“We go mighty quick hereabouts when we do go,” was all he said to Harvey. “You think on that fer a spell, young feller. That was liquor.”
“After dinner it was calm enough to fish from the decks, — Penn and Uncle Salters were very zealous this time, — and the catch was large and large fish.
“Abishai has shorely took his luck with him,” said Salters. “The wind hain’t backed ner riz ner nothin’. How abaout the trawl? I despise superstition, anyway.”
Tom Platt insisted that they had much better haul the thing and make a new berth. But the cook said: “The luck iss in two pieces. You will find it so when you look. I know.” This so tickled Long Jack that he overbore Tom Platt and the two went out together.
Underrunning a trawl means pulling it in on one side of the dory, picking off the fish, rebaiting the hooks, and passing them back to the sea again — something like pinning and unpinning linen on a wash-line. It is a lengthy business and rather dangerous, for the long, sagging line may twitch a boat under in a flash. But when they heard, “And naow to thee, O Capting,” booming out of the fog, the crew of the We’re Here took heart. The dory swirled alongside well loaded, Tom Platt yelling for Manuel to act as relief-boat.
“The luck’s cut square in two pieces,” said Long Jack, forking in the fish, while Harvey stood open-mouthed at the skill with which the plunging dory was saved from destruction. “One half was jest punkins. Tom Platt wanted to haul her an’ ha’ done wid ut; but I said, “I’ll back the doctor that has the second sight, an’ the other half come up sagging full o’ big uns. Hurry, Man’nle, an’ bring’s a tub o’ bait. There’s luck afloat to-night.”
The fish bit at the newly baited hooks from which their brethren had just been taken, and Tom Platt and Long Jack moved methodically up and down the length of the trawl, the boat’s nose surging under the wet line of hooks, stripping the sea-cucumbers that they called pumpkins, slatting off the fresh-caught cod against the gunwale, rebaiting, and loading Manuel’s dory till dusk.
“I’ll take no risks,” said Disko then — ”not with him floatin’ around so near. Abishai won’t sink fer a week. Heave in the dories an’ we’ll dress daown after supper.”
That was a mighty dressing-down, attended by three or four blowing grampuses. It lasted till nine o’clock, and Disko was thrice heard to chuckle as Harvey pitched the split fish into the hold.
“Say, you’re haulin’ ahead dretful fast,” said Dan, when they ground the knives after the men had turned in. “There’s somethin’ of a sea to-night, an’ I hain’t heard you make no remarks on it.”
“Too busy,” Harvey replied, testing a blade’s edge. “Come to think of it, she is a high-kicker.”
The little schooner was gambolling all around her anchor among the silver-tipped waves. Backing with a start of affected surprise at the sight of the strained cable, she pounced on it like a kitten, while the spray of her descent burst through the hawse-holes with the report of a gun. Shaking her head, she would say: “Well, I’m sorry I can’t stay any longer with you. I’m going North,” and would sidle off, halting suddenly with a dramatic rattle of her rigging. “As I was just going to observe,” she would begin, as gravely as a drunken man addressing a lamp-post. The rest of the sentence (she acted her words in dumb-show, of course) was lost in a fit of the fidgets, when she behaved like a puppy chewing a string, a clumsy woman in a side-saddle, a hen with her head cut off, or a cow stung by a hornet, exactly as the whims of the sea took her.
“See her sayin’ her piece. She’s Patrick Henry naow,” said Dan.
She swung sideways on a roller, and gesticulated with her jib-boom from port to starboard.
“But-ez-fer me, give me liberty-er give me-death!”
Wop! She sat down in the moon-path on the water, courtesying with a flourish of pride impressive enough had not the wheel-gear sniggered mockingly in its box.
Harvey laughed aloud. “Why, it’s just as if she was alive,” he said.
“She’s as stiddy as a haouse an’ as dry as a herrin’,” said Dan enthusiastically, as he was slung across the deck in a batter of spray. “Fends ‘em off an’ fends ‘em off, an’ ‘Don’t ye come anigh me,’ she sez. Look at her — jest look at her! Sakes! You should see one o’ them toothpicks histin’ up her anchor on her spike outer fifteen-fathom water.”
