Chapter 5

CHAPTER V

That was the first of many talks with Dan, who told Harvey why he
would transfer his dory's name to the imaginary Burgess-modelled
haddocker. Harvey heard a good deal about the real Hattie at
Gloucester; saw a lock of her hair - which Dan, finding fair words
of no avail, had "hooked" as she sat in front of him at school
that winter - and a photograph. Hattie was about fourteen years
old, with an awful contempt for boys, and had been trampling on
Dan's heart through the winter. All this was revealed under oath
of solemn secrecy on moonlit decks, in the dead dark, or in
choking fog; the whining wheel behind them, the climbing deck
before, and without, the unresting, clamorous sea. Once, of
course, as the boys came to know each other, there was a fight,
which raged from bow to stern till Penn came up and separated
them, but promised not to tell Disko, who thought fighting on
watch rather worse than sleeping. Harvey was no match for Dan
physically, but it says a great deal for his new training that he
took his defeat and did not try to get even with his conqueror by
underhand methods.

That was after he had been cured of a string of boils between his
elbows and wrists, where the wet jersey and oilskins cut into the
flesh. The salt water stung them unpleasantly, but when they were
ripe Dan treated them with Disko's razor, and assured Harvey that
now he was a "blooded Banker"; the affliction of gurry-sores being
the mark of the caste that claimed him.

Since he was a boy and very busy, he did not bother his head with
too much thinking. He was exceedingly sorry for his mother, and
often longed to see her and above all to tell her of his wonderful
new life, and how brilliantly he was acquitting himself in it.
Otherwise he preferred not to wonder too much how she was bearing
the shock of his supposed death. But one day, as he stood on the
fo'c'sle ladder, guying the cook, who had accused him and Dan of
hooking fried pies, it occurred to him that this was a vast
improvement on being snubbed by strangers in the smoking-room of a
hired liner.

He was a recognised part of the scheme of things on the "We're
Here"; had his place at the table and among the bunks; and could
hold his own in the long talks on stormy days, when the others
were always ready to listen to what they called his "fairy-tales"
of his life ashore. It did not take him more than two days and a
quarter to feel that if he spoke of his own life - it seemed very
far away - no one except Dan (and even Dan's belief was sorely
tried) credited him. So he invented a friend, a boy he had heard
of, who drove a miniature four-pony drag in Toledo, Ohio, and
ordered five suits of clothes at a time, and led things called