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 municipality, 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 ashore 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 participate 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 if 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 fishing-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 shivered 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 the people by their heartstrings; and when she told how the drenched crews were flung ashore, 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 shiny 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, shipwright, master-fisherman, and poet, in the seventy-third year of his age.
‘Naow, I call that sensible,’ said the 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 Massachusetts 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 sniggered. ‘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 shivery.’
‘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 shirt-waists stopped tittering 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:
9th September.—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.