A man's woman

by Frank Norris

But amid all this grayness of sky and water and fog one distinguished certain black and shifting masses. They outlined every wharf, they banked every dock, every quay. Every small and inconsequent jetty had its fringe of black. Even the roofs of the buildings along the water-front were crested with the same dull-coloured mass.

It was the People, the crowd, rank upon rank, close-packed, expectant, thronging there upon the City's edge, swelling in size with the lapse of every minute, vast, conglomerate, restless, and throwing off into the stillness of the quiet gray air a prolonged, indefinite murmur, a monotonous minor note.

The surface of the bay was dotted over with all manner of craft black with people. Rowboats, perilously overcrowded, were everywhere. Ferryboats and excursion steamers, chartered for that day, heeled over almost to the water's edge with the unsteady weight of their passengers. Tugboats passed up and down similarly crowded and displaying the flags of various journals and news organisations—the News, the Press, the Times, and the Associated Press. Private yachts, trim and very graceful and gleaming with brass and varnish, slipped by with scarcely a ripple to mark their progress, while full in the centre of the bay, gigantic, solid, formidable, her grim, silent guns thrusting their snouts from her turrets, a great, white battleship rode motionless to her anchor.

An hour passed; noon came. At long intervals a faint seaward breeze compressed the fog, and high, sad-coloured clouds and a fine and penetrating rain came drizzling down. The crowds along the wharves grew denser and blacker. The numbers of yachts, boats, and steamers increased; even the yards and masts of the merchant-ships were dotted over with watchers.

Then, at length, from far up the bay there came a faint, a barely perceptible, droning sound, the sound of distant shouting. Instantly the crowds were alert, and a quick, surging movement rippled from end to end of the throng along the water-front. Its subdued murmur rose in pitch upon the second. Like a flock of agitated gulls, the boats in the harbour stirred nimbly from place to place; a belated newspaper tug tore by, headed for the upper bay, smoking fiercely, the water boiling from her bows. From the battleship came the tap of a drum. The excursion steamers and chartered ferryboats moved to points of vantage and took position, occasionally feeling the water with their paddles.

The distant, droning sound drew gradually nearer, swelling in volume, and by degrees splitting into innumerable component parts. One began to distinguish the various notes that contributed to its volume—a sharp, quick volley of inarticulate shouts or a cadenced cheer or a hoarse salvo of steam whistles. Bells began to ring in different quarters of the City.

Then all at once the advancing wave of sound swept down like the rush of a great storm. A roar as of the unchained wind leaped upward from those banked and crowding masses. It swelled louder and louder, deafening, inarticulate. A vast bellow of exultation split the gray, low-hanging heavens. Erect plumes of steam shot upward from the ferry and excursion boats, but the noise of their whistles was lost and drowned in the reverberation of that mighty and prolonged clamour. But suddenly the indeterminate thunder was pierced and dominated by a sharp and deep-toned report, and a jet of white smoke shot out from the flanks of the battleship. Her guns had spoken. Instantly and from another quarter of her hull came another jet of white smoke, stabbed through with its thin, yellow flash, and another abrupt clap of thunder shook the windows of the City.

The boats that all the morning had been moving toward the upper bay were returning. They came slowly, a veritable fleet, steaming down the bay, headed for the open sea, beyond the entrance of the harbour, each crowded and careening to the very gunwales, each whistling with might and main.

And in their midst—the storm-centre round which this tempest of acclamation surged, the object on which so many eyes were focussed, the hope of an entire nation—one ship.

She was small and seemingly pitifully inadequate for the great adventure on which she was bound; her lines were short and ungraceful. From her clumsy iron-shod bow to her high, round stern, from her bulging sides to the summit of her short, powerful masts there was scant beauty in her. She was broad, blunt, evidently slow in her movements, and in the smooth waters of the bay seemed out of her element. But, for all that, she imparted an impression of compactness, the compactness of things dwarfed and stunted. Vast, indeed, would be the force that would crush those bulging flanks, so cunningly built, moreover, that the ship must slip and rise to any too great lateral pressure. Far above her waist rose her smokestack. Overhead upon the mainmast was affixed the crow's nest. Whaleboats and cutters swung from her davits, while all her decks were cumbered with barrels, with crates, with boxes and strangely shaped bales and cases.