LONDON RIVER

by

H. M. TOMLINSON

Garden City, New YorkGarden City Publishing Co. , IncAlfred A. Knopf, Inc. 

1921

TO MY MOTHER

AND TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

Contents

 I THE FORESHORE II A MIDNIGHT VOYAGE III A SHIPPING PARISH IV THE "HEART'S DESIRE" V THE MASTER VI THE SHIP-RUNNERS VII NOT IN THE ALMANAC VIII THE ILLUSION IX IN A COFFEE-SHOP X OFF-SHORE XI AN OLD LLOYD'S REGISTER

I. The Foreshore

It begins on the north side of the City, at Poverty Corner. It beginsimperceptibly, and very likely is no more than what a native knows isthere. It does not look like a foreshore. It looks like another ofthe byways of the capital. There is nothing to distinguish it from therest of Fenchurch Street. You will not find it in the Directory, forits name is only a familiar bearing used by seamen among themselves. If a wayfarer came upon it from the west, he might stop to light a pipe(as well there as anywhere) and pass on, guessing nothing of what it isand of its memories. And why should he? London is built of such oldshadows; and while we are here casting our own there is not much timeto turn and question what they fall upon. Yet if some unreasonabledoubt, a suspicion that he was being watched, made a stranger hesitateat that corner, he might begin to feel that London there was asdifferent from Bayswater and Clapham as though deep water intervened. In a sense deep water does; and not only the sea, but legends of shipsthat have gone, and of the men who knew them, and traditions of aservice older than anything Whitehall knows, though still as lively asenterprise itself, and as recent as the ships which moved on today'shigh water. 

In a frame outside one of its shops hangs a photograph of a sailingship. The portrait is so large and the beauty of the subject soevident that it might have been the cause of the stranger stoppingthere to fill his pipe. Yet how could he know that to those groups ofmen loitering about the name of that ship is as familiar as Suez orRio, even though they have never seen her? They know her as well asthey know their business. They know her house-flag--it isindistinguishable in the picture--and her master, and it is possiblethe oldest of them remembers the clippers of that fleet of which shealone now carries the emblem; for this is not only another year, butanother era. But they do not look at her portrait. They spit into theroad, or stare across it, and rarely move from where they stand, exceptto pace up and down as though keeping a watch. At one time, perhapsthirty years ago, it was usual to see gold rings in their ears. It issaid that if you wanted a bunch of men to run a little river steamer, with a freeboard of six inches, out to Delagoa Bay, you could engagethem all at this corner, or at the taverns just up the turning. Thesuggestion of such a voyage, in such a ship, would turn us to look onthese men in wonder, for it is the way of all but the wise to expectappearance to betray admirable qualities. These fellows, though, arenot significant, except that you might think of some of them that theirease and indifference were assumed, and that, when trying not to lookso, they were very conscious of the haste and importance of this greatcity into which that corner jutted far enough for them. They have justlanded, or they are about to sail again, and they might be standing onthe shore eyeing the town beyond, in which the luck of ships is cast bystrangers they never see, but who are inimical to them, and whose waysare inscrutable. 

If there are any inland shops which can hold one longer than the placewhere that ship's portrait hangs, then I do not know them. That comesfrom no more, of course, than the usual fault of an early impression. That fault gives a mould to the mind, and our latest thoughts, which wetry to make reasonable, betray that accidental shape. It may be saidthat I looked into this window while still soft. The consequence, everybody knows, would be incurable in a boy who saw sextants for thefirst time, compasses, patent logs, sounding-machines, signalling gear, and the other secrets of navigators. And not only those things. Therewas a section given to books, with classics like Stevens on _Stowage_, and Norie's _Navigation_, volumes never seen west of GracechurchStreet. The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and were sorted bychance. _Knots and Splices_, _Typee_, _Know Your Own Ship_, the _SouthPacific Directory_, and _Castaway on the Auckland Islands_. There weremany of them, and they were in that fortuitous and attractive order. The back of every volume had to be read, though the light was bad. Onone wall between the windows a specimen chart was framed. Maps aregood; but how much better are charts, especially when you cannot readthem except by guessing at their cryptic lettering! About the coastline the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lineswhich attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart is blank, being beyond soundings. At the capes are red dots, with arcs on theseaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real lightsat night. Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and mates'receipts in their pockets, being on errands to shipowners, lookoutward, and only seem to look inward. Where are the confines ofLondon?

Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or used to be, an archway into acourtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with half-modelsof sailing ships. I remember the name of one, the _Winefred_. Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on each. Therewas a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand, desks made secretwith high screens, and a silence that might have been the reproof tointruders of a repute remembered in dignity behind the screens by thosewho kept waiting so unimportant a visitor as a boy. On the counter wasa stand displaying sailing cards, announcing, among other events inLondon River, "the fine ship _Blackadder_ for immediate dispatch, having most of her cargo engaged, to Brisbane. " And in those days, just round the corner in Billiter Street, one of the East IndiaCompany's warehouses survived, a sombre relic among the new limestoneand red granite offices, a massive archway in its centre leading, itcould be believed, to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenthcentury, and forgotten. I never saw anybody go into it, or come out. How could they? It was of another time and place. The familiar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly as well, the Cathedral whichcertainly existed, for it could often be seen in the distance, and theAbbey that was little more than something we had heard named, they werebut the scenery close to the buses. Yet London was more wonderful thananything they could make it appear. About Fenchurch Street andLeadenhall Street wagons could be seen going east, bearing bales andcases, and the packages were port-marked for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo, and Santos--names like those. They had to be seen to be believed. Youcould stand there, forced to think that the sun never did more thanmake the floor of asphalted streets glow like polished brass, and thatthe evening light was full of glittering motes and smelt of dust, andthat life worked itself out in cupboards made of glass and mahogany;and suddenly you learned, while smelling the dust, that Acapulco wasmore than a portent in a book and held only by an act of faith. Yetthat astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messengerforget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with hiseyes that acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of the fable, isnowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to London, thoughyou may learn how Cornhill got its name. 

For though Londoners understand the Guildhall pigeons have as muchright to the place as the aldermen, they look upon the seabirds byLondon Bridge as vagrant strangers. They do not know where their cityends on the east side. Their River descends from Oxford in more thanone sense. It has little history worth mentioning below Westminster. To the poets, the River becomes flat and songless where at Richmond thesea's remote influence just moves it; and there they leave it. TheThames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, a featureless monotonywhere men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and goes outthrough fogs to nowhere in particular. But there is a hill-top atWoolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our River, theburden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York and Sydney, can beseen for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the shipsupon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of theCity. And surely some surmise of what our River is comes to a few ofthat multitude who cross London Bridge every day? They favour the eastside of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a pause tostare overside to the Pool. Why do they? Ships are there, it is true, but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up whichtheir cargo is hauled piece-meal to vanish instantly into mid-aircaverns; London absorbs all they have as morsels. Anyhow, it is thebusiness of ships. The people on the bridge watch another life below, with its strange cries and mysterious movements. A leisurely wisp ofsteam rises from a steamer's funnel. She is alive and breathing, though motionless. The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in awinter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory ofa dark past. Looking at them intently, to give them a name, thewayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only bythe frail effort of his will. Once they were, but now, in some moods, they are merely remembered. Only the men busy on the deck of the shipbelow are real. Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots outnoiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition youfeel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow, and that all you people onit are being drawn unresisting into that lower world of shades. Yourelease yourself from this spell with an effort, and look at the facesof those who are beside you at the parapet. What are their thoughts?Do they know? Have they also seen the ghosts? Have they felt stirringa secret and forgotten desire, old memories, tales that were told?They move away and go to their desks, or to their homes in the suburbs. A vessel that has hauled into the fairway calls for the Tower Bridgegates to be opened for her. She is going. We watch the eastern miststake her from us. For we never are so passive and well-disciplined tothe things which compel us but rebellion comes at times--misgiving thatthere is a world beyond the one we know, regret that we never venturedand made no discovery, and that our time has been saved and not spent. The gates to the outer world close again. 

There, where that ship vanished, is the highway which brought thoseunknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere. It isour oldest road, and now has many bypaths. Near Poverty Corner is abuilding which recently was dismissed with a brief, humorous referencein a new guide to our City--a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, abrick front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station. Beyondits dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk isthe road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you wouldguess to be at the end of it. The train runs over a wilderness oftiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked andscored as though by a withering heat. Nothing grows there; nothingcould live there. Smoke still pours from it, as though it werevolcanic, from numberless vents. The region is without sap. Above itsexpanse project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapours dissolvinggreat areas. When the track descends slightly, you see cavities inthat cliff which runs parallel with your track. The desert is actuallyburrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation. Somethingdoes live there. That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunneledand inhabited. The unlikely serrations and ridges with the smokemoving over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen. It is the beginning of Dockland. That the life is in upright beings, each with independent volition and a soul; that it is not an amorphousmovement, flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the ideaof height, of rising, it is difficult to believe. It has not beenbelieved. If life, you protest, is really there, has any purpose whichis better than that of extending worm-like through the underground, then why, at intervals, is there not an upheaval, a geyser-like burst, a plain hint from a power usually pent, but liable to go skywards? Butthat is for the desert to answer. As by mocking chance the desertitself almost instantly shows what possibilities are hidden within it. The train roars unexpectedly over a viaduct, and below is a deep hollowfilled with light, with a floor of water, and a surprise of ships. Howdid that white schooner get into such an enclosure? Is freedom nearerhere than we thought?

The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity ofgasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which cabbage fields inlong spokes radiate from the train and revolve. There is the grotesquesuggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps in anondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The journeyends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on the farside by the rigging and smoke-stacks of great liners. There is nodoubt about it now. At the corner of one shed, sheltering from theweather, is a group of brown men in coloured rags, first seen in thegloom because of the whites of their eyes. What we remember of such aday is that it was half of night, and the wind hummed in the cordage, and swayed wildly the loose gear aloft. Towering hulls were rangeddown each side of a lagoon that ended in vacancy. The rigging andfunnels of the fleet were unrelated; those ships were phantom andmonstrous. They seemed on too great a scale to be within humancontrol. We felt diminished and a little fearful, as among the loomingurgencies of a dream. The forms were gigantic but vague, and they wereseen in a smother of the elements; and their sounds, deep and mournful, were like the warnings of something alien, yet without form, which weknew was adverse, but could not recall when awake again. We remember, that day, a few watchers insecure on an exposed dockhead that projectedinto a sullen dreariness of river and mud which could have been thefinish of the land. At the end of a creaking hawser was a steamercanting as she backed to head downstream--now she was exposed to agreat adventure--the tide rapid and noisy on her plates, the reek fromher funnel sinking over the water. And from the dockhead, in thefuddle of a rain-squall, we were waving a handkerchief, probably to thewrong man, till the vessel went out where all was one--rain, river, mud, and sky, and the future. 

It is afterwards that so strange an ending to a brief journey from aCity station is seen to have had more in it than the time-table, hurriedly scanned, gave away. Or it would be remembered as strange, ifthe one who had to make that journey as much as thought of it again;for perhaps to a stranger occupied with more important matters it waspassed as being quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and ratherdismal, the usual boredom of a duty. Its strangeness depends, verylikely, as much on an idle and squandering mind as on the ships, theRiver, and the gasometers. Yet suppose you first saw the River fromBlackwall Stairs, in the days when the windows of the _ArtichokeTavern_, an ancient, weather-boarded house with benches outside, stilllooked towards the ships coming in! And how if then, one evening, youhad seen a Blackwall liner haul out for the Antipodes while her crewsang a chanty! It might put another light on the River, but a light, Iwill admit, which others should not be expected to see, and if theylooked for it now might not discover, for it is possible that it hasvanished, like the old tavern. It is easy to persuade ourselves that amatter is made plain by the light in which we prefer to see it, for itis our light. 

One day, I remember, a boy had to take a sheaf of documents to a vesselloading in the London Dock. She was sailing that tide. It was a hotJuly noon. It is unlucky to send a boy, who is marked by all the omensfor a City prisoner, to that dock, for it is one of the best of itskind. He had not been there before. There was an astonishing vista, once inside the gates, of sherry butts and port casks. On theflagstones were pools of wine lees. There was an unforgettable smell. It was of wine, spices, oakum, wool, and hides. The sun made it worse, but the boy, I think, preferred it strong. After wandering along manyold quays, and through the openings of dark sheds that, on so sunny aday, were stored with cool night and cubes and planks of gold, he foundhis ship, the _Mulatto Girl_. She was for the Brazils. Now it isclear that one even wiser in shipping affairs than a boy would haveexpected to see a craft that was haughty and portentous when bound forthe Brazils, a ship that looked equal to making a coast of that kind. There she was, her flush deck well below the quay wall. A ladder wentdown to her, for she was no more than a schooner of a little over onehundred tons. If that did not look like the beginning of one of thosevoyages reputed to have ended with the Elizabethans, then I am tryingto convey a wrong impression. On the deck of the _Mulatto Girl_ washer master, in shirt and trousers and a remarkable straw hat more likea canopy, bending over to discharge some weighty words into the hatch. He rose and looked up at the boy on the quay, showing then a taut blackbeard and formidable eyes. With his hands on his hips, he surveyed fora few seconds, without speaking, the messenger above. Then he talkedbusiness, and more than legitimate business. "Do you want to come?" heasked, and smiled. "Eh?" He stroked his beard. (The Brazils and all!A ship like that!) "There's a berth for you. Come along, my son. "And observe what we may lose through that habit of ours of uncriticalobedience to duty; see what may leave us for ever in that fatal pause, caused by the surprise of the challenge to our narrow experience andknowledge, the pause in which we allow habit to overcome adventurousinstinct! I never heard again of the _Mulatto Girl_. I could notexpect to. Something, though, was gained that day. It cannot benamed. It is of no value. It is, you may have guessed, that verylight which it has been admitted may since have gone out. 

Well, nobody who has ever surprised that light in Dockland will bepersuaded that it is not there still, and will remain. But what couldstrangers see of it? The foreshore to them is the unending monotony ofgrey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always reticent andsullen, that might never have seen the stars nor heard of good luck;and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a high gasbracket on a dank wall in solitude, its glass broken, and the flamewithin it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned and crippled mothtrying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and the wind. The narrowand forbidding by-path under that glim, a path intermittent anddepending on the weight of the night which is trying to blot it outaltogether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs. Prince Rupert once went thatway. The ketch _Nonsuch_, Captain Zachary Gillam, was then lying justoff, about to make the voyage which established the Hudson's BayCompany. 

It is a path, like all those stairs and ways that go down to the River, which began when human footsteps first outlined London with roughtracks. It is a path by which the descendants of those primitives wentout of London, when projecting the original enterprise of theirforbears from Wapping to the Guinea Coast and Manitoba. Why should webelieve it is different today? The sea does not change, and seamen arewhat they were if their ships are not those we admired many years agoin the India Docks. It is impossible for those who know them to seethose moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow theRiver, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to theDeptford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street toLimehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them. Whatcould they be to strangers? Mud, taverns, pawnshops, neglected andobscure churches, and houses that might know nothing but ill-fortune. 

So they are; but those ways hold more than the visible shades. Thewarehouses of that meandering chasm which is Wapping High Street arelike weathered and unequal cliffs. It is hard to believe sunlight everfalls there. It could not get down. It is not easy to believe theRiver is near. It seldom shows. You think at times you hear thedistant call of a ship. But what would that be? Something in themind. It happened long ago. You, too, are a ghost left by thevanished past. There is a man above at a high loophole, the topmostcave of a warehouse which you can see has been exposed to commerce andthe elements for ages; he pulls in a bale pendulous from the cable of aderrick. Below him one of the horses of a van tosses its nose-bag. There is no other movement. A carman leans against an iron post, andcuts bread and cheese with a clasp-knife. It was curious to hear thatsteamer call, but we knew what it was. It was from a ship that wentdown, we have lately heard, in the War, and her spectre reminds us, from a voyage which is over, of men we shall see no more. But the callcomes again just where the Stairs, like a shining wedge of day, holdthe black warehouses asunder, and give us the light of the River and arelease to the outer world. And there, moving swiftly across thebrightness, goes a steamer outward bound. 

That was what we wanted to know. She confirms it, and her signal, towhomever it was made, carries farther than she would guess. It isunderstood. The past for some of us now is our only populous andhabitable world, invisible to others, but alive with whispers for us. Yet the sea still moves daily along the old foreshore, and ships stillcome and go, and do not, like us, run aground on what now is not there. 

II. A Midnight Voyage

Our voyage was to begin at midnight from near Limehouse Hole. The hourand the place have been less promising in the beginning of many astrange adventure. Where the voyage would end could not be said, except that it would be in Bugsby's Reach, and at some time or other. It was now ten o'clock, getting towards sailing time, and the way tothe foreshore was unlighted and devious. Yet it was somewhere near. This area of still and empty night railed off from the glare of theCommercial Road would be Limehouse Church. It is foolish to supposeyou know the Tower Hamlets because you have seen them by day. Theychange. They are like those uncanny folk of the fables. At night, wonderfully, they become something else, take another form, which hasnever been more than glimpsed, and another character, so fabulous andsecret that it will support the tales of the wildest romanticist, whorightly feels that if such yarns were told of 'Frisco or Timbuctoo theymight get found out. Was this the church? Three Chinamen weredisputing by its gate. Perhaps they were in disagreement as to wherethe church would be in daylight. 

At a corner where the broad main channel of electric light ended, andperplexity began, a policeman stood, and directed me into chaos. "Anywhere, " he explained, "anywhere down there will do. " I saw anarrow alley in the darkness, which had one gas lamp and many cobbledstones. At the bottom of the lane were three iron posts. Beyond theposts a bracket lamp showed a brick wall, and in the wall was an archso full of gloom that it seemed impassable, except to a steady draughtof cold air that might have been the midnight itself entering Limehousefrom its own place. At the far end of that opening in the wall wasnothing. I stood on an invisible wooden platform and looked intonothing with no belief that a voyage could begin from there. Before methen should have been the Thames, at the top of the flood tide. It wasnot seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters ofbrilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars whichdetached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void, sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines oftrembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood onthe verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quiveringlight did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travellingroad--that chasm before me was black because it was filled with fluidnight. Night, I discovered suddenly, was in irresistible movement. Itwas swift and heavy. It was unconfined. It was welling higher todouse our feeble glims and to founder London, built of shadows on itsboundary. It moved with frightful quietness. It seemed confident ofits power. It swirled and eddied by the piles of the wharf, and thereit found a voice, though that was muffled; yet now and then it brokeinto levity for a moment, as at some shrouded and alien jest. 

There were sounds which reached me at last from the opposite shore, faint with distance and terror. The warning from an unseen steamergoing out was as if a soul, crossing this Styx, now knew all. There isno London on the Thames, after sundown. Most of us know very little ofthe River by day. It might then be no more native to our capital thanthe Orientals who stand under the Limehouse gas lamps at night. Itsurprises us. We turn and look at it from our seat in a tram, andwatch a barge going down on the ebb--it luckily misses the piers ofBlackfriars Bridge--as if a door had unexpectedly opened on a mystery, revealing another world in London, and another sort of life than ours. It is as uncanny as if we had sensed another dimension of space. Thetram gets among the buildings again, and we are reassured by theconfined and arid life we know. But what a light and width had thatsurprising world where we saw a barge drifting as leisurely as thoughthe narrow limits which we call reality were there unknown!

But after dark there is not only no River, when you stand where by dayis its foreshore; there is no London. Then, looking out fromLimehouse, you might be the only surviving memory of a city that hasvanished. You might be solitary among the unsubstantial shades, forabout you are only comets passing through space, and inscrutableshapes; your neighbours are Cassiopeia and the Great Bear. 

But where was our barge, the _Lizzie_? I became aware abruptly of theskipper of this ship for our midnight voyage among the stars. He hadhis coat-collar raised. The _Lizzie_, he said, was now free of themud, and he was going to push off. Sitting on a bollard, and pullingout his tobacco-pouch, he said he hadn't had her out before. Sorryhe'd got to do it now. She was a bitch. She bucked her other manoverboard three days ago. They hadn't found him yet. They found herdown by Gallions Reach. Jack Jones was the other chap. Old Rarzo theycalled him. Took more than a little to give him that colour. But hewas All Right. They were going to give a benefit concert for his wifeand kids. Jack's brother was going to sing; good as Harry Lauder, heis. 

Below us a swirl of water broke into mirth, instantly suppressed. Wecould see the _Lizzie_ now. The ripples slipped round her to the tuneof they-'avn't-found-'im-yet, they-'avn't-found-'im-yet-they 'avn't. The skipper and crew rose, fumbling at his feet for a rope. There didnot seem to be much of the _Lizzie_. She was but a little raft todrift out on those tides which move among the stars. "Now's yourchance, " said her crew, and I took it, on all fours. The last remnantof London was then pushed from us with a pole. We were launched onnight, which had begun its ebb towards morning. 

The punt sidled away obliquely for mid-stream. I stood at one end ofit. The figure of Charon could be seen at the other, of longacquaintance with this passage, using his sweep with the indifferenceof habitude. Perhaps it was not Charon. Yet there was someobstruction to the belief that we were bound for no more than thesteamer _Aldebaran_, anchored in Bugsby's Reach. From the low deck ofthe barge it was surprising that the River, whose name was Night, wascontent with the height to which it had risen. Perhaps it was takingits time. It might soon receive an influx from space, rise then in asilent upheaval, and those low shadows that were London, even now halffoundered, would at once go. This darkness was an irresponsible power. It was the same flood which had sunk Knossos and Memphis. It wastranquil, indifferent, knowing us not, reckoning us all one with theSumerians. They were below it. It had risen above them. Now the timehad come when it was laving the base of London. 

The crew cried out to us that over there was the entrance to the WestIndia Dock. We knew that place in another life. But should Charonjoke with us? We saw only chaos, in which the beams from a reputedcity glimmered without purpose. 

The shadow of the master of our black barge pulled at his sweep with aslow confidence that was fearful amid what was sightless and unknown. His pipe glowed, as with the profanity of an immortal to whom eternityand infinity are of the usual significance. Then a red and green eyeappeared astern, and there was a steady throbbing as if some monsterwere in pursuit of us. A tug shaped near us, drew level, and exposedwith its fires, as it went ahead, a radiant _Lizzie_ on an area ofwater that leaped in red flames. The furnace door of the tug was shut, and at once we were blind. "Hold hard, " yelled our skipper, and the_Lizzie_ slipped into the turmoil of the tug's wake. 

