The foaming fore shore/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE FLOWER OF THE COAST
"A FINE little floating plague-ship, eh, Lance?" was Taylor's war-cry as he went smiting right and left into the packed rabble that would have made a full passenger list for a five-hundred-ton coasting steamer.
Being of only sixty tons, the Auk had no space below to boast of, and what space she had was crammed to the last inch, so that Taylor and his crew could get no footing at first but rode upon the hips and backs and shoulders of men in their effort to smash an opening in the jam.
According to the custom of freighters, the Auk's hold was first spread with a layer of unbreakable cargo. A second layer of traps, nets and seines overspread this. While upon the bed of twine rested the bunks of the stationers with their gear in bags, boxes and barrels sheering in pyramids to the deck overhead.
Here they herded, eating and sleeping in cramped unsanitary quarters, carrying on a travesty of cooking by turns at the tiny galley or bolting their food raw. Nothing but make-shift sailcloth partitions screened the women's bunks from the men's. In the mêlée these partitions had been torn away and shrieking women and girls in various stages of dishabille were maelstromed in the swaying horde that trampled their bunks under foot and sent the tiers of boxes and barrels toppling on their heads.
Under the showering ruin they huddled in the dancing light of the smoky lanterns, raising hopeful eyes at the coming of the Graywing's crew, and one young girl, crouching for shelter at the foot of the mast, flung out her arms in appeal to Taylor in the lead.
"Ah, mon Américain—mon Américain!" she cried.
White as a lily she gleamed in the unwashed horde, her delicate, beautifully-chiseled, oval face terror-bleached till it seemed carved from ivory. Over the tapered curves of her half-bare shoulders where her enfolding cloak lay low on her neck, over her forehead patricianly high, her hair was tossed in a tangle like silken floss, and through the golden net her great eyes flashed out, eyes violet-blue as the tint of Labrador ice in shadow, as the water-heart of a lonely cliff-walled Labrador fiord—such eyes as a man may see but once in a thousand miles of Labrador coast.
"Ah, mon Américain—vite!" she appealed in a voice like the silver lapping of the Summer waves. "Mon Américain—vite!"
"Great heavens!" exclaimed Taylor involuntarily as he struggled toward her. "Who in the name of the mermaids is she?"
"Marie Laval—the flower of the coast, they call her!" spoke the voice of Lance at his shoulder. "You know old Peter. He's her father."
"But—but how is it I've never seen her before?" panted Taylor, knocking men this way and that in his effort to reach her.
"She's been schooling at St. John's. I guess she's through this Summer. I remember now old Peter told me he was going to take her on the stations. Yonder's old Peter behind her—and her mother, old Anne. Both too fond of their smuggled brandy, Taylor, if I do say it with a clerical tongue. Can't you smell it in the air? A perfect reek, and I shouldn't be at all surprised at this bedlam! I know Peter's brandy has been the cause."
"And that's their daughter!" marveled Taylor. "The flower of the coast! Yes—a flower in the slime! Quick, boys o' mine, get the women up on deck!"
Drunkenly clinging to the mast behind Marie, he had full glimpse of her parents in his rush, old Anne, brown-faced, brown-eyed as a gipsy, fat, ungainly, in slovenly galoshes, tubbed-up skirt and greasy head-shawl covering her oiled black hair from which gold ear-rings peeped; old Peter in worn hip boots and oilskins, his yellow toothless face lighted by cold, colorless, icicle-like eyes and, by strange anomaly, shaven bare except for a narrow snow-white fringe of whisker that rimmed it from ear to ear under his drooping southwester.
He glimpsed them, unconsciously noting every characteristic, every detail, but his thought was only of Marie, and, jamming swaying bodies apart with his shoulders and knees, he forced an opening and gathered her pliant body into his arms.
"Merci, mon Américain—merci, mon Viking!" she half-laughed, half-sobbed in impetuous gratitude. "I had the fear of death under those stamping heels but, voilà, I knew you would come when I called!"
"Ha, my flower of the coast!" breathed Taylor as he fought his way on deck with her. "Could I leave such a flower as you in the slime?"