The town crier turned upon the sweet-mannered city woman like an angry child on his partner in a game of croquet who has not obeyed the rules. He clanged down his bell insolently, and kept on clanging it up and down as he turned on his heel and strode away.
Ruth laughed. “You see!” she said.
“I see.”
“He is the last town crier in America. We are very proud of him!”
“I should think you would be,” I replied. It seemed to me that I understood why the race had become extinct. I would have traded him for a telephone.
We walked slowly down the village street. To the right of us the fishermen’s cottages, behind their white picket-fences and green, well-tended squares of lawn, made patches of paint as gay as the quilts that hung airing on their clothes-lines. They looked as if each one had been done over with what was left in the bottom of the can after their owners had finished painting their boats. On the side of the street toward the bay freshly tarred nets were spread to dry upon low bushes, dories were dragged up and turned over, and straggling wharves, with their long line of storm-bent buildings, stretched their necks out into the flats. We passed a great, ugly cold-storage house, which had superseded the private industry of the old days, the company which owned it controlling all of the seines in the bay, for whom the fishermen rose at four to pull up the nets which had once been theirs.
“You can’t buy fresh fish in Star Harbor now,” Ruth was saying; “it all goes to Boston on ice and comes back again on the train.”
Down the steep roadways beside the wharves one caught sight of tall-masted schooners, anchored to unload, and the dead herring thrown from the packing-houses to the beach, rotting in the stale tidewater, made an unwholesome stench. In front of the fish-houses swarthy Portuguese sat drowsing in the sun. Their day’s work had begun with the trip to the seines at dawn and had ended with their big breakfast at noon. Their children swarmed about them in the streets, quarreling over ice-cream cones, which they shared, lick for lick, with their dogs. On the corner near the government wharf we had to turn into the road to avoid a crowd of noisy middies who were taking up all the sidewalk, laughing like schoolboys at recess, enjoying their two hours’ leave from the big destroyer anchored in the harbor. They had no contact with the town except through mild flirtation with the girls, and no festivity while on shore greater than eating pop-corn on the curb, but they seemed to feel satisfied that they were “seeing the world” and were quite hilarious about it. They were as much a part of the port as the Portuguese sailors, and more vital to it than the stray artists whom we had seen, absorbed each in his own canvas, which he had pitched in some picturesque—and cool—spot along the water-front.
Passing through a neighborhood where the little shops filled their fly-specked windows with shell souvenirs for visitors, we turned up an alleyway and entered the yard of a house built squarely behind the row of front store buildings. In this neighborhood they did not mind because they had no view of the sea. They were tired of looking at it and were more than glad to be shut off from its sharp wind in the winter.
Judge Bell was sitting on the open porch that ran around three sides of his pink house like the deck of a ship. He was perfectly content with the location.