There would be Millwall. The tug and the turmoil had gone. We werealone again in the beyond. There was no sound now but the waterspattering under our craft, and the fumbling and infrequent splash ofthe sweep. Once we heard the miniature bark of a dog, distinct andfine, as though distance had refined it as well as reduced it. We werenearly round the loop the River makes about Millwall, and this unknownregion before us was Blackwall Reach by day, and Execution Dock used tobe dead ahead. To the east, over the waters, red light explodedfan-wise and pulsed on the clouds latent above, giving them momentaryform. It was as though, from the place where it starts, the dawn hadbeen released too soon, and was at once recalled. "The gas works, "said the skipper. 

Still the slow drift, quite proper to those at large in eternity. Butthis, I was told, was the beginning of Bugsby's Reach. It was first apremonition, then a doubt, and at last a distinct tremor in thedarkness ahead of us. A light appeared, grew nearer, higher, andbrighter, and there was a suspicion of imminent mass. "Watch her, "warned the skipper. Watch what? There was nothing to watch but thedark and some planets far away, one of them red. The menacing onestill grew higher and brighter. It came at us. A wall instantlyappeared to overhang us, with a funnel and masts above it, and ourskipper's yell was lost in the thunder of a churning propeller. Theair shuddered, and a siren hooted in the heavens. A long, dark bodyseemed minutes going by us, and our skipper's insults were taken insilence by her superior deck. She left us riotous in her wake, and wecontinued our journey dancing our indignation on the uneasy deck of the_Lizzie_. 

The silent drift recommenced, and we neared a region of unearthlylights and the smell of sulphur, where aerial skeletons, vast andblack, and columns and towers, alternately glowed and vanished as thedoors of infernal fires were opened and shut. We drew abreast of thisphantom place where names and darkness battled amid gigantic ruin. Charon spoke. "They're the coal wharves, " he said. 

The lights of a steamer rose in the night below the wharves, but it wasour own progress which brought them nearer. She was anchored. We madeout at last her shape, but at first she did not answer our hail. 

"Hullo, _Aldebaran_, " once more roared our captain. 

There was no answer. In a minute we should be by her, and too late. 

"Barge ahoy!" came a voice. "Look out for a line. "

III. A Shipping Parish

What face this shipping parish shows to a stranger I do not know. Iwas never a stranger to it. I should suppose it to be a face almostvacant, perhaps a little conventionally picturesque, for it is grey andseamed. It might be even an altogether expressionless mask, staring atnothing. Anyhow, there must be very little to be learned from it, forthose bright young cultured strangers, admirable in their eagerness forsocial service, who come and live with us for a time, so that they mayunderstand the life of the poor, never seem to have made anything ofus. They say they have; they speak even with some amount of assurance, at places where the problem which is us is examined aloud by confidentpoliticians and churchfolk. But I think they know well enough thatthey always failed to get anywhere near what mind we have. There is areason for it, of course. Think of honest and sociable Mary Ann, ofPottles Rents, E. , having been alarmed by the behaviour of goodsociety, as it is betrayed in the popular picture Press, making oddcalls in Belgravia (the bells for visitors, too), to bring souls to God. 

My parish, to strangers, must be opaque with its indifference. Itstares beyond the interested visitor, in the way the sad anddisillusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger would notunderstand if he were told. He has reason, therefore, to say we aredull. And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be anamorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would bedistressing to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrifying, asall that is alive but inexplicable must be. No more conscious purposeshows in our existence than is seen in the coral polyp. We just go onincreasing and forming more cells. Overlooking our wilderness of tilesin the rain--we get more than a fair share of rain, or else the sadquality of wet weather is more noticeable in such a place as ours--itseems a dismal affair to present for the intelligent labours of mankindfor generations. Could nothing better have been done than that? Whathave we been busy about?

Well, what are people busy about anywhere? Human purpose here has beenas blind and sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to any fixedstar, lucky to fill the need of the day, building without any distantdesign, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered. Aselsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past. Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formlessaccretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour;and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of thisarea of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during itsday on the piled strata of the dead. Yet this is the reef to which Iam connected by tissue and bone. Cut the kind of life you find inPoplar and I must bleed. I cannot detach myself, and write of it. Like any other atom, I would show the local dirt, if examined. My handmoves, not loyally so much as instinctively, to impulses which comefrom beneath and so out of a stranger's knowledge; out of my own, too, largely. 

Is that all? Not quite. Where you, if you came to us, would see butan unremarkable level of East-Enders, much like other Londoners, withno past worth recording, and no future likely to be worth a book ofgold, I see, looking to the past, a spectral show of fine ships andbrave affairs, and good men forgotten, or almost forgotten, and movingamong the plainer shades of its foreground some ghosts well known tome. I think they were what are called failures in life. And turningfrom those shades, and their work which went the way of all forgottenstuff before the inexorable tide of affairs, I look forward fromPoplar, unreasonably hopeful (for so we are made), though this timeinto the utter dark, for the morning that shall show us the moreenduring towers of the city of our dreams, the heart of the commune, the radiant spires of the city that shall be lovelier than that dearcity of Cecrops. 

But for those whose place it is not, memories and dreams can do nothingto transform it. Dockland would seem to others as any alien town wouldseem to me. There is something, though, you must grant us, a heritagepeculiarly ours. Amid our packed tenements, into the dark mass wherepoorer London huddles as my shipping parish, are set our docks. Embayed in the obscurity are those areas of captured day, reservoirs oflight brimmed daily by the tides of the sun, silver mirrors throughwhich one may leave the dark floor of Poplar for radiant other worlds. We have our ships and docks, and the River at Blackwall when night andthe flood come together, and walls and roofs which topmasts and funnelssurmount, suggestions of a vagabondage hidden in what seemed so arid acommonplace desert. These are of first importance. They are our waysof escape. We are not kept within a division of the map. And Orion, he strides over our roofs on bright winter nights. We have theimmortals. At the most, your official map sets us only lateral bounds. The heavens here are as high as elsewhere. Our horizon is beyond ourown limits. In this faithful chronicle of our parish I must tell ofour boundaries as I know them. They are not so narrow as you mightthink. Maps cannot be so carefully planned, nor walls built highenough nor streets confined and strict enough, to hold within limitsour lusty and growing population of thoughts. There is no census youcan take which will give you forewarning of what is growing here, ofthe way we increase and expand. Take care. Some day, when we discoverthe time has come for it, we shall tell our numbers, and be sure youwill then learn the result. Travelling through our part of thecountry, you see but our appearance. You go, and report us casually toyour friends, and forget us. But when you feel the ground moving underyour feet, that will be us. 

From my high window in central Dockland, as from a watch tower, I lookout over a tumbled waste of roofs and chimneys, a volcanic desert, inhabited only by sparrows and pigeons. Humanity burrows in swarmsbelow that surface of crags, but only faint cries tell me that therocks are caverned and inhabited, that life flows there unseen throughsubterranean galleries. Often, when the sunrise over the roofs iscertainly the coming of Aurora, as though then the first illuminationof the sky heralded the veritable dayspring for which we look, and thegods were nearly here, I have watched for that crust beneath, whichseals the sleepers under, to heave and roll, to burst, and for releasedhumanity to pour through fractures, from the lower dark, to be renewedin the fires of the morning. Nothing has happened yet. But I amconfident it would repay society to appoint another watcher when I amgone, to keep an eye on the place. 

Right below my window there are two ridges running in parallel jags ofchimneys, with a crevasse between them to which I can see no bottom. But a roadway is there. From an acute angle of the window a corniceoverhangs a sheer fall of cliff. That is as near the ground as can begot from my outlook. Several superior peaks rise out of thewilderness, where the churches are; and beyond the puzzling middledistance, where smoke dissolves all form, loom the dock warehouses, acontinuous range of far dark heights. I have thoughts of a venturesomeand lonely journey by moonlight, in and out of the chimney stacks, andall the way to the distant mountains. It looks inviting, and possible, by moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window, Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted countryof a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful andprotean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of theshadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them insurprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, anddissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the longrun to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change tillchange is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You seethat Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. Idoubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ironic display ontheir roofs. 

My eyes more frequently go to one place in that high country. In thatdistant line of warehouses is a break, and there occasionally I see themasts and spars of a tall ship, and I remember that beyond my darkhorizon of warehouses is the path down which she has come from theIndies to Blackwall. I said we were not inland. Cassiopeia is in thatdirection, and China over there. 

For my outlook is more than the centre of Dockland. I call it thecentre of the world. Our high road is part of the main thoroughfarefrom Kensington to Valparaiso. Every wanderer must come this way atleast once in his life. We are the hub whence all roads go to thecircumference. A ship does not go down but we hear the cry ofdistress, and the house of a neighbour rocks on the flood and is lost, casting its people adrift on the blind tides. 

Think of some of our street names--Malabar Street, Amoy Place, NankinStreet, Pekin Street, Canton Street. And John Company has left itsmarks. You pick up hints of the sea here as you pick old shells out ofdunes. We have, still nourishing in a garden, John Company's Chapel ofSt. Matthias, a fragment of a time that was, where now the vigorouscommercial life of the Company shows no evidence whatever of itsprevious urgent importance. Founded in the time of the Commonwealth asa symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked upfrom the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired areminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapelhas survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scatteredthe engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter forantiquaries. So little do men really change. They always leave theirtemples, whether they lived in Poplar or Nineveh. Only the names oftheir gods change. The Chapel at Poplar it was then, when thisshipping parish had no docks, and the nearest church was over thefields to Stepney. Our vessels then lay in the river. We got ourfirst dock, that of the West India Merchants, at the beginning of lastcentury. A little later the East India Dock was built by John Company. Then another phase began to reshape Dockland. There came a time whenthe Americans looked in a fair way, sailing ahead fast with thewonderful clippers Donald McKay was building at Boston, to show us atow rope. The best sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, andthe Thames building yards were working to create the ideal clipperwhich should beat them. This really was the last effort of sails, forsteamers were on the seas, and the Americans were actually makingheroic efforts to smother them with canvas. Mr. Green, of Poplar, worried over those Boston craft, declared we must be first again, andfirst we were. But both Boston and Poplar, in their efforts to perfectan old idea, did not see a crude but conquering notion taking form tomagnify and hasten both commerce and war. 

But they were worth doing, those clippers, and worth remembering. Theysail clear into our day as imperishable memories. They still live, forthey did far more than carry merchandise. When an old mariner speaksof the days of studding sails it is not the precious freight, the realpurpose of his ships, which animates his face. What we always rememberafterwards is not the thing we did, or tried to do, but the friends whowere about us at the time. But our stately ships themselves, with ourRiver their home, which gave Poplar's name, wherever they went, a ringon the counter like a sound guinea, at the most they are now but planksbearded with sea grass, lost in ocean currents, sighted only by thealbatross. 

Long ago nearly every home in Dockland treasured a lithographicportrait of one of the beauties, framed and hung where visitors couldsee it as soon as they entered the door. Each of us knew one of them, her runs and her records, the skipper and his fads, the owner and hisprejudice about the last pennyworth of tar. She was not a transporterto us, an earner of freights, something to which was attached a profitand loss account and an insurance policy. She had a name. She was asentient being, perhaps noble, perhaps wilful; she might have anyquality of character, even malice. I have seen hands laid on her withaffection in dock, when those who knew her were telling me of her ways. 

To few of the newer homes among the later streets of Dockland is thatbeautiful lady's portrait known. Here and there it survives, part ofthe flotsam which has drifted through the years with grandmother'ssandalwood chest, the last of the rush-bottomed chairs, and thelacquered tea-caddy. I well remember a room from which such survivalswere saved when the household ship ran on a coffin, and foundered. Itwas a front parlour in one of the streets with an Oriental name; which, I cannot be expected to remember, for when last I was in that room Iwas lifted to sit on one of its horsehair chairs, its seat like ahedgehog, and I was cautioned to sit still. It was rather a long dropto the floor from a chair for me in those days, and though sittingstill was hard, sliding part of the way would have been much worse. That was a room for holy days, too, a place for good behaviour, andboots profaned it. Its door was nearly always shut and locked, andonly the chance formal visit of respect-worthy strangers brought downits key from the top shelf of the kitchen dresser. That key was seldomused for relatives, except at Christmas, or when one was dead. Theroom was always sombre. Light filtered into it through curtains ofwire gauze, fixed in the window by mahogany frames. Over the door bywhich you entered was the picture of an uncle, too young and jolly forthat serious position, I thought then, with his careless neckcloth, andhis cap pulled down over one eye. The gilt moulding was gone from acorner of the picture--the only flaw in the prim apartment--for oncethat portrait fell to the floor, and on the very day, it was guessed, that his ship must have foundered. 

A round table set on a central thick leg having a three-clawed foot wasin that chamber, covered with a cloth on which was worked a picturefrom the story of Ruth. But only puzzling bits of the latter were tobe seen, for on the circumference of the table-cover were books, placedat precise distances apart, and in the centre was a huge Bible, with abrass clasp. With many others my name was in the Bible, and mybirthday, and a space left blank for the day of my death. Reflected inthe pier-glass which doubled the room were the portraits in oils of mygrandparents, looking wonderfully young, as you may have noticed isoften the case in people belonging to ancient history, as though, strangely enough, people were the same in those remote days, exceptthat they wore different clothes. 

I have often sat on the chair, and when patience had inured me to thespines of the area I occupied, looked at the reflections in the mirrorof those portraits, for they seemed more distant so, and in aperspective according to their age, and became really my grandparents, in a room, properly, of another world, which could be seen, but wasnot. A room no one could enter any more. I remember a black sofa, which smelt of dust, an antimacassar over its head. That sofa wouldwake to squeak tales if I stood on it to inspect the model of a ship inyellow ivory, resting on a wall-bracket above. There were many oldshells in the polished brass fender, some with thick orange lips andspotted backs; others were spirals of mother-o'-pearl, which tookdifferent colours for every way you held them. You could get the onlysound in the room by putting the shells to your ear. Like the peopleof the portraits, it was impossible to believe the shells had everlived. The inside of the grate was filled with white paper, and thetrickles of fine black dust which rested in its crevices would startand run stealthily when people walked in the next room. Over thelooking-glass there hung a pair of immense buffalo horns, with a pieceof curly black hair dividing them which looked like the skin of ourretriever dog. Above the horns was the picture of "The Famous TeaClipper _Oberon_, setting her Studding Sails off the Lizard"; but sohigh was the print, and so faint--for the picture, too, was old--thatsome one grown up had to tell me all about it. 

The clipper _Oberon_ long since sailed to the Isle-of-No-Land-at-All, and the room in which her picture hung has gone also, like oldDockland, and is now no more than something remembered. The clipper'spicture went with the wreckage, when the room was strewn, and I expectin that house today there is a photograph of a steamer with two funnels. 

Nothing conjures back that room so well as the recollection of astrange odour which fell from it when its door opened, as thoughsomething bodiless passed as we entered. There was never anything inthe room which alone could account for the smell, for it had in itsomething of the sofa, which was old and black, and of the lacqueredtea-caddy, within the lid of which was the faint ghost of a principleindefinably ancient and rare; and there was in it, too, something ofthe shells. But you could never find where the smell really came from. I have tried, and know. A recollection of that strange dusky fragrancebrings back the old room on a summer afternoon, so sombre that themahogany sideboard had its own reddish light, so quiet that the clockcould be heard ticking in the next room; time, you could hear, goingleisurely. There would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless atomsswimming in it, slanting from a corner of the window to brighten apatch of carpet. Two flies would be hovering under the ceiling. Sometimes they would dart at a tangent to hover in another place. Iused to wonder what they lived on. You felt secure there, knowing itwas old, but seeing things did not alter, as though the world wereestablished and content, desiring no new thing. I did not know thatthe old house, even then, quiet and still as it seemed, was actuallyrocking on the flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, sick withanxiety and bewilderment in guiding his home in the years he did notunderstand, which his experience had never charted, was sinkingnerveless at his helm. For he heard, when his children did not, thepremonition of breakers in seas having no landmark that he knew; feltthe trend and push of new and inimical forces, and currents thatcarried him helpless, whither he would not go, but must, heartbroken, into the uproar and welter of the modern. 

I have been told that London east of the Tower has no history worthmentioning, and it is true that sixteenth-century prints show the townto finish just where the Dock of St. Katherine is now. Beyond that, and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs tomark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were veryextensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerabledistance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tideswas a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which nowbegins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglianseaboard. Once it serpentined as far as the upper Pool, disappearingas the wharves and docks were built to accommodate London's increasingcommerce. There is no doubt, then, that the Lower Thames parishes arereally young; but, when we are reminded that they have no history worthmentioning, it may be understood that the historian is simply notinterested enough to mention it. 

So far as age goes my shipping parish cannot compare with a cathedralcity; but antiquity is not the same as richness of experience. Oneremembers the historic and venerable tortoise. He is old enough, compared with us. But he has had nothing so varied and lively as theleast of us can show. Most of his reputed three hundred years issleep, no doubt, and the rest vegetables. In the experience ofWapping, Poplar, Rotherhithe, Limehouse, and Deptford, when they reallycame to life, there was precious little sleep, and no vegetables worthmentioning. They were quick and lusty. There they stood, longknee-deep and busy among their fleets, sometimes rising to cheer when agreater adventure was sailing or returning, some expedition that wasoff to find further avenues through the Orient or the Americas, or elsea broken craft bringing back tragedy from the Arctic; ship after ship;great captain after great captain. No history worth mentioning! Thereare Londoners who cannot taste the salt. Yet, no doubt, it isdifficult for younger London to get the ocean within its horizon. Thememory of the _Oberon_, that famous ship, is significant to me, for shehas gone, with all her fleet, and some say she took Poplar's best withher. Once we were a famous shipping parish. Now we are but part ofthe East End of London. The steamers have changed us. The tides donot rise high enough today, and our shallow waters cannot make home forthe new keels. 

But to the old home now the last of the sailing fleet is loyal. Wehave enough still to show what once was there; the soft gradations of aship's entrance, rising into bows and bowsprit, like the form of acomber at its limit, just before it leaps forward in collapse. Themounting spars, alive and braced. The swoop and lift of the sheer, therich and audacious colours, the strange flags and foreign names. SouthSea schooner, whaling barque from Hudson's Bay, the mahogany ship fromHonduras, the fine ships and barques that still load for the antipodesand 'Frisco. Every season they diminish, but some are still with us. At Tilbury, where the modern liners are, you get wall sides mountinglike great hotels with tier on tier of decks, and funnels soaring highto dominate the day. There the prospect of masts is a line of derrickpoles. But still in the upper docks is what will soon have gone forever from London, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with sometimes awhite sail floating in it like a cloud. We had a Russian barquentinethere yesterday. I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships, the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transversespars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered liftskywards of main and mizzen poles. The model of this Russian ship wasas memorable as a Greek statue. It is a ship's sheer which givesloveliness to her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, finelypoised, sure of herself, in profile. She was so slight a body, so talland slender, but standing alert and illustriously posed, there wasimplied in her slenderness a rare strength and swiftness. And to herbeauty of line there went a richness of colour which made our dullparish a notable place. She was of wood, painted white. Her mastswere of pine, veined with amber. Her white hull, with the drenchingsof the seas, had become shot with ultramarine shadows, as thoughtinctured with the virtue of the ocean. The verdigris of her sheathingwas vivid as green light; and the languid dock water, the colour ofjade, glinting round her hull, was lambent with hues not its own. Youcould believe there was a soft radiation from that ship's sides whichfired the water about her, but faded when far from her sides, adelicate and faery light which soon expired. 

Such are our distinguished visitors in Dockland, though now they cometo us with less frequency. If the skipper of the _Oberon_ could nowlook down the Dock Road from the corner by North Street, what he wouldlook for first would be, not, I am sure, what compelled the electrictrams, but for the entrance of the East Dock and its familiar tangle ofspars. He would not find it. The old dock is there, but a lagoonasleep, and but few vessels sleeping with it. The quays are vacant, except for the discarded lumber of ships, sun-dried boats, rustedcables and anchors, and a pile of broken davits. The older dock of theWest India Merchants is almost the same. Yet even I have seen thebowsprits and jib-booms of the Australian packets diminish down thequays of the East Dock as an arcade; and of that West Dock there is aboy who well remembers its quays buried under the largess of thetropics and the Spanish Main, where now, through the colonnades of itswarehouse supports, the vistas are empty. Once you had to squeezesideways through the stacked merchandise. There were huge hogsheads ofsugar and hillocks of coconuts. Molasses and honey escaped to spread aviscid carpet which held your feet. The casual prodigality of itexpanded the mind. Certainly this earth must be a big and cheerfulplace if it could spread its treasures thus wide and deep in a publicplace under the sky. It corrected the impression got from the retailshops for any penniless youngster, with that pungent odour of sugarcrushed under foot, with its libations of syrup poured from the plentyof the sunny isles. Today the quays are bare and deserted, and grassrims the stones of the footway, as verdure does the neglected stonecovers in a churchyard. In the dusk of a winter evening the high andsilent warehouses which enclose the mirrors of water enclose too anaccentuation of the dusk. The water might be evaporating in shadows. The hulls of the few ships, moored beside the walls, become absorbed inthe dark. Night withdraws their substance. What the solitary wayfarersees then is the incorporeal presentment of ships. Dockland expires. The living and sounding day is elsewhere, lighting the new things onwhich the young are working. Here is the past, deep in the obscurityfrom which time has taken the sun, where only memory can go, and seesbut the ineffaceable impression of what once was there. 

There is a notable building in our Dock Road, the Board of Tradeoffices, retired a little way from the traffic behind a screen of planetrees. Not much more than its parapet appears behind the foliage. Bythose offices, on fine evenings, I find one of our ancients, CaptainTom Bowline. Why he favours the road there I do not know. It would bea reasonable reason, but occult. The electric trams and motor busesannoy him. And not one of the young stokers and deck-hands just ashoreand paid off, or else waiting at a likely corner for news of a ship, could possibly know the skipper and his honourable records. They donot know that once, in that office, Tom was a famous and respectedfigure. There he stands at times, outside the place which knew himwell, but has forgotten him, wearing his immemorial reefer jacket, hisnotorious tall white hat and his humorous trousers--short, round, substantial columns--with a broad line of braid down each leg. 

