Chapter III

Then a wind from the land sprang up and whipped
The waters till the flowers grew acid-etched
Upon her heart; but other blooms, rose-lipped,
Out of the fresh autumnal foam were fetched
By the sun's hand--strange harvest that achieves
Its seasonal fruit before the time of leaves.

The Ice-Floes

Dawn from the Foretop! Dawn from the Barrel!
A scurry of feet with a roar overhead;
The master-watch wildly pointing to Northward,
Where the herd in front of _The Eagle_ was spread!

Steel-planked and sheathed like a battleship's nose,
She battered her path through the drifting floes;
Past slob and growler we drove, and rammed her
Into the heart of the patch and jammed her.
There were hundreds of thousands of seals, I'd swear,
In the stretch of that field--"white harps" to spare
For a dozen such fleets as had left that spring
To share in the general harvesting.
The first of the line, we had struck the main herd;
The day was ours, and our pulses stirred
In that brisk, live hour before the sun,
At the thought of the load and the sweepstake won.

We stood on the deck as the morning outrolled
On the fields its tissue of orange and gold,
And lit up the ice to the north in the sharp,
Clear air; each mother-seal and its "harp"
Lay side by side; and as far as the range
Of the patch ran out we saw that strange,
And unimaginable thing
That sealers talk of every spring--
The "bobbing-holes" within the floes
That neither wind nor frost could close;
Through every hole a seal could dive,
And search, to keep her brood alive,
A hundred miles it well might be,
For food beneath that frozen sea.
Round sunken reef and cape she would rove,
And though the wind and current drove
The ice-fields many leagues that day,
We knew she would turn and find her way
Back to the hole, without the help
Of compass or log, to suckle her whelp--
Back to that hole in the distant floes,
And smash her way up with her teeth and nose.
But we flung those thoughts aside when the shout
Of command from the master-watch rang out.

Assigned to our places in watches of four--
Over the rails in a wild carouse,
Two from the port and starboard bows,
Two from the broadsides--off we tore,
In the breathless rush for the day's attack,
With the speed of hounds on a caribou's track.
With the rise of the sun we started to kill,
A seal for each blow from the iron bill
Of our gaffs. From the nose to the tail we ripped them,
And laid their quivering carcases flat
On the ice; then with our knives we stripped them
For the sake of the pelt and its lining of fat.
With three fathoms of rope we laced them fast,
With their skins to the ice to be easy to drag,
With our shoulders galled we drew them, and cast
Them in thousands around the watch's flag.
Then, with our bodies begrimed with the reek
Of grease and sweat from the toil of the day,
We made for _The Eagle_, two miles away,
At the signal that flew from her mizzen peak.
And through the night, as inch by inch
She reached the pans with the harps piled high,
We hoisted them up as the hours filed by
To the sleepy growl of the donkey-winch.

Over the bulwarks again we were gone,
With the first faint streaks of a misty dawn;
Fast as our arms could swing we slew them,
Ripped them, "sculped" them, roped and drew them
To the pans where the seals in pyramids rose
Around the flags on the central floes,
Till we reckoned we had nine thousand dead
By the time the afternoon had fled;
And that an added thousand or more
Would beat the count of the day before.
So back again to the patch we went
To haul, before the day was spent,
Another load of four "harps" a man,
To make the last the record pan.
And not one of us saw, as we gaffed, and skinned,
And took them in tow, that the north-east wind
Had veered off-shore; that the air was colder;
That the signs of recall were there to the south,
The flag of _The Eagle_, and the long, thin smoulder
That drifted away from her funnel's mouth.
Not one of us thought of the speed of the storm
That hounded our tracks in the day's last chase
(For the slaughter was swift, and the blood was warm),
Till we felt the first sting of the snow in our face.