“What’s a toothpick, Dan?”
“Them new haddockers an’ herrin’-boats. Fine’s a yacht forward, with yacht sterns to ‘em, an’ spike bowsprits, an’ a haouse that ‘u’d take our hold. I’ve heard that Burgess himself he made the models fer three or four of ‘em. Dad’s sot agin ‘em on account o’ their pitchin’ an’ joltin’, but there’s heaps o’ money in ‘em. Dad can find fish, but he ain’t no ways progressive — he don’t go with the march o’ the times. They’re chock-full o’ labour-savin’ jigs an’ sech all. ‘Ever seed the Elector o’ Gloucester? She’s a daisy, ef she is a toothpick.”
“What do they cost, Dan?”
“Hills o’ dollars. Fifteen thousand, p’haps; more, mebbe. There’s gold-leaf an’ everything you kin think of.” Then to himself, half under his breath, “Guess I’d call her Hattie S., too.”
CHAPTER V
That was the first of many talks with Dan, who told Harvey why he would transfer his dory’s name to the imaginary Burgess-modelled haddocker. Harvey heard a good deal about the real Hattie at Gloucester; saw a lock of her hair — which Dan, finding fair words of no avail, had “hooked” as she sat in front of him at school that winter — and a photograph. Hattie was about fourteen years old, with an awful contempt for boys, and had been trampling on Dan’s heart through the winter. All this was revealed under oath of solemn secrecy on moonlit decks, in the dead dark, or in choking fog; the whining wheel behind them, the climbing deck before, and without, the unresting, clamorous sea. Once, of course, as the boys came to know each other, there was a fight, which raged from bow to stern till Penn came up and separated them, but promised not to tell Disko, who thought fighting on watch rather worse than sleeping. Harvey was no match for Dan physically, but it says a great deal for his new training that he took his defeat and did not try to get even with his conqueror by underhand methods.
That was after he had been cured of a string of boils between his elbows and wrists, where the wet jersey and oilskins cut into the flesh. The salt water stung them unpleasantly, but when they were ripe Dan treated them with Disko’s razor, and assured Harvey that now he was a “blooded Banker”; the affliction of gurry-sores being the mark of the caste that claimed him.
Since he was a boy and very busy, he did not bother his head with too much thinking. He was exceedingly sorry for his mother, and often longed to see her and above all to tell her of this wonderful new life, and how brilliantly he was acquitting himself in it. Otherwise he preferred not to wonder too much how she was bearing the shock of his supposed death. But one day, as he stood on the foc’sle ladder, guying the cook, who had accused him and Dan of hooking fried pies, it occurred to him that this was a vast improvement on being snubbed by strangers in the smoking-room of a hired liner.
He was a recognized part of the scheme of things on the We’re Here; had his place at the table and among the bunks; and could hold his own in the long talks on stormy days, when the others were always ready to listen to what they called his “fairy-tales” of his life ashore. It did not take him more than two days and a quarter to feel that if he spoke of his own life — it seemed very far away — no one except Dan (and even Dan’s belief was sorely tried) credited him. So he invented a friend, a boy he had heard of, who drove a miniature four-pony drag in Toledo, Ohio, and ordered five suits of clothes at a time and led things called “germans” at parties where the oldest girl was not quite fifteen, but all the presents were solid silver. Salters protested that this kind of yarn was desperately wicked, if not indeed positively blasphemous, but he listened as greedily as the others; and their criticisms at the end gave Harvey entirely new notions
on “germans,” clothes, cigarettes with gold-leaf tips, rings, watches, scent, small dinner-parties, champagne, card-playing, and hotel accommodation. Little by little he changed his tone when speaking of his “friend,” whom Long Jack had christened “the Crazy Kid,” “the Gilt-edged Baby,” “the Suckin’ Vanderpoop,” and other pet names; and with his sea-booted feet cocked up on the table would even invent histories about silk pajamas and specially imported neckwear, to the “friend’s” discredit. Harvey was a very adaptable person, with a keen eye and ear for every face and tone about him.