His face is weather-stained still, and though his hair is white, it hasthe form of its early black and abundant vitality. As long ago as 1885he landed from his last ship, and has been with us since, watching thelandmarks go. "The sea, " he said to me once, "the sea has gone. WhenI look down this road and see it so empty--(the simple truth is it wasnoisy with traffic)--I feel I've overstayed my time allowance. Myships are firewood and wreckage, my owners are only funny portraits inoffices that run ten-thousand-ton steamers, and the boys are bones. Poplar? This isn't Poplar. I feel like Robinson Crusoe--only I can'tfind a footprint in the place. "

It is for the young to remember there is no decay, though change, sometimes called progress, resembles it, especially when your work isfinished and you are only waiting and looking on. When Captain Tom isin that mood we go to smoke a pipe at a dockhead. It will be high tideif we are in luck, and the sun will be going down to give our Rivermajesty, and a steamer will be backing into the stream, outward bound. The quiet of a fine evening for Tom, and the great business of shipsand the sea for me. We see the steamer's captain and its pilot leaningover the bridge, looking aft towards the River. I think the size oftheir vessel is a little awful to Tom. He never had to guide so manythousand tons of steel and cargo into a crowded waterway. But thosetwo young fellows above know nothing of the change; they came with it. They are under their spell, thinking their world, as once Tom did his, established and permanent. They are keeping easy pace with themovement, and so do not know of it. Tom, now at rest, sitting on apierhead bollard, sees the world leaving him, going ahead past hiscogitating tobacco smoke. Let it go. We, watching quietly from ourplace on the pier-head, are wiser than the moving world in one respect. We know it does not know whence it is moving, nor why. Well, perhapsits presiding god, who is determined the world shall go round, would befoolish to tell us. 

The sun has dropped behind the black serration of the western city. Now the River with all the lower world loses substance, becomesvaporous and unreal. Moving so fast then? But the definite skyremains, a hard dome of glowing saffron based on thin girders of ironclouds. The heaven alone is trite and plain. The wharves, thefactories, the ships, the docks, all the material evidence of hope andindustry, merge into a dim spectral show in which a few lights burn, fumbling with ineffectual beams in dissolution. Out on the River adark body moves past; it has bright eyes, and hoots dismally as it goes. 

There is a hush, as though at sunset the world had really resolved, andhad stopped moving. But from the waiting steamer looming over us, agigantic and portentous bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe, and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith. Yet the hum of the steamis too subdued a sound in the palpable and oppressive dusk to besignificant. Then a boatswain's pipe rends the heavy dark like thegleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from thesteamer's bridge. There is a sudden commotion, we hear the voiceagain, and answering cries, and by us, towards the black chasm of theRiver in which hover groups of moving planets, the mass of the steamerglides, its pale funnel mounting over us like a column. Out she goes, turning broadside on, a shadow sprinkled with stars, then makes slowway down stream, a travelling constellation occulting one after anotherall the fixed lights. 

Captain Tom knocks out his pipe on the heel of his boot, his eyes stillon the lights of the steamer. "Well, " says Tom, "they can still do it. They don't want any help old Tom could give aboard her. A good manthere. Where's she bound for, I wonder?"

Now who could tell him that? What a question to ask me. Did Tom everknow his real destination? Not he! And have I not watched Docklanditself in movement under the sun, easily mobile, from my window in itsmidst? Whither was it bound? Why should the old master mariner expectthe young to answer that? He is a lucky navigator who always finds hissky quite clear, and can set his course by the signs of uncloudedheavenly bodies, and so is sure of the port to which his steering willtake him. 

IV. The Heart's Desire. 

If the evening was one of those which seem longer than usual but stillhave far to go, it was once a custom in Millwall to find a pair ofboots of which it could be claimed that it was time they were mended, and to carry the artful parcel around to Mr. Pascoe. His cobbler'sshop was in a street that had the look of having retired from the hurryand press of London, aged, dispirited, and indifferent even to itsdefeat, and of waiting vacantly for what must come to elderly andshabby despondence. Each grey house in the street was distinguishedbut by its number and the ornament which showed between the muslincurtains of its parlour window. The home of the Jones's had ageranium, and so was different from one neighbour with a ship's modelin gypsum, and from the other whose sign was a faded photograph askewin its frame. On warm evenings some of the women would be sitting ontheir doorsteps, watching with dull faces their children at play, as ifexperience had told them more than they wanted to know, but that theyhad nothing to say about it. Beyond this street there was emptiness. It ended, literally, on a blind wall. It was easy for a wayfarer tofeel in that street that its life was caught. It was secluded from themain stream, and its children were a lively yet merely revolving eddy. They could not get out. When I first visited Mr. Pascoe, as there wasno window ornament to distinguish his place from the others, and hisnumber was missing, I made a mistake, and went next door. Through ahole drilled in that wrong door a length of cord was pendant, with agreasy knot at its end. Underneath the knot was chalked "Pull. " Ipulled. The door opened on a mass of enclosed night. From the streetit was hard to see what was there, so I went inside. What was theremight have been a cavern--narrow, obscure, and dangerous with dimobstructions. Some of the shadows were darker than others, because thecave ended, far-off, on a port-light, a small square of day framed inblack. Empty space was luminous beyond that cave. Becoming used tothe gloom I saw chains and cordage hanging from the unseen roof. Whatwas faintly like the prow of a boat shaped near. Then out from thelumber and suggestions of things a gnome approached me. "Y' want olePascoe? Nex' dore, guv'nor!" At that moment, in the square of brightday at the end of the darkness, the apparition of a ship silentlyappeared, and was gone again before my surprise. That open spacebeyond was London River. 

Next door, in a small room to which day and night were the same, Mr. Pascoe was always to be found bending over his hobbing foot, under atiny yellow fan of gaslight which could be heard making a tenuousshrilling whenever the bootmaker looked up, and ceased riveting. Whenhis head was bent over his task only the crown of a red and maturedcricketing cap, which nodded in time to his hammer, was presented toyou. When he paused to speak, and glanced up, he showed a face thatthe gas jet, with the aid of many secluded years, had tinctured withits own artificial hue, a face puckered through a long frowning intenton old boots. He wore an apron that had ragged gaps in it. He was afrail and dingy little man, and might never have had a mother, butcould have been born of that dusty workroom, to which he had been afaithful son all his life. It was a murky interior shut in from theday, a litter of petty tools and nameless rubbish on a ruinous bench, adisorder of dilapidated boots, that mean gas jet, a smell of leather;and there old Pascoe's hammer defiantly and rapidly attacked itscircumstances, driving home at times, and all unseen, more than thoserivets. If he rose to rake over his bench for material or a tool, hewent spryly, aided by a stick, but at every step his body heeled overbecause one leg was shorter than the other. Having found what hewanted he would wheel round, with a strange agility that was apparentlya consequence of his deformity, continuing his discourse, and drivinghis points into the air with his hammer, and so hobble back, stilltalking; still talking through his funny cap, as his neighbours used tosay of him. At times he convoluted aerial designs and free ideas withhis hammer, spending it aloft on matters superior to boots. The bootswere never noticed. Pascoe could revivify his dust. The glitter ofhis spectacles when he looked up might have been the sparkling of anardent vitality suppressed in his little body. 

The wall space of his room was stratified with shelves, where half-seenbottles and nondescript lumps were to be guessed at, like fossilsembedded in shadow. They had never been moved, and they never wouldbe. Hanging from a nail on one shelf was a framed lithograph of theship _Euterpe_, off S. Catherine's Point, July 21, 1849. On the shelfbelow the picture was a row of books. I never saw Pascoe look at them, and they could have been like the bottles, retained by a careful manbecause of the notion that some day they would come in handy. Once, when waiting for Pascoe, who was out getting a little beer, I glancedat the volumes, and supposed they bore some relation to the picture ofthe ship; perhaps once they had been owned by that legendary brother ofPascoe's, a sailor, of whom I had had a misty apprehension. It wouldbe difficult to say there had been a direct word about him. There weremanuals on navigation, seamanship, and ship-building, all of themcuriosities, in these later days, rather than expert guides. They werefull of marginal notes, and were not so dusty as I had expected to findthem. The rest of the books were of journeys in Central America andMexico: _Three Years in Guatemala_; _The Buried Cities of Yucatan_;_Scenes on the Mosquito Coast_; _A Voyage to Honduras_. There was moreof it, and of that sort. They were by authors long forgotten; butthose books, too, looked as though they were often in use. Certainlythey could not be classed with the old glue-pots and the lumber. 

It was long after my first visit to Pascoe that he referred to thosebooks. "Somebody told me, " he said one evening, while offering me ashare of his beer, "that you have been to the American tropics. "

I told him I could say I had been, but little more. I said it was avery big world. 

"Yes, " he said, after a pause: "and what a world. Think of thoseburied cities in Yucatan--lost in the forest, temples and gods andeverything. Men and women there, once upon a time, thinking they werea fine people, the only great people, with a king and princesses andpriests who made out they knew the mysteries, and what God was up to. And there were processions of girls with fruit and flowers onfeast-days, and soldiers in gold armour. All gone, even their bignotions. Their god hasn't got even a name now. Have you ever read the_Companions of Columbus_?"

I was as surprised as though one of his dim bottles in the shadows hadsuddenly glowed before my eyes, become magical with moving opalescence. What right had old Pascoe to be staring like that to the land andromance of the Toltecs? I had been under the impression that he readnothing but the Bible and _Progress and Poverty_. There was abiography of Bradlaugh, too, which he would quote copiously, and hisspectacles used fairly to scintillate over that, and his yellow face toacquire a new set of cunning and ironic puckers; for I believe hethought, when he quoted Bradlaugh--whose name was nearly all I knew ofthat famous man--that he was becoming extremely modern, and a littletoo strong for my conventional and sensitive mind. But here he was, telling of Incas, Aztecs, and Toltecs, of buried cities, of forgottentreasures, though mainly of the mind, of Montezuma, of the quetzalbird, and of the vanished splendour of nations that are now but a fewweathered stones. It was the forlorn stones, lost in an uninhabitedwilderness, to which he constantly returned. A brother of his, who hadbeen there, perhaps had dropped a word once into Pascoe's ear while hisaccustomed weapon was uplifted over a dock-labourer's boot-heel, andthis was what that word had done. Pascoe, with a sort of symbolicgesture, rose from his bobbing foot before me, tore the shoe from it, flung it contemptuously on the floor, and approached me with aflamboyant hammer. 

And that evening I feared for a moment that Pascoe was spoiled for me. He had admitted me to a close view of some secret treasured charms ofhis memory, and believing that I was not uninterested, now, of course, he would be always displaying, for the ease of his soul, supposing wehad a fellowship and a bond, his fascinating quetzals and Toltecs. YetI never heard any more about them. There was another subject though, quite homely, seeing where we both lived, and equally absorbing for usboth. He knew our local history, as far as our ships and house-flagswere concerned, from John Company's fleet to the _Macquarie_. He knew, by reputation, many of our contemporary master mariners. He knew, andhow he had learned it was as great a wonder as though he spoke Chinese, a fair measure of naval architecture. He could discuss ships' modelsas some men would Greek drama. He would enter into the comparativemerits of rig suitable for small cruising craft with a particularitywhich, now and then, gave me a feeling almost akin to alarm; because ina man of Pascoe's years this fond insistence on the best furniture forone's own little ship went beyond fair interest, and became theday-dreaming of romantic and rebellious youth. At that point he wasbeyond my depth. I had forgotten long ago, though but half Pascoe'sage, what my ship was to be like, when I got her at last. Knowing shewould never be seen at her moorings, I had, in a manner of speaking, posted her as a missing ship. 

One day I met at his door the barge-builder into whose cavernous loft Ihad stumbled on my first visit to Pascoe. He said it was a fineafternoon. He invited me in to inspect a figure-head he had purchased. "How's the old 'un?" he asked, jerking a thumb towards the bootmaker's. Then, with some amused winking and crafty tilting of his chin, hesigned to me to follow him along his loft. He led me clean through theport-light of his cave, and down a length of steps outside to his yardon the foreshore of the Thames, where, among his barges hauled up forrepairs, he paused by a formless shape covered by tarpaulins. 

"I've seen a few things in the way of boats, but this 'ere's a--well, what do you make of it?" He pulled the tarpaulin back, and disclosed avessel whose hull was nearing completion. I did not ask if it wasPascoe's work. It was such an amusing and pathetic surprise, that, with the barge-builder's leering face turned to me waiting for myguess, there was no need to answer. "He reckons, " said thebarge-builder, "that he can do a bit of cruising about the mouth of theThames in that. 'Bout all she wants now is to have a mast fitted, andto keep the water out, and she'll do. " He chuckled grimly. Her lineswere crude, and she had been built up, you could see, as Pascoe cameacross timber that was anywhere near being possible. Her strakes werea patchwork of various kinds of wood, though when she was tarred theirdiversity would be hidden from all but the searching of the elements. It was astonishing that Pascoe had done so well. It was still moreastonishing that he should think it would serve. 

"I've given him a hand with it, " remarked the barge-builder, "an' moreadvice than the old 'un 'ud take. But I dessay 'e could potter aboutwith the dam' tub round about as far as Canvey, if 'e keeps it out ofthe wash of the steamers. He's been at this job two years now, and Ishan't be sorry to see my yard shut of it. . . . Must humour the oldboy, though. . . . Nigglin' job, mending boots, I reckon. If I mendedboots, I'd 'ave to let orf steam summow. Or go on the booze. "

I felt hurt that Pascoe had not taken me into his confidence, and thathis ship, so far as I was concerned, did not exist. One Saturdayevening, when I called, his room was in darkness. Striking a match, there was his apron shrouding his hobbing foot. This had neverhappened before, and I turned into the barge-builder's. The proprietorthere faced me silently for a moment, treasuring a jest he was going togive me when I was sufficiently impatient for it. "Come to see whetheryour boots are done? Well, they ain't. Pascoe's gone. Christened hisboat this morning, and pushed off. Gone for a trial trip. Gone downriver. "

"Good Lord, " I said, or something of the sort. 

"Yes, " continued the barge-builder, luxuriating in it, "and I've oftenwondered what name he'd give her, and he done it this morning, in goldleaf. D'yer remember what she looked like? All right. Well, 'er nameis the _Heart's Desire_, and her skipper will be back soon, if shedon't fall apart too far off. "

Her skipper was not back soon, nor that day. We had no news of him thenext day. A few women were in his workshop, when I called, huntingabout for footwear that should have been repaired and returned, but wasnot. "'Ere they are, " cried one. "'Ere's young Bill's boots, andnothing done to 'em. The silly old fool. Why didn't 'e tell me 'e wasgoing to sea? 'Ow's young Bill to go to school on Monday now?" Theothers found their boots, all urgently wanted, and all as they werewhen Pascoe got them. A commination began of light-minded cripples whotook in young and innocent boots, promising them all things, and thentreacherously abandoned them, to do God knew what; and so I left. 

This became serious; for old Pascoe, with his _Heart's Desire_, hadvanished, like his Toltecs. A week went by. The barge-builder, forwhom this had now ceased to be a joke, was vastly troubled by thecomplete disappearance of his neighbour, and shook his head over it. Then a few lines in an evening paper, from a port on the Devon coast, looked promising, though what they wished to convey was not quiteclear, for it was a humorous paragraph. But the evidence was strongenough for me, and on behalf of the barge-builder and a few others Iwent at once to that west-coast harbour. 

It was late at night when I arrived, and bewildering with rain, totaldarkness, and an upheaval of cobbles in by-ways that wandered to noknown purpose. But a guide presently brought me to a providentialwindow, and quarters in the _Turk's Head_. In my room I could hear acontinuous murmuring, no doubt from the saloon bar below, andoccasional rounds of hearty merriment. That would be the place fornews, and I went down to get it. An oil-lamp veiled in tobacco smokewas hanging from a beam of a sooty ceiling. A congregation oflongshoremen, visible in the blue mist and smoky light chiefly becauseof their pink masks, was packed on benches round the walls. Theylaughed aloud again as I went in. They were regarding with indulgentinterest and a little shy respect an elegant figure overlooking them, and posed negligently against the bar, on the other side of whichrested the large bust of a laughing barmaid. She was as amused as themen. The figure turned to me as I entered, and stopped its discourseat once. It ran a hand over its white brow and curly hair with agesture of mock despair. "Why, here comes another to share our _HeartsDesire_. We can't keep the beauty to ourselves. "

It was young Hopkins, known to every reader of the _Morning Despatch_for his volatility and omniscience. It was certainly not his businessto allow any place to keep its secrets to itself; indeed, hisreputation including even a capacity for humour, the world wasfrequently delighted with more than the place itself knew even insecret. Other correspondents from London were also in the room. I sawthem vaguely when Hopkins indicated their positions with a few gracefulflourishes of his hand. They were lost in Hopkins's assurance ofoccupying superiority. They were looking on. "We all got hereyesterday, " explained Hopkins. "It's a fine story, not without itsfunny touches. And it has come jolly handy in a dull season whenpeople want cheering up. We have found the Ancient Mariner. He wasoff voyaging again but his ship's magic was washed out by heavyweather. And while beer is more plentiful than news, we hope to keepLondon going with some wonders of the deep. "

In the morning, before the correspondents had begun on the nextinstalment of their serial story, I saw Pascoe sitting up in a bed atanother inn, his expenses an investment of the newspaper men. He wasunsubdued. He was even exalted. He did not think it strange to see methere, though it was not difficult to guess that he had his doubtsabout the quality of the publicity he had attracted, and of the motivefor the ardent attentions of his new and strange acquaintances fromLondon. "Don't be hard on me, " he begged, "for not telling you more inLondon. But you're so cautious and distrustful. I was going to tellyou, but was uncertain what you'd say. Now I've started and you can'tstop me. I've met a man here named Hopkins, who has given me some helpand advice. As soon as my craft is repaired, I'm off again. It wasunlucky to meet that sou'wester in July. But once out of home waters, I ought to be able to pick up the Portuguese trade wind off Finisterre, and then I'm good for the Caribbees. I'll do it. She should take nomore than a fortnight to put right. "

There was no need to argue with him. The _Heart's Desire_, a centre ofattraction in the place, answered any doubt I had as to Pascoe'ssafety. But he was humoured. Hopkins humoured him, even openlyencouraged him. The Heart's Desire was destined for a great adventure. The world was kept in anticipation of the second departure for thisstrange voyage to Guatemala. The _Heart's Desire_ on the edge of aship-repairer's yard, was tinkered, patched, refitted, made as right asshe could be. The ship-repairer, the money for the work made certainfor him, did what he was told, but made no comment, except tointerrogate me curiously when I was about. 

A spring tide, with a southerly wind, brought us to a naturalconclusion. An unexpected lift of the water washed off the _Heart'sDesire_, rolled her about, and left her broken on the mud. I met thejournalists in a group on their way to the afternoon train, their facesstill reflecting the brightness of an excellent entertainment. Hopkinstook me aside. "I've made it right with old Pascoe. He hasn't lostanything by it, you can be sure of that. " But I was looking for thecobbler, and all I wished to learn was the place where I was likely tofind him. They did not know that. 

Late that evening I was still looking for him, and it had been rainingfor hours. The streets of the village were dark and deserted. Passingone of the many inns, which were the only illumination of the village, I stumbled over a shadow on the cobbles outside. In the glow of amatch I found Pascoe, drunk, with his necessary stick beside him, broken. 

V. The Master

This master of a ship I remember first as a slim lad, with a shy smile, and large hands that were lonely beyond his outgrown reefer jacket. His cap was always too small for him, and the soiled frontal badge ofhis line became a coloured button beyond his forelock. He used to comehome occasionally--and it was always when we were on the point offorgetting him altogether. He came with a huge bolster in a cab, asthough out of the past and nowhere. There is a tradition, a booktradition, that the boy apprenticed to the sea acquires saucy eyes, anda self-reliance always ready to dare to that bleak extreme the verythought of which horrifies those who are lawful and cautious. Theyknow better who live where the ships are. He used to bring his youngshipmates to see us, and they were like himself. Their eyes weredowncast. They showed no self-reliance. Their shyness and politeness, when the occasion was quite simple, were absurdly incommensurate evenwith modesty. Their sisters, not nearly so polite, used to mock them. 

As our own shy lad was never with us for long, his departure being asabrupt and unannounced as his appearance, we could willingly endurehim. But he was extraneous to the household. He had the impedingnature of a new and superfluous piece of furniture which is in the way, yet never knows it, and placidly stays where it is, in its woodenmanner, till it is placed elsewhere. There was a morning when, as hewas leaving the house, during one of his brief visits to his home, Inoticed to my astonishment that he had grown taller than myself. Howhad that happened? And where? I had followed him to the door thatmorning because, looking down at his cap which he was nervouslyhandling, he had told me he was going then to an examination. About aweek later he announced, in a casual way, that he had got his mastersticket. After the first shock of surprise, caused by the fact thatthis information was an unexpected warning of our advance in years, wewere amused, and we congratulated him. Naturally he had got hiscertificate as master mariner. Why not? Nearly all the mates we knewgot it, sooner or later. That was bound to come. But very soon afterthat he gave us a genuine surprise, and made us anxious. He informedus, as casually, that he had been appointed master to a ship; a verydifferent matter from merely possessing the licence to command. 

We were even alarmed. This was serious. He could not do it. He wasnot the man to make a command for anything. A fellow who, not so longago, used to walk a mile with a telegram because he had not thestrength of character to face the lady clerk in the post office roundthe corner, was hardly the man to overawe a crowd of hard charactersgathered by chance from Tower Hill, socialize them, and direct themsuccessfully in subduing the conflicting elements of a difficultenterprise. Not he. But we said nothing to discourage him. 

Of course, he was a delightful fellow. He often amused us, and he didnot always know why. He was frank, he was gentle, but that largevacancy, the sea, where he had spent most of his young life, had madehim--well, slow. You know what I mean. He was curiously innocent ofthose dangers of great cities which are nothing to us because we knowthey are there. Yet he was always on the alert for thieves andparasites. I think he enjoyed his belief in their crafty omnipresenceashore. Proud of his alert and knowing intelligence, he would relate along story of the way he had not only frustrated an artful shark, buthad enjoyed the process in perfect safety. That we, who rarely wentout of London, never had such adventures, did not strike him as worth athought or two. He never paused in his merriment to consider thestrange fact that to him, alone of our household, such waysideadventures fell. With a shrewd air he would inform us that he wasabout to put the savings of a voyage into an advertised trap which acountry parson would have stepped over without a second contemptuousglance, He took his ship away. The affair was not discussed at home, thougheach of us gave it some private despondency. We followed him silently, apprehensively, through the reports in the _Shipping Gazette_. He madepoint after point safely--St. Vincent, Gibraltar, Suez, Aden--after himwe went across to Colombo, Singapore, and at length we learned that hewas safe at Batavia. He had got that steamer out all right. He gother home again, too. After his first adventure as master he madevoyage after voyage with no more excitement in them than you would findin Sunday walks in a suburb. It was plain luck; or else navigation andseamanship were greatly overrated arts. 