We looked south-east, where, an hour ago,
Like a smudge on the sky-line, someone had seen
_The Eagle_, and thought he had heard her blow
A note like a warning from her sirene.
We gathered in knots, each man within call
Of his mate, and slipping our ropes, we sped,
Plunging our way through a thickening wall
Of snow that the gale was driving ahead.
We ran with the wind on our shoulder; we knew
That the night had left us this only clue
Of the track before us, though with each wail
That grew to the pang of a shriek from the gale.
Some of us swore that _The Eagle_ screamed
Right off to the east; to others it seemed
On the southern quarter and near, while the rest
Cried out with every report that rose
From the strain and the rend of the wind on the floes
That _The Eagle_ was firing her guns to the west.
And some of them turned to the west, though to go
Was madness--we knew it and roared, but the notes
Of our warning were lost as a fierce gust of snow
Eddied, and strangled the words in our throats.
Then we felt in our hearts that the night had swallowed
All signals, the whistle, the flare, and the smoke
To the south; and like sheep in a storm we followed
Each other; like sheep we huddled and broke.
Here one would fall as hunger took hold
Of his step; here one would sleep as the cold
Crept into his blood, and another would kneel
Athwart the body of some dead seal,
And with knife and nails would tear it apart.
To flesh his teeth in its frozen heart.
And another dreamed that the storm was past,
And raved of his bunk and brandy and food,
And _The Eagle_ near, though in that blast
The mother was fully as blind as her brood.
Then we saw, what we feared from the first--dark places
Here and there to the left of us, wide, yawning spaces
Of water; the fissures and cracks had increased
Till the outer pans were afloat, and we knew,
As they drifted along in the night to the east,
By the cries we heard, that some of our crew
Were borne to the sea on those pans and were lost.
And we turned with the wind in our faces again,
And took the snow with its lancing pain,
Till our eye-balls cracked with the salt and the frost;
Till only iron and fire that night
Survived on the ice as we stumbled on;
As we fell and rose and plunged--till the light
In the south and east disclosed the dawn,
And the sea heaving with floes--and then,
_The Eagle_ in wild pursuit of her men.

And the rest is as a story told,
Or a dream that belonged to a dim, mad past,
Of a March night and a north wind's cold,
Of a voyage home with a flag half-mast;
Of twenty thousand seals that were killed
To help to lower the price of bread;
Of the muffled beat ... of a drum ... that filled
A nave ... at our count of sixty dead.

?

Dawn!
Gold-minted--
The monarch of the morn,
Awake--
Shadows withdrawn,
A sheet of glass rose-tinted--
The lake!

Splash!
A coral ring
Studded with rubies and agates and gold,
Finely wrought out.
A vision of a silver flash.
Lost! Was it a grayling,
Or a rainbow-trout?

The Shark

He seemed to know the harbor,
So leisurely he swam;
His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge,
Stirred not a bubble
As it moved
With its base-line on the water.

His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue,
And as he passed the wharf
He turned,
And snapped at a flat-fish
That was dead and floating.
And I saw the flash of a white throat.
And a double row of white teeth,
And eyes of metallic grey,
Hard and narrow and slit.

Then out of the harbor,
With that three-cornered fin
Shearing without a bubble the water,
Lithely,
Leisurely,
He swam--
That strange fish,
Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue,
Part vulture, part wolf.
Part neither--for his blood was cold.

The Fog

It stole in on us like a foot-pad,
Somewhere out of the sea and air,
Heavy with rifling Polaris
And the Seven Stars.
It left our eyes untouched,
But took our sight,
And then,
Silently,
It drew the song from our throats,
And the supple bend from our ash-blades;
For the bandit,
With occult fingering,
Had tangled up
The four threads of the compass,
And fouled the snarl around our dory.

The Big Fellow

A huge six-footer,
Eyes bay blue,
And as deep;
Lower jaw like a cliff,
Tongue silent,
As hard and strong as a huskie.

A little man,
In a pressed suit,
Standing before him,
Had dug a name out of the past,
And flung it at him
Under cover of law.

The big fellow
Leaned over him,
Like a steel girder,
Just for a moment,
Then swung around on his heel
Without striking.

And I thought of the big Newfoundland
I saw, asleep by a rock
The day before,
That was galvanized by a challenge,
But eyeing a cur,
He turned,
Yawned,
Closed one eye,
Then the other,
And slept.

The Morning Plunge

Clean-limbed and arrowy he shot his way
Into the crystal waters of the bay;
Full thirty-feet below the derrick's beam,
As a lithe salmon, leaping from a stream
Hangs, instant-poised, then arches for the plunge,
Driving with lightning fin a dexterous lunge
Down to his haunts, and trails, enwreathed in mists,
A flock of garnets chasing amethysts.

