Captains Courageous Part 27

"Well, Mr. Cheyne, and what d'you think of our city?--Yes, madam, you can sit anywhere you please.--You have this kind of thing out West, I presume?"

"Yes, but we aren't as old as you."

"That's so, of course. You ought to have been at the exercises when we celebrated our two hundred and fiftieth birthday. I tell you, Mr.

Cheyne, the old city did herself credit."

"So I heard. It pays, too. What's the matter with the town that it don't have a first-cla.s.s hotel, though?"

"Right over there to the left, Pedro. Heaps o' room for you and your crowd.--Why, that's what I tell 'em all the time, Mr. Cheyne. There's big money in it, but I presume that don't affect you any. What we want is--"

A heavy hand fell on his broadcloth shoulder, and the flushed skipper of a Portland coal-and-ice coaster spun him half round. "What in thunder do you fellows mean by clappin' the law on the town when all decent men are at sea this way? Heh? Town's dry's a bone, an' smells a sight worse sence I quit. 'Might ha' left us one saloon for soft drinks, anyway."

"Don't seem to have hindered your nourishment this morning, Ca.r.s.en.

I'll go into the politics of it later. Sit down by the door and think over your arguments till I come back."

"What good's arguments to me? In Miquelon champagne's eighteen dollars a case, and--" The skipper lurched into his seat as an organ-prelude silenced him.

"Our new organ," said the official proudly to Cheyne. "Cost us four thousand dollars, too. We'll have to get back to high-licence next year to pay for it. I wasn't going to let the ministers have all the religion at their convention. Those are some of our orphans standing up to sing. My wife taught 'em. See you again later, Mr. Cheyne. I'm wanted on the platform."

High, clear, and true, children's voices bore down the last noise of those settling into their places.

"O all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!"

The women throughout the hall leaned forward to look as the reiterated cadences filled the air. Mrs. Cheyne, with some others, began to breathe short; she had hardly imagined there were so many widows in the world; and instinctively searched for Harvey. He had found the "We're Heres" at the back of the audience, and was standing, as by right, between Dan and Disko. Uncle Salters, returned the night before with Penn, from Pamlico Sound, received him suspiciously.

"Hain't your folk gone yet?" he grunted. "What are you doin' here, young feller?"

"O ye Seas and Floods, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!"

"Hain't he good right?" said Dan. "He's bin there, same as the rest of us."

"Not in them clothes," Salters snarled.

"Shut your head, Salters," said Disko. "Your bile's gone back on you.

Stay right where ye are, Harve."

Then up and spoke the orator of the occasion, another pillar of the munic.i.p.ality, bidding the world welcome to Gloucester, and incidentally pointing out wherein Gloucester excelled the rest of the world. Then he turned to the sea-wealth of the city, and spoke of the price that must be paid for the yearly harvest. They would hear later the names of their lost dead--one hundred and seventeen of them. (The widows stared a little, and looked at one another here.) Gloucester could not boast any overwhelming mills or factories. Her sons worked for such wage as the sea gave; and they all knew that neither Georges nor the Banks were cow-pastures. The utmost that folk ash.o.r.e could accomplish was to help the widows and the orphans; and after a few general remarks he took this opportunity of thanking, in the name of the city, those who had so public-spiritedly consented to partic.i.p.ate in the exercises of the occasion.

"I jest despise the beggin' pieces in it," growled Disko. "It don't give folk a fair notion of us."

"Ef folk won't be fore-handed an' put by when they've the chance,"

returned Salters, "it stands in the nature o' things they hev to be 'shamed. You take warnin' by that, young feller. Riches endureth but for a season, ef you scatter them araound on lugsuries--"

"But to lose everything--everything," said Penn. "What can you do then?

Once I"--the watery blue eyes stared up and down, as looking for something to steady them--"once I read--in a book, I think--of a boat where every one was run down--except some one--and he said to me--"

"Shucks!" said Salters, cutting in. "You read a little less an' take more int'rust in your vittles, and you'll come nearer earnin' your keep, Penn."

Harvey, jammed among the fishermen, felt a creepy, crawly, tingling thrill that began in the back of his neck and ended at his boots. He was cold, too, though it was a stifling day.

"'That the actress from Philadelphia?" said Disko Troop, scowling at the platform. "You've fixed it about old man Ireson, hain't ye, Harve?