A day came when he invited me to go with him part of his voyage. Icould leave the ship at Bordeaux. I went. You must remember that wehad never seen his ship. And there he was, walking with me to the dockfrom a Welsh railway station, a man in a cheap mackintosh, with anumbrella I will not describe, and he was carrying a brown paper parcel. He was appropriately crowned with a bowler hat several sizes too smallfor him. Glancing up at his profile, I actually wondered whether theturmoil was now going on in his mind over that confession which now hewas bound to make; that he was not the master of a ship, and never hadbeen. 

There she was, a bulky modern freighter, full of derricks andtime-saving appliances, and her funnel lording it over theneighbourhood. The man with the parcel under his arm led me up thegangway. I was not yet convinced. I was, indeed, less sure than everthat he could be the master of this huge community of engines and men. He did not accord with it. 

We were no sooner on deck than a man in uniform, grey-haired, with aseamed and resolute face, which any one would have recognized at onceas a sailor's, approached us. He was introduced as the chief officer. He had a tale of woe: trouble with the dockmaster, with the stevedores, with the cargo, with many things. He did not appear to know what to dowith them. He was asking this boy of ours. 

The skipper began to speak. At that moment I was gazing at the funnel, trying to decipher a monogram upon it; but I heard a new voice, rapidand incisive, sure of its subject, resolving doubts, and making thecrooked straight. It was the man with the brown paper parcel. Thatwas still under his arm--in fact, the parcel contained pink pyjamas, and there was hardly enough paper. The respect of the mate was notlessened by this. 

The skipper went to gaze down a hatchway. He walked to the other sideof the ship, and inspected something there. Conned her length, calledup in a friendly but authoritative way to an engineer standing by anamid-ship rail above. He came back to the mate, and with an easyprecision directed his will on others, through his deputy, up to thetime of sailing. He beckoned to me, who also, apparently, was underhis august orders, and turned, as though perfectly aware that in thisplace I should follow him meekly, in full obedience. 

Our steamer moved out at midnight, in a drive of wind and rain. Therewere bewildering and unrelated lights about us. Peremptory challengeswere shouted to us from nowhere. Sirens blared out of dark voids. Andthere was the skipper on the bridge, the lad who caused us amusement athome, with this confusion in the dark about him, and an immenseinsentient mass moving with him at his will; and he had his hands inhis pockets, and turned to tell me what a cold night it was. Thepier-head searchlight showed his face, alert, serene, with his browsknitted in a little frown, and his underlip projecting as the sign ofthe pride of those who look direct into the eyes of an opponent, andcare not at all. In my berth that night I searched for a moral forthis narrative, but went to sleep before I found it. 

VI. The Ship-Runners

1

The _Negro Boy_ tavern is known by few people in its own parish, for itis a house with nothing about it to distinguish its fame to those who donot know that a man may say to his friend, when their ships go differentways out of Callao, "I may meet you at the _Negro Boy_ some day. " It isin a road which returns to the same point, or near to it, after afatiguing circuit of the Isle of Dogs. No part of the road is betterthan the rest. It is merely a long road. That day when I first heard ofBill Purdy I was going to the tavern hoping to meet Macandrew, Chief ofthe _Medea_. His ship was in again. But there was nobody about. Therewas nothing in sight but the walls, old, sad, and discreet, of the yardswhere ships are repaired. The dock warehouses opposite the tavernoffered me their high backs in a severer and apparently an endlessobduracy. The _Negro Boy_, as usual, was lost and forlorn, but resignedto its seclusion from the London that lives, having stood there longenough to learn that nothing can control the ways of changing custom. Its windows were modest and prim in green curtains. Its only adornmentwas the picture, above its principal door, of what once was a negro boy. This picture now was weathered into a faded plum-coloured suit and a pairof silver shoe-buckles--there was nothing left of the boy himself but thewhites of his eyes. The tavern is placed where men moving in the newways of a busy and adventurous world would not see it, for they would notbe there. Its dog Ching was asleep on the mat of the portico to thesaloon bar; a Chinese animal, in colour and mane resembling a lion whosedignity has become sullenness through diminution. He could doze thereall day, and never scare away a chance customer. None would come. Butmen who had learned to find him there through continuing to trade to theopposite dock, would address him with some familiar and insulting words, and stride over him. 

The tavern is near one of the wicket gates of the irregular intrusioninto the city of a maze of dock basins, a gate giving those who know thedistrict a short cut home from the ships and quays; the tavern was sitednot altogether without design. And there came Macandrew through thatgate, just as I had decided I must try again soon. His second, Hanson, was with him. They crossed to the public-house, and we stooped over theyellow lump of Chinese apathy to talk to him, and went through the swingdoors into the saloon. The saloon was excluded from the gaze of the restof the house by little swinging screens of frosted glass above the bar, for that was where old friends of the landlord met, who had known him allthe time their house-flags had been at home in the neighbouring docks;and perhaps had even sailed with him when be himself went to sea. Asettee in red plush, salvage from the smoke-room of a liner, ran roundthe walls, with the very mahogany tables before it which it knew whenafloat. Some men in dingy uniforms and dungarees were at the tables. Two men I did not know stood leaning over the bar talking confidentiallyacross it to a woman who was only a laugh, for she was hidden. One ofthe men turned from the counter to see who had come in. 

"Hullo Mac, " he cried, in a voice hearty with the abandon of one who, perhaps, had been there long enough; "look here, here's Jessie says she'sgoing to leave us. "

A woman's hand, spoiled by many heavy rings, moved across the counter andshook his arm in warning. The youngster merely closed his own hand overit. "Isn't it hard. Really going to forsake us. Won't mix your whiskeyor uncork my lemonade any more. What are we going to do when we comehome now?"

There was an impatient muttering beyond him, and he made public asoothing and exaggerated apology. All the men in the room, even thegroup bent over a diagram of a marine engine they had drawn in chalk ontheir table, looked up in surprise, first at the youngster who had raisedhis voice, and then to watch the tall shadow of a woman pass quickly downthe counter-screen and vanish. Still laughing, the young man, with hisuniform cap worn a little too carelessly, nodded to the company, and wentout with his companion. 

Macandrew stared in contempt at the back of the fellow as he went. "Anice boy that. Too bright and bonny for my ship. What's that he wassaying about Jessie?" He tried to see where she was, and lowered hisvoice. "I know his kind. I saw them together last night, in the DockRoad. What does she have anything to do with him for? We know her ofcourse . . . But even then. . . . She's really not a bad sort. She'slike that with all those young dogs. Can't help it, I suppose. "

He moved to the bar, a massive figure, beyond the age of a sea-goingengineer, but still as light on his feet as a girl. "Where's she gone?"He pushed open one of the little glass screens, and put his petulantface, with its pale eyes set like aquamarines in bronze, into an openingtoo small to frame it. "Can you see her, Hanson?"

Hanson winked at me, adjusted the spectacles on his nose, and grinned. With that grin, and his spectacles, he was as surprising as a handsomegargoyle. His height compelled him to lean forward and to grin downward, even when speaking to a big man like Macandrew. He turned to his chiefnow, and both hands went up to his spectacles. In the way the corners ofhis mouth turned up before he spoke, whimsically wrinkling his nose, andin his intent and amused regard, there was a suggestion of the mockery ofa low immortal for beings who are fated earnestly to frustratethemselves. His grin gave you the uncomfortable feeling that it wasuseless to pretend you were keeping nothing from him. 

"Here goes, " said Hanson. "Never mind Jessie. I've got something totell you, Chief. I'm leaving you this voyage. "

Macandrew was instantly annoyed. "Going? Dammit, you can't. Look atthe crowd I've got now. You mustn't do it. "

"I must. They are a thin lot, but you could push the old _Medea_ alongwith anything. I've got another ship. My reason is very good, from theway I look at it. "

Hanson turned his grin to me. He was going to enjoy the privilege ofseeing his reasons deemed unreasonable. "Don't think it's a better jobI've got. It's worse. It's a very rummy voyage. We may complete it, with luck. It's a boat-running lunacy, and some mining gear. She'scalled the _Cygnet_. I've been over her, and we shall call her somethingdifferent before we see the last of her. "

"Then why are you going?" I asked him. 

"To see what will happen. . . . "

Macandrew interrupted him. "What? And you next on the list for Chief?You're romantic, young man, and that means you're no engineer. Is therea lot of money in it?"

"There isn't, but there's some life. I want to know what I'm made of. Shall I ever learn it under you? Down below in the _Medea_ is likewinding up a clock and going to sleep. Do you know the _Cygnet_ has sixinches of freeboard?" He was talking to me, but kept glancing sidewaysto see what effect this had on Macandrew. But Macandrew's broad back wasimpassive. 

"Six inches of freeboard, barring her false bulwarks of deal boards, andshe's going out to--I forget the name of the place, but I could show youwhere it is within a hundred miles on a map that doesn't give its name. It's up the Pondurucu. "

Macandrew made no sign, and Hanson, his humour a little damped, spokemore seriously. "I don't think she'll ever get there, but it will beinteresting to see where she stops, and why. "

Macandrew heaved round on his junior. "There's drivel. It sounds wellfrom an engineer and a mathematician, doesn't it?" He turned away again. "Supposing, " he said, over his shoulder, "supposing you pull this shipthrough all right, then where will you be? Any better off?"

"I think so, " said Hanson. He couldn't talk to Macandrew's back, so hebent over me and pointed a challenging finger at my necktie. "I've neverrisked anything yet, not even my job. This is where I do it. It'll benice to attempt something when the odds are that you can't finish it, andthere's nothing much in it if you do. Why, " he said, grinning at hisChief's back, "if I were to stay with him I'd become so normal that I'dslip into marriage and safety as a matter of course, and have to give upeverything. "

"Who's in charge of this lunacy?" asked Macandrew. His voice was alittle truculent. 

"All right, Chief. I shan't remember his name any the better becauseyou're annoyed with me. I haven't seen the skipper yet. I think I heardhim called Purdy. "

"Purdy? Bill Purdy?" Macandrew was incredulous. "Do you know whatyou've let yourself in for? If Purdy's got the job, I know why. Nobodyelse would take it, and he's the last man, anyway, who ought to have it. "

"What, drink?" asked Hanson. 

"Lord, no. Not Purdy. No. It's the man himself. I've known him a longtime, and I like him, but he'll never do. He can't make up his mind to acourse. Don't you remember the _Campeachy_ case? I expect it was beforeyour time. Purdy had her. He was coming up-Channel, and got nervousover the weather, and put into Portland for a pilot. There was no pilot. So he decided to put out again and go on. It never occurred to him thatas he was in shelter he'd better stay there till a pilot arrived, becausegetting out of that was exactly when he'd want one. He put her ashore. That was like Purdy, to play for safety and make a wreck. When he gotover the fuss Lloyd's raised about it he refused to take command againfor some time. He couldn't even make up his mind whether he wanted aship at all. "

Hanson listened to this with the air of one who was being reassured in adoubtful enterprise. 

"You mistake me, Chief, " he said. "You are only improving my reasons forgoing. Not only is the ship crank, but so is her skipper. Now tell me. . . "

Macandrew frowned at his junior, and his curiously pale eyes becamedistinctly inhuman. I believe he thought his counsel was being laughedat. But the door opened, and he touched Hanson's arm. A little man ofmiddle age stood there, who turned, and actually prevented the doors fromswinging together with their usual announcement of another customer. Foronly a moment he raised his downcast eyes to see who was there, and thennodded sadly to Macandrew. His drooping moustache conformed to thedownward lines of his face, which was that of a man who had been longobserving life with understanding, and had not a lively opinion of it. 

Macandrew's demeanour changed. It was now mild and almost affectionateas he greeted the little man. "Come over here, Purdy, and tell us whatyou've been doing. Here's Hanson, this young fellow. I hear he'ssailing with you. He's your Chief. You'd better know him. "

Purdy raised his eyes in a grave and momentary survey, made to shakehands with Hanson, but hesitated, and did so only because Hanson put outhis own great fist with decision. Purdy did not speak, except to say toHanson: "We're signing-on tomorrow. I'll meet you at the shipping officethen. " He seemed to forget the pair of them, paused, and went to a farvacant corner of the bar. The barmaid, as he got there, returned, andstopped to say something to him. 

"Well, I'm damned, " muttered Macandrew. "Look here, Jessie, " he cried, "here's all us young men been waiting for nearly twenty minutes, and youtake no notice of us, but as soon as a captain looks across the counter, there you are. But how did you know he was a captain? That's what I'dlike to know. He's only wearing a bowler hat. "

2

The _Medea_ had been ordered unexpectedly to Barry for loading, to takethe place of an unready sister-ship; and Macandrew, of whom I have hadmuch experience, would be active, critical of what a dog must put up within life, and altogether unfit for intimate, amiable, and reminiscentconversation. Yet I wanted to see him again before he left, and wentpast the Board of Trade Office hoping for signs of the _Medea_, for I hadheard she was assembling a crew that morning. But the marine-storeshops, with their tarpaulin suits hanging outside open-armed andoscillating, looked across to the men lounging against theshipping-office railings, and the idlers stared across at the tarpaulins. It did not appear to be a place where anything was destined to happen. It merely looked like rain. 

Macandrew might be inside with his crowd of firemen and greasers. Behindthe brass grille there a clerk, solitary and absorbed in his duties, bentover a pile of ships' articles, and presented to the seamen in the publicspace beyond him only the featureless shine of a bald head. The seamen, scattered about in groups, shabby and listless, with a few of theirofficers among them, were as sombre and subdued as though they hadlearned life had nothing more to offer them, and they were present onlybecause they might as well use up the salvage of their days. The clerkraised his head and questioned the men before him with a quick, inclusiveglance. "Any men here of the _Cygnet_?" he demanded. His voice, raisedin certainty above the casual murmuring of the repressed, made them allas self-conscious and furtive as though discovered in guilt. Hanson'shead appeared above the crowd, as he rose from a bench and went to theofficial. "I'm the engineer of the _Cygnet_. We're waiting for CaptainPurdy. "

The clerk complained. He pulled out his watch. "He said he would beready for me at ten this morning. Now you've lost your turn, and thereare three other ships. " He turned away in a manner which told every onethat Hanson had now become non-existent, pushed aside the _Cygnet's_papers, and searched the room once more. "Ah, good morning, CaptainHudson. You ready for me? Then I'll take you next. " The captain wentaround to stand beside the official, and his crew clustered on their sideof the bars, with their caps in their hands. 

"A good start that, " said Hanson to me. "Perhaps, after all, we nevershall start. Must be a rum chap, that Purdy. "

He told me the _Medea's_ crowd was there, but perhaps Macandrew hadalready signed, and so would not appear. That meant I might not see himfor another year; but as I left the office I found him coming up itssteps outside, and not as though there were the affairs of a month to begot into two days, but in leisurely abstraction. He might have beenmaking up his mind that, after all, there was no need to call there, forhe was studying each step as if he were looking for the bottom of amystery. His fingers were twirling the little ivory pig he carries as acharm on his watchguard. The pig is supposed to assist him when he is ina difficulty. He raised his eyes. 

"Anyhow, " he despaired to me with irrelevance, "I can't do anything forhim. "

I waited for the chance of a clue. "I thought, " Macandrew quietlysoliloquized, "he knew better than that. He's been a failure, but allthe same, he's got a better head than most of us. She's sure to bringhim to grief. "

"What's all this about?" I ventured. 

"I've just been talking to Purdy. You remember what Hanson said of thatvoyage he's making? Purdy is taking Jessie with him. You don't knowPurdy, but I do. And I know Jessie; but that's nothing. "

"Taking her with him?" I asked; "but how. . . . "

"Oh, cook, of course. That'll be it. She'll be steward, naturally. That's reasonable. You've seen her. Jessie's the sort of woman wouldjump at the chance of such a pleasant trip, as cook. "

"I don't understand. . . . "

"Who said you did? Nobody does but the pair of them. I know whatanother man might see in Purdy. But a woman! He's middle-aged, quiet, and looks tired. That woman is young and lively, and she'll be bored todeath with him on such a trip. "

"But I thought you said . . . "

"What have I said? I've said nothing. Jessie's away to sea as cook. Why not? I'm going inside. Are you coming in?"

Crossing the floor of the office, Hanson caught Macandrew's arm. "Yourlot are signing-on now. " The master of the _Medea_ was round with theofficial tallying the men by the ship's papers. "I see it, " Macandrewanswered. "I've signed. I wanted to catch the old man before he beganthat job. "

"We're hung up for Purdy, " Hanson told him. "Nobody seems to know wherehe is. " Hanson was amused. 

"Yes. Well . . . He'll be here all right . . . And now this new jobwhich you think so funny, young Hanson. See it goes through. Presentlyit won't be so funny. Hang on to it then. "

Hanson was surprised by this, and a trifle hurt. He was beginning tospeak, making the usual preliminary adjustment of his spectacles, when amovement near the door checked him. His hands remained at his glasses, as if aiding his sight to certify the unbelievable. 

"What's this?" he murmured. "Here's Purdy. Isn't that the _Negro Boy's_barmaid with him . . . Is she with him?" He continued to watch, apparently for some sign that this coincidence of his captain and abarmaid in a public office was designed. 

The bent gaze of the master of the _Cygnet_ might have noticed the bootsof his engineer, for he took in the room no higher than that. Then hecame forward with his umbrella, still in contemplation. It might havebeen no more than a coincidence. She, too, approached, a little behindhim, but obscuring his dull meagreness, for she was a head taller, and abold and challenging figure. Her blond hair distinguished her even morethan the emphasis of her florid hat. Her pallor that morning refined theindubious coarseness of her face, and changed vulgarity into theattractive originality of a spirited character. Many there knew her, butshe recognized nobody. She yawned once, in a fair piece of acting, andin her movements and the poise of her head there was a disdain almostplain enough to be insolence. Purdy turned to her, and the strange pairconferred. I heard Hanson say to himself: "What on earth. " She leftPurdy, bent her head with a gracious but stressed smile to Macandrew, andwent to the bench by the wall, where she sat, waiting, with her legscrossed in a way that was a defiance and an attraction in such a place, where a woman is rarely seen. She read a newspaper, perhaps because thatacted as a screen, though she turned its pages with a nervous abruptnesswhich betrayed her imitation of indifference. 

3

The _Medea_ and the _Cygnet_, and the other ships I knew which carriedthose whose fortunes were some concern of mine, might have sailed overthe edge of the world. My only communication was with an occasionalfamiliar name in the reports of the _Shipping List_. Then Macandrew camehome again. But it was difficult to meet him. Mrs. Macandrew told me hewas working by his ship in drydock. They had had trouble with theengines that voyage, and she herself had seen little of him, except tofind him, when she came down of a morning, asleep in the drawing-room. Just flung himself down in the first place, you know. In those greasyoveralls, too. He had told her the engine-room looked like a scrap-heap, but the ship had to be ready for sea in ten days. Once he had workedthirty-two hours on end. Think of that, and he had not been home for sixmonths. She would strongly advise any girl not to marry a man who wentto sea, and if I met Macandrew I was to bring him home at once. Did Ihear?

When I found the _Medea_ it was late in the day, for she was not in thedry-dock that had been named. Her Chief had just gone ashore. There wasa chance that he would have called at the _Negro Boy_, but he had notbeen seen there. Except for the landlord, who was at a table talking toa stranger, the saloon was empty. A silk hat was on the table before thestranger, beside a tankard, and the hat was surmounted by a pair ofneatly folded kid gloves. "Come over here, " said the landlord. "Sithere for a bit, Macandrew may come in. This is Dr. Maslin. " A monoclefell its length of black cord from the doctor's eye, and he nodded to me. 

"The doctor used to be with me when I was running out East, " explainedthe landlord. "Where did you say you had come from now, Doctor? Oh, yes, Tabacol. Funny name. I was never on the South American coast. After I left you sick at Macassar, the last trip we had together--the old_Siwalik_--I left the sea to younger men. But there you are, Doctor. Still at it. Why don't you give it up?"

The doctor did not answer, except to make a bubbling noise in histankard. He placed it on the table again delicately and deliberately, and wiped his grizzled moustache with a crimson silk handkerchief. Heput up his monocle, and seemed to be intently inspecting a gas globe overthe counter. I thought his grimace in this concentration came from aneffort to reinforce his will against all curiosity on our part. But itappeared he was really looking at what showed, at an angle, of a portraiton the wall of an inner room. He could just see it, from where he sat. Anyhow, the landlord imagined it was the portrait which had caught hisfriend's interest. "Looking at that crayon portrait, Doctor? Ah, showywoman, isn't she? Used to be barmaid here. The Lord knows where she isnow. Went to sea, like a fool. Stewardess, or something worse. Muchmore useful here. "

The doctor's seamed face, sour and ironic, made it impossible to knowwhether his expression was one of undisguised boredom, or only his showof conventional politeness. I began to feel I had broken into theintimacy of two men whose minds were dissimilar, but friendly through oldassociations, and that the doctor's finer wit was reproving me for anintrusion. So I rose, and asked indifferently what sort of a place wasTabacol. Had he been there before?

"Never, " said the doctor, "nor is it the kind of place one wishes to seetwice. We were kept at Tabacol because so many of our men were down withfever. It is a little distance up the Pondurucu River . . . Maybe twohundred miles. Did you say. . . ? No. It is not really out of the way. An ocean steamer calls at Tabacol once a month or six weeks. It is onlyon the edge of what romantic people call the unknown. "

It was evident he thought I could be one of the romantic. He looked atme for the first time, twisting the cord of his eyeglass with his fingerand thumb in a fastidious way, and I thought his glance was to dissipatesome doubt he had that he ought to be speaking to me at all. He droppedthe cord suddenly as if letting go his reserve, and said slyly, with agrave smile: "Perhaps the romantic think the unknown is worth lookinginto because it may be better than what they know. At Tabacol I used tothink the unknown country beyond it looked even duller than usual. Therewas a forest, a river, a silence, and it was either day or night. Thatwas all. If the voice of Nature is the voice of God. . . . "

The landlord was observing in surprise this conversational excursion byhis old friend, as if it were altogether new to him. He laughed aloud, and, putting a consoling hand on his friend's shoulder as he rose, hetold us he must leave us for a few minutes, for he had business. "Lookmore cheerful before I get back, Doctor. "

The doctor chuckled, and stretched across to give his gloves a moresatisfactory position on his hat. "I don't understand what it can bethat attracts people to such a place. Young men, maybe yourself even, wish to go there. Isn't that so? Yes. I've met such men in suchplaces. Then they did not give me the impression that they weresatisfied with their romance. Impossible, of course. Romance is neverin the place unless we put it there, and who would put even a sentimentaldream into such a hole as Tabacol? Tropical squalor. Broken people!I've never seen romance in such a place, and don't expect to. . . . "

Several cabs, on their way to a ship outward bound, made an increasingnoise in the night, rattled by on the cobbles outside, their occupantsroaring a sentimental chorus, and drowned what the doctor was saying. 