In Absentia

Erect and motionless he stood,
His face a hieroglyph of stone,
Stopped was his pulse, chilled was his blood,
And stiff each sinew, nerve and bone.

The spell an instant held him, when
His veins were swept by tidal power,
And then life's threescore years and ten
Were measured by a single hour.

The world lay there beneath his eye;
The sun had left the heavens to float
A hand-breadth from him, and the sky
Was but an anchor for his boat.

Fled was the class-room's puny space--
His eye saw but a whirling disk;
His old and language-weathered face
Shone like a glowing asterisk!

What chance had he now to remember
The year held months so saturnine
As ill-starred May and blank September,
With that brute tugging at his line?

The Flood Tide

He paused a moment by the sea,
Then stooped, and with a leisured hand
He wrote in casual tracery
Her name upon the flux of sand.

The waves beat up and swiftly spun
A silver web at every stride;
He watched their long, thin fingers run
The letters back into the tide.

But she had written where the tide
Could never its grey waters fling;
She watched the longest wave subside
Ere it could touch the lettering.

The Pine Tree

I saw how he would come each night and wait
An hour or more beside that broken gate--
Just stand, and stare across the road with dim,
Grey eyes. Nothing was there but an old pine tree,
Cut down and sawn in lengths; and absently
He answered questions that I put to him.

He spoke as if some horrid deed were done--
Murder--no less--it seemed to be;
A week before, under his very eyes,
A gang of men had slain a tree.
The pine was planted seventy years ago
To celebrate his birth,
It had a right, he said, to live and grow,
And then into the earth,
By a mild and understanding law,
To pass with nature's quiet burial.
But they had come, those men, with axe and saw,
And killed it like a criminal,
And with the hangman's rope about its neck,
It swayed a moment, then with heavy sound,
Dropped with a crash of branches to the ground.

In Lantern Light

I could not paint, nor could I draw
The look that searched the night;
The bleak refinement of the face I saw
In lantern light.

A cunning hand might seize the crag,
Or stay the flight of a gull,
Or the rocket's flash; or more--the lightning jag
That lit the hull.

But as a man born blind must steal
His colors from the night
By hand, I had to touch that face to feel
It marble white.

The Secret of the Sea

Tell me thy secret, O Sea,
The mystery sealed in thy breast;
Come, breathe it in whispers to me,
A child of thy fevered unrest.

It's midnight, and from me has sleep
Flown afar, like a bird on the wing,
All tired is my heart as I weep
Through a winter that knows not a spring.

Why dost thou respond to my plea
With only a minor refrain?
Thy voice in a moan floats to me,
As an echo sobbed from my pain.

Hast thou a grief, too, like mine,
That never heals with the years;
A bosom entombing a shrine
Bedewed with the waste of thy tears?

Where lies my loved one to-night
Beneath thy grey mantle so wide?
I would that his slumber were light,
To wake with the flow of the tide.

Should he not wake, bear him this,
An amaranth plucked from my heart;
Wreathe it soft in his dreams with a kiss,
Then return, and ere I depart.

On the flood of my soul's overflow.
Borne on by my grief from the wild
Of this storm-beaten life, let me know
How he slept; let me know if he smiled.

Loss of the Steamship Florizel

What changed thy face from that of yesterday,
Great Sea! that with thy mothering hands outspread
And smiling on our common life, didst lay
The table covers for our daily bread?

To-day, held by the thresh of iron shocks
Within the vortex of a lightless fate,
Thy hands are tearing seaweed on the rocks,
And thou--a stark and wild inebriate.

The Drowning

The rust of hours,
Through a year of days,
Has dulled the edge of the pain;
But at night
A wheel in my sleep
Grinds it smooth and keen.

By day I remember
A face that was lit
With the softness of human pattern;
But at night
It is changed in my sleep
To a bygone carved in chalk.

A cottage inland
Through a year of days
Has latched its doors on the sea;
But at night
I return in my sleep
To the cold, green lure of the waters.

Monologues and Dialogues