Ye know why naow."

It was not "Ireson's Ride" that the woman delivered, but some sort of poem about a fis.h.i.+ng-port called Brixham and a fleet of trawlers beating in against storm by night, while the women made a guiding fire at the head of the quay with everything they could lay hands on.

"They took the grandam's blanket, Who s.h.i.+vered and bade them go; They took the baby's cradle, Who could not say them no."

"Whew!" said Dan, peering over Long Jack's shoulder. "That's great!

Must ha' bin expensive, though."

"Ground-hog case," said the Galway man. "Badly lighted port, Danny."

"And knew not all the while If they were lighting a bonfire Or only a funeral pile."

The wonderful voice took hold of people by their heartstrings; and when she told how the drenched crews were flung ash.o.r.e, living and dead, and they carried the bodies to the glare of the fires, asking: "Child, is this your father?" or "Wife, is this your man?" you could hear hard breathing all over the benches.

"And when the boats of Brixham Go out to face the gales, Think of the love that travels Like light upon their sails!"

There was very little applause when she finished. The women were looking for their handkerchiefs, and many of the men stared at the ceiling with s.h.i.+ny eyes.

"H'm," said Salters; "that 'u'd cost ye a dollar to hear at any theater--maybe two. Some folk, I presoom, can afford it. 'Seems downright waste to me... . Naow, how in Jerusalem did Cap Bart Edwardes strike adrift here?"

"No keepin' him under," said an Eastport man behind. "He's a poet, an'

he's baound to say his piece. 'Comes from daown aour way, too."

He did not say that Captain B. Edwardes had striven for five consecutive years to be allowed to recite a piece of his own composition on Gloucester Memorial Day. An amused and exhausted committee had at last given him his desire. The simplicity and utter happiness of the old man, as he stood up in his very best Sunday clothes, won the audience ere he opened his mouth. They sat unmurmuring through seven-and-thirty hatchet-made verses describing at fullest length the loss of the schooner Joan Hasken off the Georges in the gale of 1867, and when he came to an end they shouted with one kindly throat.

A far-sighted Boston reporter slid away for a full copy of the epic and an interview with the author; so that earth had nothing more to offer Captain Bart Edwardes, ex-whaler, s.h.i.+pwright, master-fisherman, and poet, in the seventy-third year of his age.

"Naow, I call that sensible," said an Eastport man. "I've bin over that graound with his writin', jest as he read it, in my two hands, and I can testify that he's got it all in."

"If Dan here couldn't do better'n that with one hand before breakfast, he ought to be switched," said Salters, upholding the honour of Ma.s.sachusetts on general principles. "Not but what I'm free to own he's considerable litt'ery--fer Maine. Still--"

"Guess Uncle Salters's goin' to die this trip. Fust compliment he's ever paid me," Dan sn.i.g.g.e.red. "What's wrong with you, Harve? You act all quiet and you look greenish. Feelin' sick?"

"Don't know what's the matter with me," Harvey replied. "Seems if my insides were too big for my outsides. I'm all crowded up and s.h.i.+very."

"Dispepsy? Pshaw-too bad. We'll wait for the readin', an' then we'll quit, an' catch the tide."

The widows--they were nearly all of that season's making--braced themselves rigidly like people going to be shot in cold blood, for they knew what was coming. The summer-boarder girls in pink and blue s.h.i.+rt-waists stopped t.i.ttering over Captain Edwardes's wonderful poem, and looked back to see why all was silent. The fishermen pressed forward as that town official who had talked with Cheyne bobbed up on the platform and began to read the year's list of losses, dividing them into months. Last September's casualties were mostly single men and strangers, but his voice rang very loud in the stillness of the hall.

"September 9th.--Schooner "Florrie Anderson" lost, with all aboard, off the Georges. "Reuben Pitman, master, 50, single, Main Street, City.

"Emil Olsen, 19, single, 329 Hammond Street, City; Denmark. "Oscar Stanberg, single, 25, Sweden. "Carl Stanberg, single, 28, Main Street, City. "Pedro, supposed Madeira, single, Keene's boarding-house, City.

"Joseph Welsh, alias Joseph Wright, 30, St. John's, Newfoundland."

"No--Augusty, Maine," a voice cried from the body of the hall.