". . . Folly. Worse than folly. " He was holding his gloves now, and waslightly flicking the edge of the table with them in place of verbalemphasis. He suddenly regarded me again as if he strongly suspected meof being his antipathy. "Who but a fool would take a woman to such acountry as that? Any romantic sentimentalist, I suppose. I forget thename of the ship. There was, you might say, hardly sufficient room topaint a name on her. She was no more than a tug. It was a miracle shesurvived to get there at all, for she had crossed from England. Crossedthe Western ocean in such a craft, and brought a woman with him. Didever you hear of such folly?"

Now I was certain of our whereabouts, and felt a weak inclination to showan elder that I, too, knew something about it; but when I leaned forwardeagerly and was about to speak, the doctor screwed in that devastatingmonocle, and I felt I was only a curious example of the sort of thing heespecially disliked. For a minute, in which I wondered if I had quitestopped his guarded flow, he said no more. Then he addressed hiseyeglass to a panel of the partition, and flicked his gloves at that. 

"I had noticed for some days that little craft lying near us, but gaveher no attention. I had sixteen men to attend to with complexions likelemons, and one died. There was no time to bother with other folk'stroubles. Our skipper, one breakfast-time, told me there was a womanaboard that little thing, and he'd been asked whether I'd go over. Shewas ill. 

"I've seen some queer packets of misery at sea, but never one thattouched that ship. Her skipper seemed a regular fool. I had to ask himto speak up, for he mumbled like a boy who has been caught out, and knowsit is useless to pretend. I learned from him that he was only justbeginning his voyage. You understand? He was just beginning it, there. He was going up-river, to a point not on the chart. I cannot make outnow whether he wanted to put that woman ashore to get home in comfort atthe first opportunity, or whether . . . It's impossible to say. Onewould sooner believe the best of another man, with half a chance. Afterall, " said the doctor bitterly, "as long as the woman survived I supposeshe was some consolation in misery. 

"I scrambled over the deck lumber. There was hardly room to move. Ifound her in a cabin where she could get little seclusion from the crew. Hardly any privacy at all, I should say. As soon as I saw her I couldmake a guess . . . However, I told the fellow afterwards what I thought, and he gave me no answer. He even turned his back on me. He must haveknown well enough that that river was no place for any sort of whitewoman. He was condemning her perhaps to death just to make an ugly jobmore attractive. 

"I admit, " said the doctor, with a sly glance, "that she could make itattractive, for a sort of man. She was wrapped in a rosy dressing-gown. She held it together with her hands. I noticed them . . . Anybody might. . . They were covered with rings. She had character, too. She made mefeel, the way she looked at me, that I was indiscreet in asking personalquestions. I could see what was wrong with her. It was debility, butall the same the beginning of an end not far off, in that country. 

"'You'll have to get out of this, ' I told her. 

"'Can't be done, Doctor, ' she said coolly. 

"'It can. A liner for England will be here in another week, and you musttake it. '

"'I don't, ' she said. She was quiet enough, but she seemed a very wilfulwoman. 'I've got my job here. '

"I told her that the skipper of her ship would never carry out hisorders, because they could not be carried out. I told her, what wasperfectly true, that their craft would rot on a sandbar, or findcataracts, or that they'd all get eaten by cannibals, or die of somethingnasty. I admit I tried to frighten her. 

"'It's no good, Doctor, ' she said. 'You can't worry me. I've got mywork to do in this ship, like the others. '

"'Pooh!' I said to her. 'Cooking and that. Anybody could do it. Letthe men do it. It's not a woman's job. '

"'You're wrong, ' she said. 'It's mine. You don't know. '

"I began to get annoyed with this stubborn creature. I told her shewould die, if she didn't leave the working of that ship to those whoought to do it. 

"'Who ought?' she asked me, in a bit of a temper. 'I know what I have todo. I'm going through with it. It's no good talking. I'll take mychance, like the rest. '

"So I had to tell her that I was there because the master of her ship hadsent for me to give my advice. My business was to say what she ought todo. 

"'I don't want to be told. I know, ' she said. 'The captain sent foryou. Talk to him. '

"My temper was going, and I told her that it was something to know thecaptain himself had enough sense to send for me. 

"'Look here, ' she told me. 'I've had enough of this. I want to bealone. Thank you for troubling to come over. '"

The doctor lifted his shoulders, and made a wry face, that might havebeen disdain or pity. 

"I was leaving her, but she called to me, and I went back. She held outher hand. 'I do thank you for troubling about me. Of course I do. ButI want to stay on here--I must. '

"'Well, you know the penalty, ' I said. 'I was bound to tell you that. '

"'What of it?' she said, and laughed at me. 'We musn't bother aboutpenalties. Good-bye!'

"I must say she made me feel that if the skipper of that ship had been ofdifferent metal, she might almost have pulled him through. But what aman. What a man! I saw his miserable little figure standing not farfrom where my boat was when I was going. He made as if he were coming tome, and then stopped. I was going to take no notice of him, but went upand explained a thing or two. I'll bet he'll remember them. All he saidwas: 'I was afraid you'd never change her mind, ' and turned away. What aman! There was a pair for you. I could understand him, but what couldhave been in her mind? Whatever made her talk like that? That's the wayof it. There's your romance of the tropics, and your squalid Garden ofEden, when you know it. A monotonous and dreary job, and a woman. "

The landlord returned. The monocle fixedly and significantly regardedme. "Have another, Doctor, " said the landlord, pointing to the emptytankard. "How long were you in Macassar?" The doctor turned briskly tohis old friend, and began some chaff. 

4

Ferguson, who had just come into port with a damaged propeller shaft, wastelling us how it was. This was his first expansive experience, andthere could be no doubt the engine-room staff of the _Torrington_ hadbehaved very well. The underwriters had recognized that, and handsomely, at a special meeting at Cornhill. Though Ferguson was young for a chiefengineer, his professional elders, who were listening to him, showed somecritical appreciation of the way he solved his problem. He was sittingat a table of the _Negro Boy_, drawing a diagram on it, and they stoodround. 

"There. That was where it was. You see what we had to do. It would nothave been so bad in calm weather, but we were labouring heavily, all theway from Savannah. Our old man did not think it possible to do it. Butit was no good waiting for something worse to happen. "

The matter grew too technical for me. There was cargo jettisoned, andballast tanks emptied aft. The stern of the _Torrington_ was lifted sothat her propeller at intervals was clear. Ferguson then went oversideon life-lines. When he was not submerged, he was trying to put his shipright again; and when he became exhausted, one of his colleagues took hisplace, to see whether, while escaping drowning, he could continue thework of salvation. They all escaped, and the _Torrington_ put back toTampa for repairs, which her own engineers accomplished. 

The demonstration was over, and Ferguson's story was lapsing into generalgossip. The party of men began to dissolve. 

"Who do you think I saw at Tampa?" Ferguson asked Macandrew. "Old Purdy. "

"What?" cried Macandrew. "Is he alive?"

Ferguson laughed. "Just about. What's he been doing? I thought he hadchucked the sea. It was in the Customs Office. I'd been there to make adeclaration, and in one of those long corridors there he stood, allalone, with his hat in his hand, perhaps cooling his head. I hardly knewhim. He's more miserable than ever. "

"Did he say anything?" asked Macandrew. 

"About as much as usual. I didn't know him at first. He seemed ratherill. The temples of that high forehead of his were knotted with veins. It nearly gave me a headache to look at him. "

Several of us were impelled to ask a number of questions, but Fergusonwas listening now, with the detachment of youth, to the end of a bawdystory that two men were laughing over. This had already displaced Purdyin his mind. 

"Didn't he say anything at all? Didn't he mention Hanson?" we askedFerguson. 

"Eh? What, old Purdy? I don't think so. I don't remember. Now youmention it, I think I did hear somewhere that Hanson was with Purdy. ButI don't believe he said anything about him. I was just going to ask himto come and have a drink, when he said good-bye. All I know is I saw himstanding there like a sorrowful saint. Then he walked off slowly downthe corridor. He's a sociable beggar. I couldn't help laughing at him. "

5

There was a notice in the window of the _Negro Boy_, and I discoveredthat the tavern was under Entirely New Management. The picture sign overthe principal door had been renewed. The mythical little figure whichhad given the public-house its name was no longer lost in the soot ofhalf a century. He was now an obvious negro boy, resplendent in a goldencoat. The reticence of the green window-curtains had become a brightvacancy of mirrors, and the tavern was modern within. Reform haddestroyed the exclusiveness of the saloon bar; instead of privacy, distant mirrors astonished you with glimpses of your own head which wereincredible and embarrassing in their novelty. The table-tops were ofwhite marble supported on gilded iron. The prints and lithographs ofships had gone from the walls, and were replaced by real picturesconverted to the advertisement of various whiskies--pictures ofbattleships, bull-dogs, Scotsmen, and figures in armour tempted fromtheir ancient posts in baronial halls, after midnight, to finish theprecious drink forgotten by the guests. In accordance with thistransformation the young lady in attendance at the bar was in neat blackand white, with her hair as compact and precise as a resolution at apublic meeting which had been passed even by the women present. She wassevere and decisive, and without recognition of anything there but thetariff of the house, and sold her refreshments as in a simple yetexacting ritual which she despised, but knew to be righteous. 

It was many months since I had been there. Macandrew was no nearer thanRotterdam, and perhaps would not see London that voyage. There had beena long period in which change had been at work at the docks, even totheir improvement, but through it all not one of my old friends hadreturned home. They had approached no nearer than Falmouth, theHartlepools, or Antwerp, with a slender chance that they would come tothe Thames, and next we heard of them when they were bound outwards oncemore, and for a period known not even to their wives. The new _NegroBoy_ had not the appearance of a place where I could expect to find afriend, and I was leaving it again, instantly, when a tall figure rose ina corner waving a reassuring hand. I did not recognize the man, butthought I knew his smile, which made me look at him in dawning hope. Thegrin, evidently knowing its power, was maintained till I saw itindubitably as Hanson's. He made a remembered gesture with hisspectacles. "I was just about sick of this place, " he said. "I'vewaited here for an hour hoping somebody would turn up. Where's Macandrewnow?"

"In Rotterdam. I don't think he will be home this voyage. "

"And what's happened to this house? Where's the old man?"

"You know all I know about it. I haven't been here for nearly a year. We must expect progress to make things better than they were. Where haveyou come from?"

"I'm running between Liverpool and Baltimore now, in the Planets. They're comfortable ships, but I don't admire the Western ocean. It'stoo savage and cold. How is Macandrew? I came up from Liverpool becauseI felt I must see him again. I heard he was here. "

From the way he talked, I thought he preferred those subjects requiringthe least effort for a casual occasion. "Now and then, " I had to tellhim, "some of us have wondered what happened to the _Cygnet_. "

Hanson's smile became effulgent. My remark might have reminded him of amost enjoyable joke, but he made no sign, while enjoying it privately, that he intended to share it with me at any time. 

"There was a _Cygnet_, wasn't there?" he asked, when my patience hadnearly gone. "I should like somebody to confirm it. The reason I cameto this house tonight, to be candid, was just to see this room again, tosettle a doubt I had. Didn't Macandrew stand over there, and showconcern because a fair, plump woman wasn't quick enough with his beer?"

I admitted this, as an encouragement. "But when I got here tonight, "continued Hanson, "the change made me feel my mind had lost hold. I mustsay it's a relief to see you. "

"Has this anything to do with the _Cygnet_?" I asked. 

"Everything. I had the time of my life. I wouldn't have missed it foranything. But somehow, now and then, I want to be quite sure I had itmyself, and not some other fellow. " He beamed with the very remembranceof the experience, and nodded his head at me. He leaned over the tableto me in confidence. "Have you ever been to the tropics? I don't meancalling at Colombo or Rio. I mean the back of things where there's aremarkable sun experimenting with low life and hardly anybody looking on. If ever you get the chance, you take it. It alters all your ideas oftime and space. You begin to learn what stuff life is made of when yousee a tropical forest, and see nothing else for months. On the otherhand, " he said, "you become nothing. You see it doesn't matter to otherswhat happens to you, and you don't care much what happens to others. "

"You don't care? It doesn't matter?" I said in doubt to this youngmathematician and philosopher, who had been experimenting with life. "Isn't that merely romantic?"

"Romance--romance be damned! I got down to the facts. "

"Well, get me down to them. I should like the facts. I want to hearwhat this strange voyage was like. "

"As you know, " Hanson assured me, "I went out merely to see what wouldhappen to myself, in certain circumstances. I knew I was going to bescared, and I was. There is a place called Tabacol on the river, and weanchored there after our ocean passage for more than a week. I don'tknow why, and it was no use asking Purdy. Probably he didn't know. Ihad made up my mind to make the engines move and stop, whenever ordered, and then see where we are. Anyway, after the racket of the sea voyage, when the engines stopped at Tabacol the utter silence was as if somethingwhich had been waiting there for you at once pounced. The quiet was ofan awful weight. I could hardly breathe, and chanced to look at thethermometer. It stood at 132 degrees. I don't know how I got outside, but when I came to I was on my back on deck, and Jessie was looking afterme. I remember wondering then how a big, fleshy woman like her couldstand it, and felt almost as sorry for her as I did for myself. "

"Did she look ill?"

"Jessie? Oh, I don't know. She looked as if she might have been havinga merrier time. Well, we left Tabacol, and I felt we were leavingeverything we knew behind us. I got the idea, in the first day on theriver, that we were quite lost, and were only pushing the old _Cygnet_along to keep up our spirits. We crawled close under the walls of theforest. Our vessel looked about as large and important as a leaf adrift. That place is so immense that I saw we were going to make no impressionon it. It wouldn't matter to anybody but ourselves if it swallowed usup. On the first day I saw a round head and two yellow eyes in it, watching us go by. The thought went through my mind: 'a jaguar. ' Thewatching face vanished on the instant, and I always felt afterwards thatthe forest knew all about us, but wouldn't let us know anything. I gotthe idea that it wasn't of the least use going on, unless we didn'tintend to treat the job seriously. If we were serious about it then itwas evident we ought to turn back. "

"Didn't the skipper ever say what he thought of it?"

"What could Purdy think, or do? There was that river, and the forest onboth sides of it, and the sun over us. Nothing else but the quiet; andwe didn't know where our destination was. We anchored every evening, close to the bank. One evening, as we anchored, a shower of arrowsclattered about us. There was just one shower, out of the trees, or outof the clouds. "

"What was Jessie doing all this time?" I ventured to ask him. 

"Why, what was any one doing? She wasn't an anxiety of my department. Isuppose she was there for the only reason I had--because she asked forit. It was the same next day, except that instead of more arrows wefound a python in the bunkers. Came aboard over the hawsers, I suppose. We were a lively lunatic asylum below while killing it with fire-shovelsand crowbars. That was what the voyage was like. The whole lot of itwas the same, and you knew quite well that the farther you went the lessanything mattered. There were slight variations each day of snakes, mosquitoes, and fevers, to keep you from feeling dead already. "

"I've often wondered, " I confessed, thinking to bring Hanson to somethingI wanted to hear, "what happened to your company. Once we had a word ofPurdy, but never of Jessie or of you. "

"Well, now I'm telling you. But you'd have been past wondering if you'dbeen with us. Purdy wasn't companionable. He'd tell me it was hot. Andit was. You could feel that yourself. Jessie cooked our meals. Hergalley could have been only a shade better than the engine-room. Shebegan to look rather faded. At last I was the only one who hadn't beendown with fever. We crawled on and on, and the only question was wherewe ourselves would end, for the forest and the river were never going to. But you didn't care. I'd never been better in my life, and here was thething I'd always wanted to see. I could have gone on for ever like that, wondering what we should see round the next corner. 

"Our big troubles were to come. Up to then, we hadn't run into anythingreally drastic after turning a corner. I suppose we had had about amonth of it, and God knows where we were, but we had nobody to ask; andthen we ran on a sandbar. The jungle met overhead. We were in what wasonly a dark drain through the forest. So this, I thought, is where wethrow in our hand. We might as well have been in another planet for allthe chance we had of getting away from that place. We were aground fortwo days; the river then rose a foot, and we came off. The men werecomplaining among themselves by then. I heard them talking to each otherabout chucking it. It was bound to come. This day they went aft in abody to Purdy. There stood Purdy, a little object in white against thegloom of the forest, and he looked about as futile as the last match in awind at night. He stood fingering a beard he had grown. One of the menwas beginning to talk truculently at him. Just then Jessie appeared frombelow, between me and the group. She had been down with fever for somedays, and she surprised me as much as a ghost. She looked rather likeone, too. She stood watching Purdy, without moving. He didn't look ather, though he must have known she was there. I'm pretty sure we had tothank her for what happened to us afterwards, for it was then that Purdybegan shaking his finger at that big stoker who was shouting. I'd neverseen him with such an expression before. As near as he could be wild, hewas. 'We're going on, ' said Purdy to them very distinctly. 'This shipcontinues her voyage. If you want to leave her here, I'll put youashore. ' He walked away some paces, and came back to the men. Then hesaid something more in his usual voice. 'Do you men tell me you'reafraid of the job? I don't believe it. It can be done. We'll do it. We'll do it. Mr. Hanson, ' he called out, 'we are ready to get under way. Would you please stand by?'

"The men never said another word. They went for'ard. It was verycurious, but after that they behaved as though they had another skipper. Yet they were properly frightened by what they thought was ahead of them. My lot below were always asking me about it, and I handed them the usualornamental and soothing lies, in which they believed long enough to keepthe steam up. What more could you ask of human nature? So we kept herplugging along, getting nearer and nearer nowhere. We turned another ofthose dramatic corners, later on, though I forget how much later, andahead of us the river was piled high with rocks, and was tumbling fromabove. The _Cygnet_ had had her fair share of luck, but luck could notget her over that. We were all looking at the white water ahead, andfeeling--at least I was--that we were being laughed at, when I heardPurdy call me, and turned round. He was hurrying towards me round thegear, and I thought from the look of him that this complete frustrationhad turned his mind. He signed for me to follow him, and I did it, wondering what we should do with a lunatic added to all the rest of it. I followed him into his cabin. 'What can I do?' he said, and bent overhis berth, 'what can I do?'

"Jessie was curled up on her side in his berth, and there was nothinganyone could do. I didn't know she was alive. But she half opened hereyes, without looking up, and her hand began moving towards Purdy. 'Thatyou, Bill?' she said. Purdy flopped down beside her. I got out. 

"So I took over for a bit--the mate was no good--and waited for the nextthing. That affair disheartened the men a lot, and I took it forgranted, from their faces as they stood round that figure in a tarpaulinunder a tree in the forest, that we were witnessing the end. There wasPurdy, too . . . You couldn't expect much from him after a funeral. "

Hanson bent over the table, and began tapping it with a finger, and spokeslowly through a surprise he still felt. "Old Purdy came to me thefollowing morning, and told me what he intended to do. What do youthink? He reckoned that, though we were still a hundred miles from theheadquarters of the consignees, an outpost was probably no farther thanjust above the falls. He himself was going to prospect, for there shouldbe a native trail through the woods, past the rapids; and he left me incharge. 

"Macandrew was all wrong about that fellow. In two days he was back. Hehad found an outpost, four miles above, but nobody was there, so we couldget no help. He was going to land our cargo of a ton and a half ofmachinery, and place it on the company's territory above the falls. 'Youcan see for yourself, ' Purdy said to me pathetically, 'that I can'tdeliver the _Cygnet_ there. But I think I am right in making her secureand leaving her here, and reporting it. What else can I do? They oughtto give me a clean receipt. '

"It was funny enough, that anxiety about a ship and machinery where therewas nothing but monkeys and parrots, but I agreed with him, and we got towork landing those packages of mining gear, which only an expert couldunderstand, in a place where nothing was likely to happen till the LastDay. The way we sweated over it! And then warped the stuff with snatchblocks through four miles of jungle. Yes; and buried two men of ourcompany on the way. But we did get the cargo on to the company's damnedland at last, and a nice lot of half-naked scarecrows we looked, withnothing to fill our hollow cheeks but whiskers. There the name of theplace was all right, 'Tres Irmaos, ' painted over a shed. The shed wasfalling to pieces. There was nobody about. Nothing but a little openspace, and the forest around, and the sun blazing down at us. 

"We pushed on for headquarters, Purdy leading us. A hundred miles to go!I don't know how we did it. Three more died, including the mate, but wedidn't bury those. Purdy kept on the move. He told me, after aneternity, that it was just ahead of us, and at last we did come to someother men. They were Colombians. We astonished them, but nothing couldastonish us any more. Purdy learned that he had got to our ultimatedestination all right. Then some fellow appeared, in a gaudy uniform anda sword, who spoke English. When Purdy asked to be taken to the managerof the company, this gay chap laughed fiercely, and kept looking at Purdyin triumph. 'Him?' he shouted, when he had got enough fun out of it, 'im? He's dead. We execute him. All those people--they go. No morecompany. All finish. No good. ' He was very bright about it. 

"Purdy never said a word. All he did was to turn to me, and then starebeyond me with big eyes at something which couldn't possibly have beenthere. "

VII. Not in the Almanac

It was an unlucky Friday morning; "and, what's more, " the chief officerstopped on the gangway to call down to me on the quay, "a black catcrossed my path when I left home this morning, and a very nice blackcat it was. " The gangway was hauled up. The tugs began to move thebig steamer away from us, a process so slow that the daylight betweenus and the ship increased imperceptibly. 

On my way home I paused by the shop which sells such antiques as oldspring mattresses, china dogs, portable baths, dumb-bells, and even thekind of bedroom furniture which one would never have supposed waspurchasable at second-hand. But lower, much lower in the shopkeeper'sestimate than even such commodities--thrown into a bin because theywere rubbish, and yet not quite valueless--was a mass of odd volumes. _The First Principles of Algebra_, _Acts Relating to Pawnbrokers_, and_Jessica's First Prayer_, were discovered in that order. The next was_Superstitions of the Sea_. 

I am not superstitious. I have never met a man who was. And look atthe ships in dock today, without figure-heads, with masts that are onlythe support of derricks and the aerials of wireless, and with scienceand an official certificate of competency even in the galley! Couldanything happen in such ships to bring one to awe and wonder? The darkof the human mind is now lighted, one may say, with electricity. Wehave no shadows to make us hesitate. That book of sea superstitionswas on my table, some weeks later, and a sailor, who gave up trading tothe East to patrol mine-fields for three years, and who has never beenknown to lose any time when in doubt through wasting it on a secretpropitiatory gesture, picked up the book, smiling a littlesuperciliously, lost his smile when examining it, and then asked if hemight borrow it. 

