends to see if they were
getting all that.
"There was one day that passage it blew a bit," exclaimed Clancy. "And
that was the day we thought we saw a fellow to the east'ard. We had
men by the halyards all that day with splitting knives."
"Why?" asked Keith.
"Why, to cut before she could capsize."
"Oh!" said Keith and said it with a little click.
"But that's nothing. I've seen the gang with Tom O'Donnell standing
watch by the halyards for days with axes when he was making a
passage."
Minnie Arkell filled another glass of champagne for Clancy, and Clancy
didn't give the fizz too much time to melt away either.
"These men are the real things," she said, but Clancy, for fear we
were getting too much credit, broke in, "Not us seiners. It's the
winter fishermen--trawlers and hand-liners--that are the real things.
Of course, we lose men now and then seining, but it's in winter up on
the shoal water on the Banks that--there's where you have some seas
to buck against," and he went on to tell of a battle with a gale on a
winter's night on the Grand Banks. Clancy could tell a story as well
as anybody I ever met. He could make the blood jump to your heart, or
the tears to your eyes--or he could chill you till the blood froze.
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.
She flushed up. "Thank you, Tommie, for that, though I know he was a
reckless man." And, she might have added, he left some of his
recklessness in the blood of the Arkells.
The skipper told them a lot about sea life that night. Some of the
stories he told, though long known in Gloucester, they took to be
yarns at first. They could not believe that men went through such
things and lived. And then the skipper had such an easy way of telling
them. After a man has been through a lot of unusual things--had them
years behind him and almost forgotten them--I suppose they don't
surprise him any more.
The skipper looked well that night. When he warmed up and his eyes
took on a fresh shine and his mouth softened like a woman's, I tell
you he was a winner. I could not help comparing him with the
steam-yacht owner, who was a good-looking man, too, but in a different
way. Both of them, to look at, were of the same size. Both had their
clothes made by tailors who knew their business and took pains with
the fitting, though it was easy to fit men like Clancy and the
skipper, such fine level shoulders and flat broad backs they had. Now
the skipper, as I say, when he warmed up began to look something like
what he ought--like he did when walking the quarter and the vessel
going out to sea. Only then it would be in a blue flannel shirt open
at the throat and in jack-boots. But now, in the cabin of that yacht,
dressed as he was in black clothes like anybody else and in
good-fitting shoes, you had to take a second look at him to get his
measure. The yachtsman thought that he and the skipper were of about
the same size, and barring that the skipper's shoulders were a shade
wider there wasn't so much difference to look at. But there was a
difference, just the same. The yachtsman weighed a hundred and
seventy-five pounds. He asked what Maurice weighed. "Oh, about the
same," said Maurice. But I and Clancy knew that he weighed a hundred
and ninety-five, and Minnie Arkell, who knew too, finally had to tell
it, and then they all took another look at the two men and could see
where the difference lay. There was no padding to Maurice, and when
you put your hand where his shoulders and back muscles ought to be you
found something there.
When we were leaving that night, Mrs. Miner stopped Maurice on the
gangway to say, "And when they have the fishermen's race this fall,
you must sail the Johnnie Duncan, Maurice, as you've never sailed a
vessel yet. With you on the quarter and Clancy to the wheel she ought
to do great things."
"Oh, we'll race her as well as we know how if we're around, but Tom
O'Donnell and Wesley Marrs and Tommie Ohlsen and Sam Hollis and the
rest--they'll have something to say about it, I'm afraid."
"What of it? You've got the vessel and you must win--I'll bet all the
loose money I have in the world on her. Remember I own a third of
her. Mr. Duncan sold me a third just before I left Gloucester."
That was a surprise to us--that Mrs. Miner owned a part of the Johnnie
Duncan. It set Clancy to figuring, and turning in that night, he
said--he was full of fizzy wine, but clear-headed enough--"Well, what
do you make of that? The Foster girl a third and Minnie Arkell a third
of this one. I'm just wise to it that it wasn't old Duncan alone that
wanted Maurice for skipper. Lord, Lord, down at the Delaware
Breakwater do you remember that when we heard that the Foster girl
owned a part of this one, I said, like the wise guy I thought I was,
'Ha, ha,' I said, 'so Miss Foster owns a third? That's it, eh?' And
now it's Minnie Arkell a third. Where does Withrow come in? And did
you hear her when she invited Maurice to the time they're going to
have on that same steam-yacht to-morrow night?--that was when she
whispered to him at the gangway, when we were leaving. She tried to
get him to promise to come, and at last he said he would if he was in
the harbor. 'Then be sure to be in the harbor--you're skipper and can
do as you please. Do come,' she said at the last, good and loud, 'and
tell them how to sail a vessel in heavy weather. They only play at it,
so do come and tell them.' And then in a low voice--'But I want you to
come for yourself.' That's what she says--'For yourself,' she
says--in a whisper almost. 'Take a run into the harbor to-morrow night
if you can, Maurice,' she says. O Lord, women--women--they don't know
a thing--no," and Clancy turned in.