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Page 79
"D. Hawkins, alias Williams, 34, married, Shelbourne, Nova
Scotia.
"G. W. Clay, coloured, 28, married, City."
And so on, and so on. Great lumps were rising in Harvey's throat,
and his stomach reminded him of the day when he fell from the
liner.
"May 10th. --Schooner 'We're Here' [the blood tingled all over him]
Otto Svendson, 20, single, City, lost overboard."
Once more a low, tearing cry from somewhere at the back of the
hall.
"She shouldn't ha' come. She shouldn't ha' come," said Long Jack,
with a cluck of pity.
"Don't scrowge, Harve," grunted Dan. Harvey heard that much, but
the rest was all darkness spotted with fiery wheels. Disko leaned
forward and spoke to his wife, where she sat with one arm round
Mrs. Cheyne, and the other holding down the snatching, catching,
ringed hands.
"Lean your head daown--right daown!" he whispered. "It'll go off
in a minute."
"I ca-an't! I do-don't! Oh, let me--" Mrs. Cheyne did not at all know
what she said.
"You must," Mrs. Troop repeated. "Your boy's jest fainted dead
away. They do that some when they're gettin' their growth. 'Wish to
tend to him? We can git aout this side. Quite quiet. You come right
along with me. Psha', my dear, we're both women, I guess. We
must tend to aour men-folk. Come!"
The 'We're Heres' promptly went through the crowd as a
body-guard, and it was a very white and shaken Harvey that they
propped up on a bench in an anteroom.
"Favours his ma," was Mrs. Troop's ouly comment, as the mother
bent over her boy.
"How d'you suppose he could ever stand it?" she cried indignantly
to Cheyne, who had said nothing at all. "It was horrible--horrible!
We shouldn't have come. It's wrong and wicked! It--it isn't right!
Why--why couldn't they put these things in the papers, where they
belong? Are you better, darling?"
That made Harvey very properly ashamed. "Oh, I'm all right, I
guess," he said, struggling to his feet, with a broken giggle.
"Must ha' been something I ate for breakfast."
"Coffee, perhaps," said Cheyne, whose face was all in hard lines,
as though it had been cut out of bronze. "We won't go back again."
"Guess 'twould be 'baout's well to git daown to the wharf," said
Disko. "It's close in along with them Dagoes, an' the fresh air will
fresh Mrs. Cheyne up."
Harvey announced that he never felt better in his life; but it was
not till he saw the 'We're Here', fresh from the lumper's hands, at
Wouverman's wharf, that he lost his all-overish feelings in a queer
mixture of pride and sorrowfulness. Other people--summer
boarders and such-like--played about in cat-boats or looked at the
sea from pier-heads; but he understood things from the inside--
more things than he could begin to think about. None the less, he
could have sat down and howled because the little schooner was
going off. Mrs. Cheyne simply cried and cried every step of the
way and said most extraordinary things to Mrs. Troop, who
"babied" her till Dan, who had not been "babied" since he was six,
whistled aloud.
And so the old crowd--Harvey felt like the most ancient of mariners
dropped into the old schooner among the battered dories, while
Harvey slipped the stern-fast from the pier-head, and they slid her
along the wharf-side with their hands. Every one wanted to say so
much that no one said anything in particular. Harvey bade Dan
take care of Uncle Salters's sea-boots and Penn's dory-anchor, and
Long Jack entreated Harvey to remember his lessons in
seamanship; but the jokes fell flat in the presence of the two
women, and it is hard to be funny with green harbour-water
widening between good friends.
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