We are not superstitious, now we are sure a matter may be mysteriousonly when we have not had the leisure to test it in the right way, butwe have our private reservations. There is a ship's doctor, who hasbeen called a hard case by those who know him, for he has grown greyand serious in watching humanity from the Guinea Coast to the SouthSeas. He only smiles now when listening to a religious or a politicaldiscussion, and might not be supposed to have any more regard for themysteries than you would find in the _Cold Storage Gazette_. When heis home again we go to the British Museum. He always takes me there. It is one of his weaknesses. I invited him, when last we were there, to let us search out a certain exhibit from Egypt about which curiousstories are whispered. "No you don't, " he exclaimed peremptorily. Hegave me no argument, but I gathered that it is very well to be funnyabout such coincidences, yet that one never certainly knows, and thatit is better to regard the unexplored dark with a well-simulatedrespect till one can see through it. He had, he said, known of affairsin the East, and they were not provided for in the books; he had triedto see through them from all points, but not with the satisfaction hedesired. For that reason he never invited trouble unless he knew itwas not there. 

Another man, very like him, a master mariner, and one who knew me wellenough for secrets, was bringing me from the French Coast for Barry atfull speed, in a fog. He was a clever, but an indiscreet navigator. Iwas mildly rebuking him by the door of his chart-room for hisfoolhardiness, but he laughed quietly, said he intended to make a goodpassage, which his owners expected, and that when the problem wasstraightforward he used science, but that when it was all a fog hetrusted mainly to his instinct, or whatever it might be, to inform himin time. I was not to be alarmed. We should have the Lizard eightmiles on the starboard beam in another hour and a half. By this timewe were continuing our talk in the chart-room. An old cap of his wason the floor, upside down. I faced him there, in rebuke of thisreliance on instinct, but he was staring at the cap, a little startled. Then he dashed past me without a word for the bridge. While followinghim at leisure I heard the telegraph ring. Outside I could see nothingbut the pallor of a blind world. The flat sea was but the fugitivelustre of what might have been water; but all melted into nothing at adistance which could have been anywhere. The tremor of the shiplessened, and the noise of the wash fell, for the speed had slackened. We might have become hushed, and were waiting, listening and anxious, for something that was invisible, but threatening. Then I heard theskippers voice, quick but quiet, and arrived on the bridge in time tosee the man at the wheel putting it hard over. Something had beensighted ahead of us, and now was growing broad on the starboard bow--afaint presentment of land, high and unrelated, for there was a luminousvoid below it. It was a filmy and coloured ghost in the sky, with athin shine upon it of a sun we could not see. It grew more material aswe watched it, and brighter, a near and indubitable coast. "I knowwhere I am now, " said the skipper. "Another minute or two, and weshould have been on the Manacles. "

Smiling a little awkwardly, he explained that he had seen that old capon the floor before, without knowing how it could have got there, andat the same time he had felt very nervous, without knowing why. Thelast time was when, homeward bound in charge of a fine steamer, hehoped Finisterre was distant, but not too far off. Just about _there_, as it were; and that his dead reckoning was correct. The weather hadbeen dirty, the seas heavy, and the sun invisible. He went on, to findnothing but worse weather. He did sight, however, two other steamers, on the same course as himself, evidently having calculated to passUshant in the morning; his own calculation. He would be off Ushantlater, for his speed was less than theirs. There they were, a luckyand unexpected confirmation of his own reasoning. His chief officer, an elderly man full of doubt, smiled again, and smacked his handstogether. That was all right. My friend then went into thechart-room, and underwent the strange experience we know. He wondereda little, concluded it was just as well to be on the safe side, andslightly altered his course. Early next morning he sighted Ushant. There was nothing to spare. He was, indeed, cutting it fine. The seaswere great, and piled up on the rocks of that bad coast were the twosteamers he had sighted the day before. 

Why had not the other two masters received the same nudge fromProvidence before it was too late? That is what the unfortunate, whocannot genuinely offer solemn thanks like the lucky, will never know, though they continually ask. It is the darkest and most unedifyingpart of the mystery. Moreover, that side of the question, as a war hashelped us to remember, never troubles the lucky ones. Yet I wish toadd that later, my friend, when in waters not well known, in charge ofa ship on her maiden voyage--for he always got the last and best shipfrom his owners, they having recognized that his stars werewell-assorted--was warned that to attempt a certain passage, in somepeculiar circumstances, was what a wise man would not lightlyundertake. But my friend was young, daring, clever, and fortunate. That morning his cap was _not_ on the floor. At night his valuableship with her exceptionally valuable cargo was fast for ever on a coralreef. 

What did that prove? Apart from the fact that if the young reject theexperience of their elders they may regret it, just as they may regretif they do pay heed to it, his later misfortune proves nothing; except, perhaps, that the last thing on which a man should rely, unless hemust, is the supposed favour of the gods of whom he knows nothing but, say, a cap unreasonably on the floor; yet gods, nevertheless, whoseexistence even the wise and dubious cannot flatly deny. 

It may have been for a reason of such a sort that I did not lend mybook to my young sailor friend who wished to borrow it. I should neverhave had it back. Men go to sea, and forget us. Our world hasnarrowed and has shut out Vanderdecken for ever. But now thateverything private and personal about us which is below the notice evenof the Freudian professor is pigeon-holed by officials at the TownHall, I enjoy reading the abundant evidence for the Extra Hand, thatone of the ship's company who cannot be counted in the watch, but isfelt to be there. And now that every Pacific dot is a concession tosome registered syndicate of money-makers, the Isle-of-No-Land-At-All, which some lucky mariners profess to have sighted, is our last chanceof refuge. We cannot let even the thought of it go. 

VIII. The Illusion

When I came to the house in Malabar Street to which John Williams, master mariner, had retired from the sea, his wife was at her frontgate. It was evening, and from the distant River a steamer called. Mrs. Williams did not see me, for her grey head was turned away. Shewas watching, a little down the street, an officer of the MerchantService, with his cap set like a challenge, for he was very young, anda demure girl with a market-basket who was with him. They werestanding in amused perplexity before their house door. It was a housethat had been empty since the foundering of the _Drummond Castle_. Thesailor was searching his pockets for the door-key, and the girl waslaughing at his pretended lively nervousness in not finding it. Mrs. Williams had not heard me stop at her elbow, and continued to watch thecomedy. She had no children, and she loved young people. 

I did not speak, but waited for her to turn, with that ship's callstill sounding in my mind. The rain had cleared for a winter sunset. Opposite, in the house which had been turned into a frugal shop, it wasthought so near to night that they lit their lamp, though it was notonly possible to see the bottles of sweet-stuff and the bundles of woodin the window, but to make out the large print of a bill stuck to apane announcing a concert at the Wesleyan Mission Room. The lamp wasalight also in the little beer-house next door to it, where the_Shipping Gazette_ could be borrowed, if it were not already out onloan; for children constantly go there for it, with a request frommother, learning their geography that way in Malabar Street, whilefollowing a father or a brother round the world and back again, andworking out by dead-reckoning whether he would be home for Christmas. 

The quiet street, with every house alike, had that air of consciousreserve which is given by the respectable and monotonous; but for amoment then it was bright with the glory of the sky's afterglowreflected on its wet pavements, as though briefly exalted with anunexpected revelation. The radiance died. Night came, and it was asif the twilight native to the street clouded from its walls and brimmedit with gloom, while yet the sky was bright. The lamplighter set hisbeacon at the end of the street. 

That key had been found. Mrs. Williams laughed to herself, and thensaw me. "Oh, " she exclaimed. "I didn't know you were there. Did yousee that? That lamplighter! When Williams was at sea, and I wasalone, it was quite hopeful when the lamplighter did that. It lookedlike a star. And that Number Ten is let at last. Did you see theyoung people there? I'm sure they're newly married. He's a sailor. "

With the fire, the humming kettle, and the cat between us, and thetable laid for tea, Mrs. Williams speculated with interest and hopeabout those young strangers. Did I notice what badge was on his cap?My eyes were better than hers. She trusted it would be all right forthem. They were starting very young. It was better to start young. She looked such a good little soul, that girl. It was pleasant to knowthat house was let at last. It had been empty too long. It wasgetting a name. People could not help remembering why it was empty. But young life would make it bright. 

"People say things only change, but I like to think they change for thebetter, don't you? But Williams, he will have it they change for theworse. I don't know, I'm sure. He thinks nothing really good exceptthe old days. " She laughed quietly, bending to tickle the cat'sear--"nothing good at all except the old days. Even the wrecks weremore like wrecks. " She looked at me, smiling. 

"As you know, " she said, "there's many men who follow the sea withhomes in this street, but Williams is so proud and strong-willed. Hesays he doesn't want to hear about them. What do they know about thesea? You know his way. What do they know about the sea? That's theway he talks, doesn't he? But surely the sea is the same for us all. He won't have it, though. Williams is so vain and determined. "

The captain knocked. There was no doubt about that knock. The doorsurrendered to him. His is a peremptory summons. The old mastermariner brought his bulk with dignity into the room, and his wife, reaching up to that superior height, too slight for the task, ministered to the overcoat of the big figure which was making, allunconsciously, disdainful noises in its throat. It would have beenworse than useless for me to interfere. The pair would have repelledme. This was a domestic rite. Once in his struggle with his coat thedominant figure glanced down at the earnestness of his little mate, paused for a moment, and the stern face relaxed. 

With his attention concentrated and severe even in so small an effortas taking from his broad back a reluctant coat, and the unvarying fixedintentness of the dark eyes over which the lids, loose with age, hadpartly folded, giving him the piercing look of a bird of prey; and theswarthiness of his face, massive, hairless, and acutely ridged, withits crown of tousled white hair, his was a figure which made it easy tobelieve the tales one had heard of him when he was the master of the_Oberon_, and drove his ship home with the new season's tea, leaving, it is said, a trail of light spars all the way from Tientsin to theChannel. 

The coat was off. His wife had it over her arm, and was regarding withconcern the big petulant face above her. She said to him: "Number Tenis let at last. They're a young couple who have got it. He's asailor. "

The old man sat down at a corner of the table, stooped, and in onehandful abruptly hauled the cat off the rug, laying its unresistingbody across his knees, and rubbing its ribs with a hand that halfcovered it. He did not appear to have heard what he had been told. Hedid not look at her, but talked gravely to the fire. "I met Dennisontoday, " he said, as if speaking aloud to himself, in surprise atmeeting Dennison. "Years since I saw him, " he continued, turning tome. "Where was it now, where was it? Must have been Canton River, theyear he lost his ship. Extraordinary to find Dennison still afloat. Not many of those men about now. You can go the length of the DockRoad today and see nothing and meet nobody. "

He looked again into the flames, fixedly, as though what he reallywanted was only to be found in them. His wife was at his elbow. She, too, was watching them, still with his coat over her arm. She spokealoud, though more to herself than to us. "She seemed such a nicelittle woman, too. I couldn't see the badge on his cap. "

"Eh?" said the old man, throwing the cat back to the floor and roundingto his wife. "What's that? Let's have tea, Mrs. Williams. We're bothdreaming, and there's a visitor. What are you dreaming about? You'venothing to dream about. "

There was never any doubt, though, that the past was full and alive tohim. There was only the past. And what a memory was his! He wouldlook at the portrait of his old clipper, the _Oberon_--it was centralover the mantel-shelf--and recall her voyages, and the days in eachvoyage, and just how the weather was, what canvas she carried, and howthings happened. Malabar Street vanished. We would go, when he was inthat mood, and live for the evening in another year, with men who havegone, among strange affairs forgotten. 

Mrs. Williams would be in her dream, too, with her work-basket in herlap, absently picking the table-cloth with her needle. But for us, allwe knew was that the _Cinderella_ had a day's start of us, and theweather in the Southern Ocean, when we got there, was like the death ofthe world. I was aware that we were under foresail, lower topsails, and stay-sails only, and they were too much. They were driving usunder, and the _Oberon_ was tender. Yes, she was very tricky. Butwhere was the _Cinderella_? Anyhow, she had a day's start of us. Captain Williams would rise then, and stand before his ship's picture, pointing into her rigging. 

"I must go in and see that girl, " said the captain's wife once, when wewere in the middle of one of our voyages. 

"Eh?" questioned her husband, instantly bending to her, but keeping hisforefinger pointing to his old ship; thinking, perhaps, his wife wasadding something to his narrative he had forgotten. 

"Yes, " she said, and did not meet his face. "I must go in and see her. He's been gone a week now. He must be crossing the Bay, and look atthe weather we've had. I know what it is. "

I did then leave our voyage in the past for a moment, to listen to theimmediate weather without. It was certainly a wild night. I shouldget wet when I left for home. 

"Ah!" exclaimed the puzzled captain, suddenly enlightened, with hisfinger still addressing the picture on the wall. "She means the mandown the street. An engineer, isn't he? The missis calls him asailor. " He continued that voyage, made in 1862. 

There was one evening when, on the home run, we had overhauled andpassed our rivals in the race, and were off the Start. CaptainWilliams was serving a tot all round, in a propitiatory act, hoping tolower the masts of the next astern deeper beneath the horizon, and tokeep them there till he was off Blackwall Point. He then found hewanted to show me a letter, testimony to the work of his ship, which hehad received that voyage from his owners. Where was it? The missisknew, and he looked over his shoulder for her. But she was not there. 

They must have been the days to live in, when China was like that, andthere was all the East, and such ships, and men who were seamen andnavigators in a way that is lost. As the old master mariner, who hadlived in that time, would sometimes demand of me: What is the sea now?Steamers do not make time, or lose it. They keep it. They run toschedule, one behind the other, in processions. They have nothing toovercome. They do not fail, and they cannot triumph. They arepredestined engines, and the sea is but their track. Yet it had beenotherwise. And the old man would brood into the greater past, hisvoice would grow quiet, and he would gently emphasize his argument byletting one hand, from a fixed wrist, rise, and fall sadly on thetable, in a gesture of solemn finality. He was in that act, early oneevening, while his wife was reading a newspaper; and I had risen to go, and stood for a moment silent in the thought that these of ours werelesser days, and their petty demands and trivial duties made of men butmere attendants on uninspiring process. 

Serene Mrs. Williams, reading her paper, and not in our world at all, at that moment struck the paper into her lap, and fixed me withsurprise and shock in her eyes, as though she had just repelled thatmean print in a malicious attempt at injury. Her husband took nonotice. She handed me the paper, with a finger on a paragraph. "Thesteamer _Arab_, which sailed on December 26 last for Buenos Aires, hasnot been heard of since that date, and today was 'posted' as missing. "

I remembered then a young man in uniform, with a rakish cap, trying tofind a key while a girl was laughing at him. As I left the house Icould see in the dusk, a little down the street, the girl standing ather gate. The street was empty and silent. At the end of it thelamp-lighter set his beacon. 

IX. In a Coffee-Shop

With a day of rain, Dockland is set in its appropriate element. Itdoes not then look better than before, but it looks what it is. Notsudden April showers are meant, sparkling and revivifying, but adrizzle, thin and eternal, as if the rain were no more than the shadowcast by a sky as unchanging as poverty. When real night comes, thenthe street lamps dissolve ochreous hollows in the murk. It was such aday as that; it was not night, for the street lamps were not alight. There was no sound. The rain was as noiseless as the passage of time. Two other wayfarers were in the street with me. One had no rightthere, nor anywhere, and knew it, slinking along with his head and tailheld low, trailing a length of string through the puddles. The other, too, seemed lost. He was idling as if one street was the same asanother, and on that day there was rain in all. He came towards me, with his hands in his pockets and his coat collar up. He turned on mebriskly, with a sudden decision, when he drew level. Water drippedfrom the peak of his cap, and his clothes were heavy and dark with it. He spoke. "Mister, could ye give me a hand up? I've made a mess ofit. " His cheerful and rather insolent assurance faltered for a moment. He then mumbled: "I've been on the booze y'understand. " But there wasstill something in his tone which suggested that any good man mighthave done the same thing. 

It is not easy to be even sententious with the sinful when an openconfession robs us of our moral prerogative, so I only told him that itseemed likely booze had something to do with it. His age could havebeen forty; but it was not easy to judge, for the bridge of his nosewas a livid depression. Some accident had pushed in his face under theeyes, giving him the battered aspect of ancient sin. His sinisterappearance would have frightened any timid lady if he had stopped herin such a street, on such a day, with nobody about but a lost dog, andthe houses, it could be supposed, deserted, or their inmates secludedin an abandonment to misery. And, taking another glance at him, Ithought it probable, from the frank regard of the blue and frivolouseye which met mine, that he would have recognized timidity in a lady ata distance, and would have passed her without seeing her. Uncertainwhether his guess in stopping me was lucky, he began pulling nervouslyat a bleached moustache. His paw was the colour of leather. Its nailswere broken and stained with tar. 

"Can't you get work?" I suggested. "Why don't you go to sea?"

This deliberately unfair question shook his upright confidence inhimself, and perhaps convinced him that he had, after all, stopped afool. He took his cap off, and flung a shower from it--it had beendraining into his moustache--and asked whether I did not think helooked poor enough for a sailor. 

Then I heard how he came to be there. Two days before he had signedthe articles of the steamship _Bilbao_. His box had gone aboard, andthat contained all his estate. The skipper, to be sure of his man, hadtaken care of his discharge book, and so was in possession of the onlyproof of his identity. Then he left the shipping office, and met somefriends. 

Those friends! "That was a fine girl, " he said, speaking more to therain than to me. "I never seen a finer. " I began to show signs ofmoving away. "Don't go, mister. She was all right. I lay you neverseen a finer. Look here. I reckon you know her. " He plunged an eagerhand into an inner pocket. "Ever heard of Angel Light? She's on thestage. It's a fact. She showed me her name herself on a programmelast night. There y'are. " He triumphed with a photograph, and hisgnarled forefinger pointed at an exposed set of teeth under anextraordinary hat. "Eh, ain't that all right? On the stage, too. Mether at the corner of Pennyfields. "

It was still raining. He flung another shower from his cap. I wasimpatient, but he took my lapel confidentially. "Guv'nor, " he said, "if I could find the swab as took my money, I lay I'd make him look soas his own mother 'ud turn her back on him. I would. Ten quid. "

He had, it appeared, lost those friends. He was now seeking, withvarying emotions, both the girl and the swab. I suggested the dock andhis ship would be a better quest. No, it was no good, he said. Hetried that late last night. Both had gone. The policeman at the gatetold him so. The dock was there again this morning, but a differentpoliceman; and whatever improbable world the dock and the policeman ofmidnight had visited, there they had left his ship, inaccessible, tangled hopelessly in a revolving mesh of saloon lights and collapsingstreets. Now he had no name, no history, no character, no money, andhe was hungry. 

We went into a coffee-shop. It stands at the corner of the streetwhich is opposite the _Steam Packet_ beerhouse. You may recognize theplace, for it is marked conspicuously as a good pull-up for carmen, though then the carmen were taking their vans steadily past it. Thebuildings of a shipwright's yard stand above it, and the hammers of theyard beat with a continuous rhythmic clangour which recedes, when youare used to it, till it is only the normal pulse of life in your ears. The time was three in the afternoon. The children were at school, andalone the men of the iron-yard made audible the unseen life of theplace. We had the coffee-shop to ourselves. On the counter a jam rollwas derelict. Some crumpled and greasy newspapers sprawled on thebenches. The outcast squeezed into a corner of a bench, and a stoutand elderly matron appeared, drying her bare arms on her apron, andlooked at us with annoyance. My friend seized her hand, patted it, andaddressed her in terms of extravagant endearment. She spoke to himabout that. But food came; and as he ate--how he ate!--I waited, looking into my own mug of tepid brown slop at twopence the pint. There was a racing calendar punctuated with dead flies, and a picturein the dark by the side of the door of Lord Beaconsfield, with itsmotto: "For God, King, and Country"; and there was a smell which comesof long years of herrings cooked on a gas grill. At last the hungrychild had finished scraping his plate and wiping his moustache with hishands. He brought out a briar pipe, and a pouch of hairy skin, andfaded behind a blue cloud. From behind the cloud he spoke at large, like a confident disreputable Jove who had been skylarking for yearswith the little planet Earth. 

At a point in his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interestvanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts ofthe place I knew once, when Poplar was salt. The lost sailor himselfwas insignificant. What was he? A deck hand; one who tarred iron, andcould take a trick at the wheel when some one was watching him. Theplace outside might have been any dismal neighbourhood of London. Itscharacter had gone. 

The tap-tapping on iron plates in the yard next door showed where wewere today. The sailor was silent for a time, and we listened togetherto the sound of rivets going home. "That's right, " said the outcast. "Make them bite. Good luck to the rivets. What yard is that?" I toldhim. 

"What? I didn't know it was about here. That place! Well, it's agood yard, that. They're all right. I was on a steamer that went inthere, one trip. She wanted it, too. You could put a chisel throughher. But they only put in what they were paid for, not what shewanted. The old _Starlight_. She wouldn't have gone in then but for abump she got. Do you know old Jackson? Lives in Foochow Street roundabout here somewhere. He's lived next to that pub in Foochow Streetfor years and years. He was the old man of the _Starlight_. He's asailor all right, is Jackson. 

"The last trip I had with him was ten months ago. The _Starlight_ camein here to the West Dock with timber. She had to go into dry-dock, andI signed on for her again when she was ready. This used to be my home, Poplar, before I married that Cardiff woman. Do you know Poplar atall? Poplar's all right. We went over to Rotterdam for something orother, but sailed from there light, for Fowey. We loaded about threethousand tons of china clay for Baltimore. 

"The sea got up when we were abreast of the Wolf that night, and shewas a wet ship. 'We're running into it, ' said old Jackson to the mate. I was at the wheel. 'Look out, and call me if I'm wanted. '"

The man pushed his plate away, and leaned towards me, elbows on thetable, putting close his flat and brutish face, with his wet hairplastered over all the brow he had. He appeared to be a little drowsywith food. "Ever crossed the Western ocean in winter? Sometimesthere's nothing in it. But when it's bad there's no word for it. There was our old bitch, filling up for'ard every time she dropped, androlling enough to shift the boilers. We reckoned something was comingall right. Then when it began to blow, from dead ahead, the old manwouldn't ease her. That was like old Jackson. It makes you think ofyour comfortable little home, watching them big grey-backs running byyour ship, and no hot grub because the galley's flooded. The Wolf wasonly two days behind us, and we had all the way to go. It was lively, guv'nor. The third night I was in with the cook helping him to getsomething for the men. They'd been roping her hatches. The coverswere beginning to come adrift, y'understand. The cook, he was slippingabout, grousing all round. Then she stopped dead, and the lights wentout. Something swept right over us with a hell of a rush, and I feltthe deck give under my feet. The galley filled with water. 'Christ, she's done, ' shouted the cook. 

