“What happened? Joe, but I was glad you 45 didn’t come with me. You’d have felt as I did about it, I know. There they were––the two of them––Hollis and Withrow––yes, Withrow there––when I broke in on them, and Maurice between them––drunk. Yes, sir, drunk and helpless. They called it a wine-party, as though a man couldn’t get as good and drunk on wine in a private residence as ever he could on whiskey or rum in the back room of a saloon. Well, sir, I asked a question or two, and they tried to face me out, but out they went––first Hollis, and then Withrow, one after the other, and both good and lively. And then Minnie Arkell popped in from her own house by way of the backyard. She didn’t expect to see me––I know she didn’t. Had gone over to her house when the men began to drink, she said, and had just come over to see granny.
“Well, I told her what I thought. ‘It means nothing to you,’ I said, ‘to see a man make a fool of himself––that’s been a good part of your business in life for some time, now––to see men make fools of themselves for you. Withrow had reasons for wanting him disgraced––never mind why. Sam Hollis, maybe, has his reasons too. And the two of them are being helped along by you. You could have stopped this thing here to-day, but you didn’t.’ ‘No, no, Tommie,’ she says. ‘Yes, yes,’ I went on, ‘and don’t try to tell me different. 46 If I didn’t know you since you were a little girl you might be able to convince me, but I know you. Maurice, when he was himself, passed you by. You were bound to have him. You know a real man, more’s the pity, when you see one, and you know that Maurice, young and green and soft as he is, has more life and dash than a dozen of the kind you’ve been mixing with lately.’
“Oh, but I laid it on, Joe. Yes. A shame to have to talk like that to a woman, but I just had to. I didn’t stop there. ‘You’re handsome, and you’re rich, Minnie Arkell; got a lot of life left in you yet, and go off travelling with people who get their names regularly in the Boston papers; but just the same, Minnie Arkell, there are women in jail not half so bad as you––women doing time who’ve done less mischief in the world than you have.’”
“Wasn’t that pretty rough, Tommie?”
“Rough? Lord, yes––but true, Joe, true. And if you’d only see poor Maurice lying there! Cried? I could’ve cried, Joe––not since my mother died did I come so near to it. But it was done.
“Well, I made Minnie go and get her grandmother. And, Joe, if you’d seen that fine old lady––oh, but she’s got a heart in her––stoop and put Maurice’s head on her bosom as if he 47 was a little child. ‘The poor, poor boy. No mother here,’ she said, ‘and the best man on earth might come to it. Leave him to me, Tommie.’ Lord, I could have knelt down at her feet––the heart in her, Joe.”
“And how has Maurice been since?”
“All right. That was the first time in his life that he was drunk. I think it will be his last. But let’s go aboard the Johnnie.”
After looking over the Johnnie Duncan and admiring her to our hearts’ content, we sat down in her cabin and began to talk of the seining season to come. Others came down and joined in––George Moore, Eddie Parsons among others––and they asked Clancy what he was going to do. Was he going to see about a chance to go seining, or what? Moore said he’s been waiting to see what Maurice Blake was going to do; but as it was beginning to look as though Maurice was done for, he guessed he’d take a look around. He asked Clancy what he thought, and Clancy said he didn’t know––time enough yet.
Maurice Blake himself dropped down then. He was looking better, and everybody was glad to see it. He’d quit drinking––that was certain; and now he was a picture of a man––not pretty, but strong-looking, with his eyes glowing and his skin flushing with the good blood inside him. He took 48 a seat on the lockers and began to whittle a block of soft pine into a model of a hull, and after a while, with a squint along the sheer of his little model, he asked if anybody had seen Tom O’Donnell or Wesley Marrs. Several said yes, they had, and he asked where, and when they told him he got up and said he guessed he’d go along––as he couldn’t get a vessel himself, he might as well see about a chance to go hand. “And as we’ve been together so much in times gone by, Tommie, and you, Eddie and George, what do you say if we go together now?”