They were lying there, tied to the docks. They were all dreams, so long and clean, with the beautiful sheer fore and aft, and the overhang of the racers they were meant to be––the gold run, with the grain of the varnished oak rails shining above the night-black of their topsides, and varnished spars. They had the look of vessels that could sail––and they could, and live out a gale––nothing like them afloat I’d heard people say that ought to know.
I walked along another stretch and at Withrow’s dock I saw again the new one that had been built for Maurice Blake but given to Sam Hollis, who was a boon companion of Withrow’s ashore, as I may have said already. Hollis’s gang were bragging even now that she’d trim anything that ever sailed––the Lucy Foster, the Nannie O, the Colleen Bawn, and all the rest of them. And there were some old sharks, too, upon the docks who said they didn’t know but she looked as if she could. But a lot of other people didn’t think it––she was all right as a vessel, but Sam Hollis wasn’t 15 a Wesley Marrs, nor a Tom O’Donnell, nor a Tommie Ohlsen, nor even a Maurice Blake, who was a much younger man and a less experienced fisherman than any of the others.
All that, with the vessels anchored in the stream and the little dories running up and down and in and out––it all brought back again the trips I’d made with my father, clear back to the time when I was a little boy, so small that in heavy weather he wouldn’t trust me to go forward or aft myself, but would carry me in his arms himself––it all made me so long for the sea that my head went round and I found myself staggering like a drunken man as I tried to walk away from it.
III
MINNIE ARKELL
There was nothing for it. For a thousand dollars a month I could not stay ashore. Somebody or other would give me a chance to go seining, some good skipper I knew; and if none of the killers would give me a chance, then I’d try some old pod of a skipper. My mother would just have to let me go. It was only summer fishing after all––seining wasn’t like winter trawling––and in the end she would see it as I did.
I walked along, and as the last man in my mind was Maurice Blake, of course he was the first I had to run into. He was not looking well; I mean he was not looking as he should have looked. There was a reckless manner about him that no more belonged to him than a regularly quiet manner belonged to his friend Tommie Clancy. And I guessed why––he had been drinking. I had heard it already. Generally when a man starts to drink for the first time everybody talks about it. I was surprised, and I wished he hadn’t. But we are always finding out new things about men. In 17 my heart I was not blaming Maurice so much maybe as I should. I’d always been taught that drinking in excess was an awful habit, but some otherwise fine men I knew drank at times, and I wasn’t going to blame Maurice till I knew more about it.
And we can forgive a lot, too, in those we like. Maurice had no family to think of, and it must have been a blow to him not to get so fine a vessel as the Fred Withrow after he had been promised and had set his heart on it. And then to see her go to a man like Sam Hollis! and with the prospect of not getting another until a man like Withrow felt like saying you could. Everybody in Gloucester seemed to know that Withrow was doing all he could to keep Maurice from getting a vessel, and as the owners had banded together just before this for protection, as they called it, “against outside interference,” and as Withrow was one of the largest owners and a man of influence beyond his vessel holdings, he was quite a power at this time.