Before long he knew where Disko kept the old greencrusted quadrant that they called the “hog-yoke” — under the bed-bag in his bunk. When he took the sun, and with the help of “The Old Farmer’s” almanac found the latitude, Harvey would jump down into the cabin and scratch the reckoning and date with a nail on the rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the chief engineer of the liner could have done no more, and no engineer of thirty years’ service could have assumed one half of the ancient-mariner air with which Harvey, first careful to spit over the side, made public the schooner’s position for that day, and then and not till then relieved Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in all these things.
The said “hog-yoke,” an Eldridge chart, the farming almanac, Blunt’s “Coast Pilot,” and Bowditch’s “Navigator” were all the weapons Disko needed to guide him, except the deep-sea lead that was his spare eye. Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt taught him first how to “fly the blue pigeon”; and, though his strength was not equal to continuous sounding in any sort of a sea, for calm weather with a seven-pound lead on shoal water Disko used him freely. As Dan said:
“‘Tain’t soundin’s dad wants. It’s samples. Grease her up good, Harve.” Harvey would tallow the cup at the end, and carefully bring the sand, shell, sludge, or whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and smelt it and gave judgment As has been said, when Disko thought of cod he thought as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and experience, moved the We’re Here from berth to berth, always with the fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen board.
But Disko’s board was the Grand Bank — a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side — a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog, vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet.
For days they worked in fog — Harvey at the bell — till, grown familiar with the thick airs, he went out with Tom Platt, his heart rather in his mouth. But the fog would not lift, and the fish were biting, and no one can stay helplessly afraid for six hours at a time. Harvey devoted himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and Tom’s instinct; Manuel’s conch sounding thin and faint beside them. But it was an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea below ten feet from his straining eyes. A few days later he was out with Manuel on what should have been forty-fathom bottom, but the whole length of the roding ran out, and still the anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew mortally afraid, for that his last touch with earth was lost. “Whale-hole,” said Manuel, hauling in. “That is good joke on Disko. Come!” and he rowed to the schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at the skipper because, for once, he had led them to the edge of the barren Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank. They made another berth through the fog, and that time the hair of Harvey’s head stood up when he went out in Manuel’s dory. A whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a plunging, and spouting. It was his first introduction to the dread summer berg of the Banks, and he cowered in the bottom of the boat while Manuel laughed. There were days, though, clear and soft and warm, when it seemed a sin to do anything but loaf over the hand-lines and spank the drifting “sun-scalds” with an oar; and there were days of light airs, when Harvey was taught how to steer the schooner from one berth to another.
It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his band on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky. That was magnificent, in spite of Disko saying that it would break a snake’s back to follow his wake. But, as usual, pride ran before a fall. They were sailing on the wind with the staysail — an old one, luckily — set, and Harvey jammed her right into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art. The foresail went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through the staysail, which was, of course, prevented from going over by the mainstay. They lowered the wreck in awful silence, and Harvey spent his leisure hours for the next few days under Tom Platt’s lee, learning to use a needle and palm. Dan hooted with joy, for, as he said, he had made the very same blunder himself in his early days.
Boylike, Harvey imitated all the men by turns, till he had combined Disko’s peculiar stoop at the wheel, Long Jack’s swinging overhand when the lines were hauled, Manuel’s round-shouldered but effective stroke in a dory, and Tom Platt’s generous Ohio stride along the deck.
“‘Tis beautiful to see how he takes to ut,” said Long Jack, when Harvey was looking out by the windlass one thick noon. “I’ll lay my wage an’ share ‘tis more’n half play-actin’ to him, an’ he consates himself he’s a bowld mariner. Watch his little bit av a back now!”
“That’s the way we all begin,” said Tom Platt. “The boys they make believe all the time till they’ve cheated ‘emselves into bein’ men, an’ so till they die — pretendin’ an’ pretendin’. I done it on the old Ohio, I know. Stood my first watch — harbor-watch — feelin’ finer’n Farragut. Dan’s full o’ the same kind o’ notions. See ‘em now, actin’ to be genewine moss-backs — very hair a rope-yarn an’ blood Stockholm tar.” He spoke down the cabin stairs. “Guess you’re mistook in your judgments fer once, Disko. What in Rome made ye tell us all here the kid was crazy?”
