The Seiners Part 14

Clancy, standing aft, threw a look at our seine-boat, which of course we had in tow. "She's quite a drag," he suggested, "for a vessel that's racing."

"Yes," said the skipper, "but wait a while. We won't cast it off unless we have to."

We did not have to. We soon had her in trim. For weeks the skipper and Clancy had been marking the Johnnie's sheets so that in an emergency they could whip her into her best sailing in no time. With that, and with the shifting of some barrels of salt that we had on deck, we soon had her going. It is surprising what a lot of difference the shifting of a few barrels of salt will make in the trim of a vessel. We had not had a try with anything for two weeks or so and had become careless.

The last thing we did was to take some barrels of fresh water that happened to be standing forward of the windla.s.s and shift them aft, and then the Johnnie began to go along for fair.

Coming up to Block Island Light things were pretty even. Then it came a question of who was to go to windward. The yacht hauled her mainsheet in to two blocks. So did we, and, further, ran a line from the cringle in her foresail to the weather rigging. She could not make it--we had her.

"Mind the time," said the skipper, when at last we had her under our quarter--"mind the time, Tommie, when we used to do so much racing down on the Cape sh.o.r.e? There's where we had plenty of time for racing and all sorts of foolishness. I was pretty young then, but I mind it well. A string of men on the rigging from the shear poles clear up to the mast-head--yes, and a man astraddle the main gaff once or twice, pa.s.sing buckets of water to wet down the mains'l."

"Yes, and barrels of water out toward the end of the main-boom keep the sail stretched. Man, but those were the days we paid attention to racing."

"Those were the days," a.s.serted the skipper. "But we can do a little of it now, too."

By that you will understand we were walking away from our yacht. We were to anchor in the harbor while she was still coming, and we had towed our seine-boat all the way.

"Lord," said Clancy, as we were tying up our foresail, "but I'd like to see this one in an ocean race with plenty of wind stirring--not a flat breeze and a short drag like we had to-day."

XIX

MINNIE ARKELL AGAIN

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 pa.s.sed a few words with a steam-yacht anch.o.r.ed 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sage 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 bra.s.s 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 j.a.panese 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 b.u.t.ton on front n.o.body'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 Sat.u.r.day 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 b.u.t.t in somewhere--who lives aboard his yacht just the same as he does in his house ash.o.r.e--electric bells, baths, servants, barber and all--and hugs the sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e--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 ash.o.r.e. 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 pa.s.sages. Now, they must have got the same weather and yet n.o.body 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage."

Minnie Arkell filled another gla.s.s 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.