"We scrambled out. It was too dark to see anything, but we could hearthe old man shouting. The engines had stopped. I fell over somewreckage. " The sailor stroked his nose. "This is what it did. 

"Next morning you wouldn't have known the old _Starlight_. All herboats had gone, and she had a list to port like a roof. You wanted tobe a bird to get about her. The crowd looked blue enough when they sawthe falls flying around at daylight, and only bits of boats. It was acase. Every time she lay down in the trough, and a sea went over hersolid, we watched her come up again. She took her time about it. 

"The engineers were at it below, trying to get her clear. They had thedonkey going. In the afternoon we sighted a steamer's smoke towestward. She bore down on us. I never seen anything I liked betterthan that. Then the Chief came up, and I saw him talking to the oldman. The old man climbed round to us. 'Now, lads, ' he said, 'there'sa Cunarder coming. But the engineer says he reckons he's getting herclear of water. What about it? Shall I signal the liner, or will youstand by her?'

"We let the Cunarder go. I watched her out of sight. We hung around, and just about sunset the Chief came up again. I heard what he said. 'It's overhauling us fast, sir, ' he said to the old man. The old man, he stood looking down at the deck. Nobody said anything for a spell. Then a fireman shot through a companion on all fours, scrambled to thebulwarks, and looked out. He began cursing the sun, shaking his fistat it every time it popped over the seas. It was low down. It wasfunny to hear him. 'So long, chaps, ' he said, and dropped overside. 

"We waited all night. I couldn't sleep, what with the noise of theseas running over us, and waiting for something to happen. It wasperishing cold, too. At sun-up I could see she might pitch under atany time. She was about awash. The old man came to me and thesteward, and said: 'Give the men all the gin they'll drink. Fill 'emup. ' Some of 'em took it. I never knew a ship take such a hell of atime to sink as that one. 

"I sighted the steamer, right ahead, and we wondered whether the ironunder us would wait till she come. We counted every roller that wentover us. The other steamer was a slow ship all right. But she cameup, and put out her boats. We had to lower the drunks into them. Ileft in the last boat with the old man. 'Jim, ' he said, looking at heras we left her, 'she's got no more than five minutes now. I just felther drop. Something's given way. ' Before we got to the other ship wesaw the _Starlight's_ propeller in the air. Right on end. Yes. Inever seen anything like that--and then she just went . . . "

The sailor made a grimace at me and nodded. From the shipwright's nextdoor the steady, continuous hammering in the dry-dock was heard again, as though it had been waiting, and were now continuing the yarn. 

X. Off-Shore

1

For weeks our London days had been handmade with gas and oil. It was awinter of the kind when the heaven of the capital is a brown obscuritynot much above the highest reached by the churches, and a December moreyears before the War then it would be amusing to count. There was enoughof the sun in that morning to light my way down Mark Lane, across GreatTower Street to Billingsgate. I was on my way to sea for the first time, but that fortune was as incredible to me as the daylight. And as to thedaylight, the only certainty in it was its antiquity. It was a gloomthat was not only because the year was exhausted, but because darknesswas falling at the end of an epoch. It was not many years before theWar, to be a little more precise, though then I was unaware of the reasonof the darkness, except common fog. 

Besides, why should a Londoner, and even an East-Ender whose familiarwalls are topped by mastheads, believe in the nearness of the ocean? Wethink of the shipping no more than we do of the paving stones or of thewarnings of the pious. It is an event of the first importance to go fora first voyage, though mine was to be only by steam-trawler to the DoggerBank; yet, as the event had come to me so late, I had lost faith in theomens of London's foreshore, among which, at the bottom of Mark Lane, wasan Italian baking chestnuts over a coke fire. The fog, and the slops, and the smell by Billingsgate, could have been tokens of no more than atwopenny journey to Shepherd's Bush. I had believed in the signs solittle that I had left my bag at a railway station, miles away. 

Three small steamers, the size of tugs, but with upstanding bows and asheer suggesting speed and buoyancy, were lying off the fish market, andmine, the _Windhover_, had the outside berth. I climbed over to her. Blubber littered her iron deck, and slime drained along her gutters. Black grits showered from her stack. The smell from her galley, and theheat from her engine-room casing, were challenging to a stranger. It wasno place for me. The men and porters tramping about their jobs knewthat, and did not order me out of their way. This was Billingsgate, andthere was a tide to be caught. They hustled me out of it. But theskipper had to be found, for I must know when I had to come aboard. Aperpendicular iron ladder led to her saloon from a hatch, and throughunintelligence and the dark I entered that saloon more precipitously thanwas a measure of my eagerness, picked myself up with a coolness which Ican only hope met with the approval of some silent men, watching me, whosat at a table there, and offered my pass to the man nearest me. 

It was the mate. He scrutinized the simple document at unnecessarylength, and with a gravity that was embarrassing. He turned up slowly alarge and weather-beaten sadness, with a grizzled moustache that curledtightly into his mouth from under a long, thin nose which pointed at melike a finger. His heavy eyes might have been melancholy or only tired, and they regarded me as if they sought on my face what they could notfind on my document. I thought he was searching me for the proof of mysanity. Presently he spoke: "Have you _got_ to come?" he said, and in agentle voice that was disconcerting from a figure so masculine. While Iwas wondering what was hidden in this question, the ship's master enteredthe saloon briskly. He was plump and light. His face was a smooth roundof unctuous red, without a beard, and was mounted upon many folds ofbrown woollen scarf, like an attractive pudding on a platter. He lookedat me with amusement, as I have no doubt those lively eyes, with theirbrows of arched interest, looked at everything; and his thick grey hairwas curved upwards in a confusion of interrogation marks. 

He chuckled. "This is not a passenger ship, " he said. "That will haveto be your berth. " He pointed to a part of the saloon settee which wasabout six feet forward and above the propeller. "A sou'-wester washedout our only spare cabin, comin' in. There you are. " He began to climbthe ladder out of it again, but stopped, and put his rosy face under thelintel of the door. "You've got twenty minutes now. Get your luggageaboard. "

My bag was where it could not be reached in twenty minutes. Roughing itmay have its humours, but to suffer through it, as I was aware I must, ifI stayed, would more than outweigh the legitimate interest of a firstvoyage, except for heroic youth with its gift of eternal life. Simpleignorance, as usual, made me heroic. I went on deck, and found thesteward sitting on a box, with a bucket of sprats before him, tearing offtheir heads, and then throwing the bodies contemptuously into anotherbucket. The ends of his fingers and thumbs were pink and bright, andwere separated from the remainder of his dark hands by margins ofglittering scales. He compared to me, as he beheaded the fish, the girlsof Hull and London. But what I knew of the girls of but one city was someagre in comparison that I could only listen to his particulars insilent surprise. It was notable that a man like that, who pulled theheads and guts of fish like that, should have acquired a knowledge sopeculiar, so personal, of the girls of two cities. While consideringwhether what at first looked like the mystery of this problem might notbe in reality its clue, I became aware of another listener. Its lean anddismal length was disproportionate to that small ship. It had on butdungarees and a singlet, and the singlet, because of the length of thefigure, was concave at the stomach, where, having nothing to rest upon, it was corrugated through the weight of a head made brooding by a heavyblack beard. Hairy wrists were thrust deeply into the pockets to hold upthe trousers. The dome of its head was as bald and polished as yellowmetal. The steward introduced me to the Chief Engineer. "Yon's a dirtysteward, " returned the Chief simply. 

"Clean enough for this ship, " said the Steward. 

"Aye, " sighed the engineer, "aye!"

"Have you been to the Queen's Hall lately?" asked the Chief of me. "Ishould like to hear some Beethoven or Mozart tonight. Aye, but we'reawa'. It'll be yon sprats. " He sighed his affirmative again inresignation, and stood regarding the steward bending over the pails onthe deck. "What make ye, " he asked, "of this war between the Japs andRussia? Come awa' doon, and have a bit talk. I canna' look at thatman's hands and argue reasonable. It'd no be fair to ye. "

We could not have that argument then, for I had so little time to goashore and purchase what necessaries could be remembered while narrowlywatching the clock. I was astride the bulwarks again when the_Windhover_ was free of her moorings. There was a lack of deliberationand dignity in this departure which gave it the appearance ofimprovisation, of not being the real thing. I could not believe itmattered whether I went or not. My first voyage had, that is, thosecommon circumstances which always make our crises incredible when theyface us, as if they had met us by accident, in mistake for some one else. The bascules of the Tower Bridge went up, this time to let out me. Yetthat significant gesture, obviously made to my ship, was watched with anindifference which was little better than cynicism. What was this city, past which we moved? In that haze it was only the fading impress of whatonce was there, of what once had overlooked the departure of voyagers, when on memorable journeys, in famous ships. Now it had almost gone. Ithad seen its great days. There was nothing more to watch upon its River, and so it was going. And was an important voyage ever made by one whohad forgotten his overcoat? The steward rose, raised his bucket of fishoffal, emptied it overboard, and went below. It was not easy to believethat such a voyage could come to anything, for London itself wasintangible, and when we got past those heavier shades which were thecity, and were running along the Essex marshes, though there was morelight, there was nothing to be seen, not even land substantial enough tobe a shadow. There was only the length of our own ship. Our pilot leftus, and we felt our way to the Lower Hope, a place I could have acceptedif it had not been on the chart, and anchored. 

Night came, and drove me below to the saloon, where we made five who satwith the sprats, now fried, and mugs of tea before us. The saloon wasthe hollow stern, a triangle with a little fireplace in its base, andfour bunks in its sides. Its centre was filled with a triangular table, over which, pendent from the skylight, was an oil-lamp in chains. Asettee ran completely round the sides, and on that one sat for meals, andused it as a step when climbing into a bunk. The skipper cheerily hailedme. "As you're in for it, make yourself comfortable. Sorry we can't domore than give you the seat to sleep on. But the chief thing in thisship is fish. Try some sprats. "

"Aye, try yon sprats, " invited the Chief. "Ye'll get to like them well, in time. " After the fish there was cards, in which I took no hand, butregarded four bent heads, so intent they might have been watching aritual of magic which might betray their fate; and, above those heads, motionless blue cirrus clouds of tobacco smoke wreathing the still lamp. The hush was so profound that we could have been anchored beyond theconfines of this life. 

2

What the time was next morning when I woke I do not know, for the saloonwas too dark to show the clock, over the fireplace. But the skylight wasa pale cube of daylight, and through it I could see a halyard quiveringand swaying, apparently in a high wind. My bench was in a continuoustremor. 

We were off again. Somebody appeared at the doorway, a pull of cottonwaste in his hand, and turned a negroid face, made lugubrious by whitelines which sweat had channelled downwards through its coal dust. Itlooked at me, this spectre with eyes brilliant yet full of unutterablereproach, saw that I was awake, and winked slowly. It was the secondengineer. He said it was a clear morning. We had been under way anhour. He had got sixty revolutions now. He then receded into the gloombeyond; but materialized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of twodisembodied eyes appeared, and the same voice said that it had wonseventeen and six-pence last night, but there was something funny aboutthe way the skipper shuffled cards. 

Feeling as though I were in one piece, I got up, made my joints bendagain, and went on deck. Our ship, tilting at the immobile world, mighthave upset the morning, which was pouring a bath of cold air over us. The overcoat of the skipper, who was pacing the bridge, flapped in thissteady current. A low coast was dim on either hand, hardly superior tothe flawless glass of the Thames. By the look of it, we were the firstever to break the tranquillity of that stream. We ourselves madescarcely a sound; we could have been attempting a swift, secret and, sofar, unchallenged escape. The shores unfolded in a panorama withoutform. Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship beforethe world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghostshrouded in the still folds of diaphanous night, its riding lightsfollowing us like eyes. In the horny light of that winter dawn weoverhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, theChapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern. We made acourse east by north to where the red glints of the Maplin and Gunfleetlights winked in their iron gibbets. Above the shallows of the BurrowsShoal the masts projected awry of the wreck of a three-masted schooner, and they could have been the fingers of the drowned making a last clutchat nothing. 

We got abreast of Orfordness, and went through the gate of the NorthChannel upon a wide grey plain. We were fairly at sea. We were out. The _Windhover_, being free, I suppose, began to dance. The sun came up. The seas were on the march. Just behind us was London, asleep andunsuspecting under the brown depression of its canopy; and as to thissurprise of light and space so near to that city, so easily entered, yetfor so long merely an ancient rumour, an old tale of our streets to whichthe ships and the wharves gave credence--how shall the report of it soundtrue? Not at all, except to those who still hold to a faith, through allfoul times, in the chance hints of a better world. 

A new time was beginning in such a world. There was a massive purplebattlement on the sea, at a great distance, the last entrenchment ofnight; but a multitude of rays had stormed it, poured through clefts andchasms in the wall, and escaped to the _Windhover_ on a broad road thatwas newly laid from the sky to this planet. The sun was at one end ofthe road, and we were at the other. There were only the two of us onthat road. On our port beam the shadow which was East Anglia becamesuddenly that bright shore which is sometimes conjectured, but is neverreached. 

The _Windhover_ drove athwart the morning, and her bows would ride overthe horizon to divide it, and then the skyline joined again as she sankbelow it. We were beginning to live. I did not know what the skipperwould think of it, so I did not cheer. Sometimes the sea did this forme, making a loud applause as it leaped over the prow. The trawler was agood ship; you could feel that. She was as easy and buoyant as athoroughbred. She would take a wave in a stride. I liked her start ofsurprise when she met a wave of unexpected speed and strength, and thenleaped at it, and threw it, white and shouting, all around us. It wasthat part of a first voyage when you feel you were meant to be anavigator. To stand at the end of the bridge, rolling out over thecataracts roaring below, and to swing back, and out again, watching theship's head decline into a hollow of the seas, and then to clutch thesaddle as she reared with a sudden twist and swing above the horizon, andin such a vast and illuminated theatre, was to awake to a new virtue inlife. We were alone there. There were only comets of smoke on thebright wall of the sky, of steamers out of sight. 

At sunset we made Smith's Knoll Light, and dropped the land. The clusterof stars astern, which was a fleet of Yarmouth herring boats at work, went out in the dark. I had, for warmth and company in the wheel-houseon the bridge, while listening to the seas getting up, only signals fromOrion and the Great Bear, the glow of the pipe of the silent fellow atthe wheel, and the warm shaft of light which streamed from somewhere inthe ship's body and isolated the foremast as a column of gold. There wasthe monody, confident but subdued, the most ancient song in the world, ofinvisible waters. Sometimes there was a shock when she dropped into ahollow, and a vicious shower whipped across the glass of the wheel-house. I then got the sad feeling, much too soon, that the inhospitable Northwas greeting us. It is after sundown at sea, when looking through thedark to the stars, listening to sounds that are as though ancient waterswere still wandering under a sky in which day has not been kindled, seeking coasts not yet formed, it is in such nights that one's thoughtsare of destiny, and then the remembrance of our late eager activitiesbrings a little smile. There being no illumination in the wheel-housebut the restricted glow from the binnacle, this silent comment of mine onman and his fate caused the helmsman no amusement. "I hope you arebringing us luck this trip, " said the sailor to me. "Last trip we got apoor catch. I don't know where the fish have got to. " Somewhere, north-east about two hundred miles, was the fleet which, if I were theright sort of mascot to the Windhover, we should pick up on the eveningof the next day. 

3

When I left the wheel-house to go below, it was near midnight. As Iopened the heavy door of the house the night howled aloud at myappearance. The night smelt pungently of salt and seaweed. Thehand-rail was cold and wet. The wind was like ice in my nose, and ittasted like iron. Sometimes the next step was at a correct distancebelow my feet; and then all that was under me would be swept away. Idescended into the muffled saloon, which was a little box enclosing lightand warmth partially submerged in the waters. There it smelt of hotengine-oil and stale clothes. I got used to the murmuring transit ofsomething which swept our outer walls in immense bounds, and the flyinggrind of the propeller, and the bang-clang of the rudder when it wasstruck . . . And must have gone to sleep. . . . 

When I woke, it was because the saloon in my dreams had gone mad. Perhaps it had been going mad for some time. Really I was not fullyawake--it was four in the morning, the fire was out, and violent draughtskept ballooning the blanket over me--and in another minute I might havebecome quite aware that I had gone to sea for the first time. It was mybench which properly woke me. It fell away from me, and I, of course, went after it, and my impression is that I met it halfway on its returnjourney, for then there came the swooning sensation one feels in theimmediate ascent of a lift. When the bench was as high as it could go itoverbalanced, canting acutely, and, grabbing my blanket, I leftdiagonally for a corner of the saloon, accompanied by some sea-boots Imet under the table. As I was slowly and carefully climbing back, thefloor reversed, and I stopped falling when my head struck a panel. Thepanel slid gently along, and the mate's severe countenance regarded mefrom inside the bunk. I expected some remonstrance from a tired man whohad been unfairly awakened too soon. "Hurt yourself?" he asked. "It'sgetting up outside. Dirty weather. Take things easy. "

I took them as easily as perhaps should be expected of a longshoreman. There was no more sleep, though no more was wanted. By putting out myhand to the table I managed to keep where I was, even when, in thosemoments of greatest insecurity, the screw was roaring in mid-air. Ourfascinating hanging lamp would perform the impossible, hanging acutelyout of plumb; and then, when I was watching this miracle, rattle itschain and hang the other way. A regiment of boots on the floor--Isuppose it was boots--would tramp to one corner, remain quiet for awhile, and then clatter elsewhere in a body. Towards daybreak theskipper appeared in shining oilskins, tapped the barometer, glanced atme, and laughed because my pillow--which was a linen bag stuffed with oldmagazines--at that moment became lower than my heels, and the precipitousrug tried to smother me. I enjoyed that laugh. 

Later still, I saw that our dark skylight was beginning to regain itssight. Light was coming through. Our lunatic saloon lamp was growingwan. I ventured on deck. When my face was no more than out of thehatch, what I saw was our ship's stern upturned before me, with our boatlashed to it. It dropped out of view instantly, and exposed the blurredapparition of a hill in pursuit of us--the hill ran in to run overus--and in that very moment of crisis the slope of wet deck appearedagain, and the lashed boat. The cold iron was wet and slippery, but Igrasped it firmly, as though that were an essential condition ofexistence in such a place. 

The _Windhover_, too, looked so small. She was diminished. She did notbear herself as buoyantly as yesterday. Often she was not quick enoughto escape a blow. She looked a forlorn trifle, and there was no aid insight. I cannot say those hills, alive and deliberate on all sides, werewaves. They were the sea. The dawn astern was a narrow band of deadwhite, an effort at daybreak suddenly frustrated by night, but notaltogether expunged. The separating black waters bulked above the dawnin regular upheavals, shutting out its pallor, and as incontinentlycollapsed again to release it to make the _Windhover_ plainer in hersolitude. 

The skipper waddled briskly aft, and stood beside me. He put his noseinside the galley. "I smell coffee, " he said. His charge reared, andpitched him against the bulwarks. "Whoa, you bitch, " he criedcheerfully. "Our fleet ought not to be far off, " he explained. "Oughtto see something of them soon. " He glanced casually round the emptinesssof the dawn. He might have been looking for some one with whom he hadmade an appointment at Charing Cross. He then backed into the hatch andwent below. The big mate appeared, yawned, stooped to examine a lashedspar, did not give the sunrise so much as a glance, did not allow theocean to see that he was even aware of its existence, but went forward tothe bridge. 

The clouds lowered during the morning, and through that narrowed spacebetween the sea and the sky the wind was forced at a greater pace, dragging rain over the waters. Our fleet might have been half a mileaway, and we could have gone on, still looking for it. The day earlysurrendered its light, a dismal submission to conditions that had madeits brief existence a failure. It had nearly gone when we sightedanother trawler. She was the _Susie_. She was smaller than the_Windhover_. We went close enough to hail the men standing knee-deep inthe wash on her deck. It would not be easy to forget the _Susie_. Ishall always see her, at the moment when our skipper began to shoutthrough his hands at her. She was poised askew, in that arrestedinstant, on a glassy slope of water, with its crest foaming above her. Surge blotted her out amid-ships, and her streaming forefoot juttedclear. She plunged then into the hollow between us, showing us the planof her deck, for her funnel was pointing at us. Her men bawled to us. They said the _Susie_ had sighted nothing. 

Our engine-bell rang for us to part company. Our little friend droppedastern. She seemed a poor little thing, with a squirt of steam to keepher alive in that stupendous and hurrying world. A man on her raised hisarm to us in salute, and she vanished. 

4

The talk of our skipper, who began to be preoccupied and abrupt veered tothe subject of Jonah. We should now have been with our fleet, but werealone in the wilderness, and any course we took would be as likely asanother. "This hasn't happened to me for years, " he apologized. Hestared about him, tapping the weather-dodger with his fingers, andwhistled reflectively. He turned to the man at the wheel. "Take hereast for an hour, and then north for an hour, " and went below. 

Day returned briefly at sunset. It was an astonishing gift. The cloudsrapidly lifted and the sky cleared, till the sea extended far to a brighthorizon, hard and polished, a clear separation of our planet and heaven. The waves were still ponderous. The _Windhover_ laboured heavily. Werolled over the bright slopes aimlessly. She would rear till the forwarddeck stuck up in front of us, then drop over, flinging us against thedodger, and the shock would surround her with foam that was an eruptionof greenish light. 

The sun was a cold rayless ball halved by the dark sea. The wall ofheaven above it was flushed and translucent marble. There was a silverparing of moon in a tincture of rose. When the sun had gone, the placeit had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while wemight have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetratedby a glow that was without. The purple waters took the light from aboveand the waves turned to flames. The fountains that mounted at the bowsand fell inboard came as showers of gems. (I heard afterwards it wasstill foggy in London. ) And now, having made all I can of sunset andocean, and a spray of amethysts, jacinths, emeralds, zircons, rubies, peridots, and sapphires, it is no longer possible for me to avoid thesaloon, the thought of which, for an obscure reason, my mind loathed. 