“He wuz,” Disko replied. “Crazy ez a loon when he come aboard; but I’ll say he’s sobered up consid’ble sence. I cured him.”
“He yarns good,” said Tom Platt. “T’other night he told us abaout a kid of his own size steerin’ a cunnin’ little rig an’ four ponies up an’ down Toledo, Ohio, I think ‘twas, an’ givin’ suppers to a crowd o’ sim’lar kids. Cur’us kind o’ fairy-tale, but blame interestin’. He knows scores of ‘em.”
“Guess he strikes ‘em outen his own head,” Disko called from the cabin, where he was busy with the logbook. “Stands to reason that sort is all made up. It don’t take in no one but Dan, an’ he laughs at it. I’ve heard him, behind my back.”
“Yever hear what Sim’on Peter Ca’houn said when they whacked up a match ‘twix’ his sister Hitty an’ Lorin’ Jerauld, an’ the boys put up that joke on him daown to Georges?” drawled Uncle Salters, who was dripping peaceably under the lee of the starboard dory-nest.
Tom Platt puffed at his pipe in scornful silence: he was a Cape Cod man, and had not known that tale more than twenty years. Uncle Salters went on with a rasping chuckie:
“Sim’on Peter Ca’houn he said, an’ he was jest right, abaout Lorin’, ‘Ha’af on the taown,’ he said, ‘an’ t’other ha’af blame fool; an’ they told me she’s married a ‘ich man.’ Sim’on Peter Ca’houn he hedn’t no roof to his mouth, an’ talked that way.”
“He didn’t talk any Pennsylvania Dutch,” Tom Platt replied. “You’d better leave a Cape man to tell that tale. The Ca’houns was gypsies frum ‘way back.”
“Wal, I don’t profess to be any elocutionist,” Salters said. “I’m comin’ to the moral o’ things. That’s jest abaout what aour Harve be! Ha’af on the taown, an’ t’other ha’af blame fool; an’ there’s some’ll believe he’s a rich man. Yah!”
“Did ye ever think how sweet ‘twould be to sail wid a full c
rew o’ Salterses?” said Long Jack. “Ha’af in the furrer an’ other ha’af in the muck-heap, as Ca’houn did not say, an’ makes out he’s a fisherman!”
A little laugh went round at Salters’s expense.
Disko held his tongue, and wrought over the log-book that he kept in a hatchet-faced, square hand; this was the kind of thing that ran on, page after soiled page:
“July 17. This day thick fog and few fish. Made berth to northward. So ends this day.
“July 18. This day comes in with thick fog. Caught a few fish.
“July 19. This day comes in with light breeze from N.E. and fine weather. Made a berth to eastward. Caught plenty fish.
“July 20. This, the Sabbath, comes in with fog and light winds. So ends this day. Total fish caught this week, 3,478.”
They never worked on Sundays, but shaved, and washed themselves if it were fine, and Pennsylvania sang hymns. Once or twice he suggested that, if it was not an impertinence, he thought he could preach a little. Uncle Salters nearly jumped down his throat at the mere notion, reminding him that he was not a preacher and mustn’t think of such things. “We’d hev him rememberin’ Johns-town next,” Salters explained, “an’ what would happen then?” so they compromised on his reading aloud from a book called “Josephus.” It was an old leather-bound volume, smelling of a hundred voyages, very solid and very like the Bible, but enlivened with accounts of battles and sieges; and they read it nearly from cover to cover. Otherwise Penn was a silent little body. He would not utter a word for three days on end sometimes, though he played checkers, listened to the songs, and laughed at the stories. When they tried to stir him up, he would answer: “I don’t wish to seem unneighbourly, but it is because I have nothing to say. My head feels quite empty. I’ve almost forgotten my name.” He would turn to Uncle Salters with an expectant smile.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 55