And our saloon, compared with the measure of the twilight emptiness nowabout us, was no bigger than the comfort a man feels amid mischance whenhe remembers that he is still virtuous. The white cloth on its table, Inoticed, as I sat down, was contaminated by a long and sinful life. Butthe men round it were good and hearty. I took my share of ham and fishon the same plate, and began to feel not so hungry as before. I wasinformed that ashore we are too particular about trifles, because we havethe room for it, but on a trawler there is not much room. You have tosqueeze together, and make do with what is there, because fish is themost important passenger. My hunk of bread was placed where the clothbore the imprint of a negro's hand. The mugs of tea were massive, andsweetish (I could smell that) with condensed milk. Did I want my tea? Inoticed there were two men between me and the exit, and no room to pass. The room was hot. The bench was rising and falling. My soul felt paleand faintly apprehensive, compelling me, now I was beset, to take hold ofit firmly, and to tell it that this was not the time to be a miserablemartyr, but a coarse brute; and that, whether it liked it or not, I wasgoing to feed at once on fish, ham, and sickly liquor, and heaven help usif it failed me before these sailors. It made no response, being a thinnonconformist soul, so I had to leave it, and alone I advanced on thefood. As so often happens, the conquest was a little less hard than itappeared to be. I progressed, though slowly, and at last wassufficiently disengaged from my task to count the minutes moving at theirfuneral pace to the end of the meal. The heat of the room mounted. Themovements of the ship continued to throw my stomach against the edge ofthe table. 

My companions, however, were in no hurry to move. They discussed, amongother things, Hull, and its unfortunate system of sanitation. While thisgossip, which was explicit with exuberant detail, was engaging us, Isummoned my scientific mind, which is not connected with my soul, tolisten to what was being said, and the rest of me was deaf. They went onto tell each other about other trawlers and other crews. Other ships andmen, I heard, had most of the luck. "The fish follow some of 'em about, "complained the skipper. "I should like to know how it's done. "

"They ought to follow us, " replied the second engineer. "When I wentdown to take over this morning, Mac was singing Scotch songs. What morecould we do below?"

"It's a grand life, " nodded his superior's polished bald head. "Aye, there's guid reason for singing. Sing to yon codfish, y'ken. "

The skipper looked at the engineer in doubtful innocence. "Well, I wishsinging would do it, " he said gravely. "I don't know. How do youaccount for some fellows getting most of the luck? Their ships are thesame, and they don't know any more. "

Mac shook his head. "The owners think they do. There's their bigcatches, y'ken. Ye'll no convince owners that the sea bottom isna' wetand onsairten. "

The rosy face of the skipper became darker, and there was a spark in hiseyes. This was unfair. "But dammit, man, you don't mean to say theowners are right? Do these chaps know any more? Look at old Rumface, old Billy Higgs. Got enough women to make him hate going into any port. Can't be happy ashore unless he's too drunk to know one woman fromanother. What does he do? Can't go to sea without taking his trawlerright over all the fish there is. Is that his sense? Ain't God good tohim? Shows him the fish every time. "

The engineer stood up, bending his head beneath a beam, crooking an elbowto consider one hairy arm. "Ah weel, I wouldna call it God. Ye cannatell. Man Billy has his last trip to make. Likely he'll catch fishthat'd frighten Hull. Aye. "

The skipper moved impatiently, made noises in his throat, rose, and bothwent out. The mate, who had been chewing and looking at nothing all thetime, chuckled. 

The mate pulled off his big boots, and climbed into his bunk. Thesteward cleared the table. I had the saloon to myself, and tried to readfrom a magazine I extracted from my pillow. The first story wasrollicking of the sea, and I have never seen more silly or such drearylies in print. And the others were about women, magazine women, and theland, that magazine land which is not of this earth. The bench stillheaved, and there was a new smell of sour pickles. I think a jar hadupset in a store cupboard. Perhaps I should feel happier in thewheel-house. It was certain the wheel-house would not smell of vinegar, boots, and engine oil. It would have its own disadvantages--it would becold and damp--and the wind and seas on the lively deck had to be facedon the way to it. The difficulty there is in placing the second courseon London's cosy dinner-tables began to surprise me. 

Our wooden shelter, the wheel-house, is ten feet above the deck, withwindows through which I could look at the night, and imagine the rest. Ihad, to support me, the mono-syllabic skipper and a helmsman with nothingto say. I saw one of them when, drawing hard on his pipe, its glowoutlined a bodyless face. The wheel chains rattled in their channels. There was a clang when a sea wrenched the rudder. I clung to awindow-strap, flung back to look upwards through a window which the shipabruptly placed above my head, then thrown forward to see wreaths ofwater speeding below like ghosts. The stars jolted back and forth inwide arcs. There were explosions at the bows, and the ship trembled andhesitated. Occasionally the skipper split the darkness with a rocket, and we gazed round the night for an answer. The night had no answer togive. We were probably nearing the North Pole. About midnight, thesilent helmsman put away his pipe, as a preliminary to answering afoolish question of mine, and said, "Sometimes it happens. It's boundto. You can see for ye'self. They're little things, these trawlers. Just about last Christmas--wasn't it about Christmas-time, Skipper?--the_Mavis_ left the fleet to go home. Boilers wrong. There was one of ourhands, Jim Budge, who was laid up, and he reckoned he'd better get homequick. So he joined her. We were off the Tail of the Dogger, and itblew that night. Next morning Jim's mate swore Jim's bunk had been laidin. It was wet. He said the _Mavis_ had gone. I could see the bunk waswet all right, but what are ventilators for? Chance it, the _Mavis_never got home. A big sea to flood the engine-room, and there she goes. "

5

After the next daybreak time stood still--or rather, I refused to noteits passage. For that morning I made out the skipper, drenched withspray, and his eyes bloodshot, no doubt through weariness and theweather, watching me from the saloon doorway. I did not ask anyquestions, but pretended I was merely turning in my sleep. It isprobably better not to ask the man who has succeeded in losing you whereyou are, particularly when his eyes are bloodshot and he is wonderingwhat the deuce he shall do about it. And greater caution still isrequired when his reproachful silence gives you the idea that he thinksyou a touch of ill-luck in his enterprise. My companions, I believe, regretted I had not been omitted. I tried, therefore, to beinconspicuous, and went up to seclude myself at the back of the boat onthe poop, there to understudy a dog which is sorry it did it. Notadverse fate itself could show a more misanthropic aspect than the emptyovercast waste around us. It was useless to appeal to it. It didvouchsafe us one ship that morning, a German trawler with a fir treelashed to her deck, ready for Christmas morning, I suppose, when perhapsthey would tie herrings to its twigs. But she was no good to us. Andthe grey animosity granted us three others during the afternoon, and theywere equally useless, for they had not sighted our fleet for a week. Allthat interested me was the way the lookout on the bridge picked out amark, which I could not see, for it was obscured where sea and sky werethe same murk, and called it a ship. Long before I could properlydiscern it, the look-out behaved as though he knew all about it. But itwas never the sign we wanted. We had changed our course so often that Iwas beginning to believe that nobody aboard could make a nearer guess atour position than the giddy victim in blindman's-buff. A sextant wasnever used. Apparently these fishermen found their way about on a littlemental arithmetic compounded of speed, time, and the course. That leavesa large margin for error. So if they felt doubtful they got a plummet, greased it, and dipped it overboard. When it was hauled up theyinspected whatever might be sticking to the tallow, and at once announcedour position. At first I felt sceptical. It was as though one who hadgot lost with you in London might pick up a stone in an unknownthoroughfare, and straightway announce the name of that street. Thatwould be rather clever. But I discovered my fishermen could do somethinglike it. 

Our skipper no longer appeared at meals. He was on the bridge day andnight. He acted quite well a pose of complete indifference, and said nomore than: "This has not happened to me for years. " He repeated thisslowly at reasonable intervals. But he had lost the nimble impulse tochat about little things, and also his look of peering and innocentcuriosity. As now he did not come to our table, the others spoke ofBillingsgate carriers, such as ours, which had driven about the Doggertill there was no more in the bunkers than would take them to Hull to getmore coal. From the way they spoke I gathered they would crawl intoport, in such circumstances, without flags, and without singing. Thisgave my first trip an appearance I had never expected. Imagination, which is clearly of little help in geography, had always pictured theDogger as a sea where you could hail another trawler as you would a cabin London. A vessel might reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunkit had left behind. But here we were with our ship plunging round thecompass merely expectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly like theothers, But at last we had them. We spoke a rival fleet of trawlers. Theiradmiral cried through a speaking-trumpet that he had left "ours" at sixthat morning twenty miles NNE. , steaming west. It was then eleveno'clock. Hopefully the _Windhover_ put about. We held on for threehours at full speed, but saw nothing but the same waves. The skipperthen rather violently addressed the Dogger, and said he was going below. The mate asked what course he should steer. "Take the damned ship whereyou like, " said the skipper. "I'm going to sleep. " He was away tenminutes. He reappeared, and resumed his silent parade of the bridge. The helmsman grinned at the mate. By then the wind had fallen, the seaswere more deliberate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight, insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, for the night began tofill the hollows of the Dogger almost at once, and soon there was nothingto be seen but the glimmer of breaking waves. 

6

There is nothing to be done with an adventure which has become a misprisethan to enjoy it that way instead. What did I care when they complainedat breakfast of the waste of rockets the night before? What did thatmatter to me when the skylight above our morning coffee was open at last, really open? Fine weather for December! Across that patch of blue, which was a peep into eternity, I saw drift a bird as white as sanctity. And did it matter if the imprints on our tablecloth of negroes' thumbswere more numerous and patent than ever, in such a light? Not in theleast. For I myself had long since given up washing, as a laborious andunsatisfactory process, and was then cutting up cake tobacco with therapture of an acolyte preparing the incense. If this was what was meantby getting lost on the Dogger, then the method, if only its magic couldbe formulated, would make the fortunes of the professional fakirs ofhappiness in the capitals of the rich. Yet mornings of such a qualitycannot be purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of virtue. 

On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic. The windwas steady and generous. The warm sunlight danced. I should not havebeen surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of thegreatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek, smiling with approval of the scene below--melancholy approval, for wewould remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale andsickly when Paul, that argumentative zealot, came to provide a world, already thinking more of industry and State politics than of the gods, with a hard-wearing theology which would last till Manchester came. Forthe _Windhover_ had drifted into a time and place as innocent of man'shighest achievements as is joy of death. The wind and sea were chanting. The riding of the ship kept time to that measure. The vault wasturquoise, and the moving floor was cobalt. The white islands of theOlympians were in the sky. 

Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, withnothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over fromearth's earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in thenorth. That cloud did not rise. It blew towards us straight over theseas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail, heading east of south of us. She was, when at a distance, a bafflingmass of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed. Shegot abeam of us. Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper togive grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the shipof romance, and in such a time and place. She was a cloud that, when itmounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into themeridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mistblown forward on the wind. She might have risen at any moment. Hergreen hull had the sheer of a sea hollow. Her bows pressed continuallyonward, like the crest of a wave curving forward to break, but held, asthough enchanted. Sometimes, when her white mass heeled from us underthe pressure of the wind, a red light flashed from her submerged body. She passed silently, a shining phantom, and at last vanished, as phantomsdo. 

7

When the boots, exploded on the saloon floor by the petulant mate, wokeme, it was three of a morning which, for my part, was not in the almanac. "We're bewitched, " the mate said, climbing over me into his cupboard. "Inever thought I should want to see our fleet so much. "

"Aye, " remarked the chief engineer, who came shuffling in then for somesleep, "ye'll find that fleet quick, or the stokers are giving orders. D'ye think a ship is driven by the man at the wheel? No' that I want tosmell Hull. "

A kick of the ship overturned the fireshovel, and I woke again to lookwith surprise at so small a cause of a terrible sound, and was leavingthe shovel to its fate when it came to life, and began to crawlstealthily over the floor. It was an imperative duty to rise andimprison it. When that was forgotten the steward arrived, and roused meto watch the method of setting a breakfast-table at sea; but I had seenall that before, and climbed out of the saloon. There are moments in alife afloat when the kennel and chain of the house-dog appear to havetheir merits. The same wash was still racing past outside, and the shipmoving along. The halyards were shaking in the cold. The funnel wasstill abruptly rocking. A sailor was painting the starboard stanchions. A stoker was going forward off duty, in his shirt and trousers, indifferent to the cruel wind which bulged and quivered his thin rags. The skipper was on the bridge, his hands in the pockets of his flappingovercoat, still searching the distance for what was not there. A trainof gulls was weaving about over our wake. A derelict fish-trunk floatedclose to us, with a great black-backed gull perched on it. He cocked upone eye at me when he drew level, crouched for flight, but perhaps saw onmy face the reason why I prefer working tomorrow, and contemptuouslystayed where he was. Then I noticed the skipper looking back at thebird. He nodded to it, and cried: "There goes a milestone. The fleet isabout somewhere. " I danced with caution along the treacherous deck, where one day that voyage a sea picked up two men and stranded them ontop of the engine-room casing, and got up with the master. He had justordered the ship to be put over to a trawler in sight. With the seas soswift and ponderous I completely forgot the cold wind in watching the twolively ships being manoeuvred till they were within earshot. When theengines were stopped the steering had to be nicely calculated, or erraticwaves brought them dangerously close, or else took them out of call. Ournew friend had not seen "our lot, " but had left a fleet with an unknownhouse-flag ten miles astern. We surged forward again. 

We steamed for two hours, and then the pattern of a trawler's smoke wasseen ahead traced on a band of greenish brilliance which divided the seafrom the sky. Almost at once other faint tracings multiplied there. Ina few minutes we could make out plainly within that livid narrow outletbetween the sea and the heavy clouds a concourse of midget ships. 

"There they are, " breathed the skipper after a quick inspection throughhis glasses. 

In half an hour we were in the midst of a fleet of fifty little steamers, just too late to take our place as carrier to them for London's dailymarket. As we steamed in, another carrier, which had left London afterus, hoisted her signal pennant, and took over that job. 

While still our ship was under way, boats put out from the surroundingtrawlers, and converged on us for our outward cargo, the emptyfish-trunks. That intense band of light which had first betrayed thesmoke of the fleet eroded upwards into the low, slaty roof of nimbus tillthe gloom was dissolved to the zenith. The incubus vanished; the sunflooded us. At last only white feathers were left in the sky. I felt Ihad known and loved these trawlers for years. All round us were ships'boats, riding those sweeping seas in a gyrating and delirious lunacy; andin each were two jovial fishermen, who shouted separate reasons to ourskipper for "the week off" he had taken. 

These boats came at us like a swarm of assailants, swooping downhill onus, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us againfor a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivityof glass. A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on thesnowy ridge of an upheaval, and vanish as the _Windhover_ canted away. Then we rolled towards her, and there she was below us, in a smooth andtransient hollow. Watching for their chances, snatched out of luck byskill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties; theboxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was snatched away, and then were swept off. The shouted jokes were broadened andstrengthened to fit that riot and uproar. This sudden robust life, following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely anddisappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering andmocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of mastsand smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against atriumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheelingkittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all inthat pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though thecreative word had been spoken only five minutes before. We, and allthis, had just come. I wanted to laugh and cheer. 

8

There is, we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at achart than from any impeccable modern map. Maps today are losing theirattraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy. Maps do notallow us to forget that there are established and well-orderedgovernments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, totax, and to punish us, and that their police patrol the tropical forests. But consider the legends on a chart even of the North Sea, of the worldbeneath the fathoms--the _Silver Pits_, the _Dowsing Ground_, the _LemanBank_, the _Great Fisher Ground_, the _Horn Reef_, the _Witch Ground_, and the _Great Dogger Bank_! Strange, that indefinable implication of aword! I remember that, when a child, I was awake one night listening toa grandfather's clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, and abrother sat up in bed and whispered: "Look, the Star in the East. " Iturned, and one bright eye of the night was staring through the window. Heaven knows into what profundity of ancestral darkness my brotherswhisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, but an awe, or a fear, waswakened in me which was not mine, for I remember I could not explain it, even though, at the time, the anxious direct question was put to me. Norcan I now. It would puzzle a psycho-analyst most assured of the rightsystem for indexing secret human motives to disengage one shadow fromanother in an ancestral darkness. That is why I merely put down here thenames to be found on a chart of the North Sea, and say no more about it, being sure they will mean nothing except to those to whom they meansomething. Those words, like certain moonbeams, which stir in us thatnot ourselves which makes for righteousness, or lunacy, combine only bychance. The combination which unlocks the secret cannot be stated, or itwould not work. When there is a fortuitous coincidence of the magicfactors, the result is as remarkable to us as it is to those who thinkthey know us. When I used to stand on London's foreshore, gazing to whatwas beyond our street lamps, the names on the chart had a meaning for mewhich is outside the usual methods of human communication. The DoggerBank!

Here then it was, yet still to be seen only by faith. It was like Mrs. Harris. I had the luck to discover that I should lose nothing through myvisit; and every traveller knows how much he gains when the place he haswished to visit allows him to take away from it no less than what hebrought with him. The Bank was twenty fathoms under us. We saw itproved at times when a little fine white sand came up, or fleshy yellowfingers, called sponge by the men, which showed we were over the pasturesof the haddock. That was all we saw of a foundered region of prehistoricEurope, where once there was a ridge in the valley of that lost river towhich the Rhine and Thames were tributaries. Our forefathers, prospecting that attractive and remunerative plateau of the Dogger, ontheir pilgrimage to begin making our England what it is, caught deerwhere we were netting cod. I almost shuddered at the thought, as thougheven then I felt the trawl of another race of men, who had strangelyforgotten all our noble deeds and precious memories, catching in the ruinof St. Stephen's Tower, and the strangers, unaware of what august relicwas beneath them, cursing that obstruction to their progress. Anyhow, weshould have the laugh of them there; but these aeons of time aredesperate waters into which to sink one's thought. It sinks out ofsight. It goes down to dark nothing. 

Well, it happened to be the sun of my day just then, and our time forcatching cod, with the reasonable hope, too, that we should find the citystill under St. Stephen's Tower when we got back, as a place to sell ourcatch. 

Our empty boxes were discharged. Led by the admiral, the_Windhover_--with the rest of the fleet--lowered her trawl, and wentdipping slowly and quietly over the hills, towing her sunken net. Theadmiral of a fishing-fleet is a great man. All is in his hands. Hechooses the grounds. Our admiral, it was whispered to me, was the wizardof the north. The abundant fish-pastures were revealed to him in hisdreams. It was my last evening on the Bank. The day had beenwonderfully fine for winter and a sea that is notoriously evil. Attwilight the wind dropped, the heave of the waters decreased. Thescattered fleet, gliding through the hush, carried red, green, and whiteplanets. The ships which lay in the western glow were black and simpleshapes. Those to the east of us were remarkable with a chromaticprominence, and you thought, while watching them, that till that momentyou had not really seen them. Presently the moon cleared the edge of thesea, a segment of frozen light, and moored to our stern with a quivering, ghostly line. 

Coloured rockets sailed upwards from the admiral when he changed his mindand his course, and then the city of mobile streets altered its plan, andrewove its constellation. At midnight white flares burned forward on allthe boats. The trawls were to be hauled. Our steam-winch began to bangits cogs in the heavy work of lifting the net. All hands assembled tosee what would be our luck. The light sent a silver lane through thenight, and men broke through the black walls of that brilliant separationof the darkness, and vanished on the other side. Leaning overside, Icould see the pocket of our trawl drawing near, still some fathoms deep, a phosphorescent and flashing cloud. It came inboard, and was suspendedover the deck, a bulging mass, its bottom was unfastened, and out gushedour catch, slithering over the deck, convulsive in the scuppers. Themass of blubber and plasm pulsed with an elfish glow. 

9

We were homeward bound. The flat sea was dazzling with reflectedsunshine, and a shade had to be erected over the binnacle for the man atthe wheel. It might have been June, yet we had but few days toChristmas. The noon ceiling was a frail blue, where gauze was suspendedin motionless loops and folds. The track of the sun was incandescentsilver. A few sailing vessels idled in the North Channel, their sailsslack; but we could not see a steamer in what is one of the world'sbusiest fairways. We ran on a level keel, and there was no movement butthe tremor of the engines. We should catch the tide at the Shipwash, andgo up on it to Billingsgate and be home by midnight. How foolish it isto portion your future, at sea!

It was when I was arranging what I should do in the later hours of thatday, when we were at Billingsgate, that the skipper, staring round theNorth Channel, said to me: "It looks as though London had been wiped outsince we left it. Where's the ships?"

The Maplin watched us pass with its red eye. We raised all the lightstrue and clear. I went below, and we were talking of London, and thelast trains, when the engine-room telegraph gave us a great shock. "Stopher!" we heard the watch cry below. 

I don't know how we got on deck. There were too many on the companionladder at the same time. While we were struggling upwards we heard thatfrantic bell ring often enough to drive the engine-room peopledistracted. I got to the ship's side in time to see a liner's bulk glideby. She would have been invisible but for her strata of lights. She wasjust beyond our touch. A figure on her, high over us, came to her rail, distinct in the blur of the light of a cabin behind him, and shouted atus. I remember very well what he said, but it is forbidden to put downsuch words here. The man at our wheel paid no attention to him, thatdanger being now past, and so of no importance. He continued to spin thespokes desperately, because, though we could not see the ships about us, we could hear everywhere the alarm of their bells. We had run at elevenknots into a bank of fog which seemed full of ships. The moon waslooking now over the top of the wall of fog, yet the _Windhover_, which, with engines reversed, seemed to be going ahead with frightful velocity, drove into an opacity in which there was nothing but the warning soundsof a great fear of us. I imagined in the dark the loom of impendingbodies, and straining overside in an effort to make them out, listeningto the murmur of the stream, nervously fanned the fog with my hat in aridiculous effort to clear it. Twice across our bows perilous shadowsarose, sprinkled with stars, yet by some luck they drifted silently byus, and the impact we expected and were braced for was not felt. 

I don't know how long it was before the _Windhover_ lost way, but weanchored at last, and our own bell began to ring. When our unseenneighbours heard the humming of our exhaust, their frantic appealsubsided, and only now and then they gave their bells a shaking, perhapsto find whether we answered from the same place. There was an absolutesilence at last, as though all had crept stealthily away, having left us, lost and solitary, in the fog. We felt confident there would be aclearance soon, so but shrouded our navigation lights. But the rampartof fog grew higher, veiled the moon, blotted it out, expunged the lastand highest star. We were imprisoned. We lay till morning, and therewas only the fog, and ourselves, and a bell-buoy somewhere which tolleddolefully. 

And morning was but a weak infiltration into our prison. A steadfastinspection was necessary to mark even the dead water overside. The Riverwas the same colour as the fog. For a fortnight we had been withoutrest. We had become used to a little home which was unstable, andsometimes delirious, and a sky that was always falling, and an earth thatrose to meet the collapse. Here we were on a dead level, still andsilent, with the men whispering, and one felt inclined to reel withgiddiness. We were fixed to a dumb, unseen river of a world that wasblind. 

There was one movement. It was that of the leisurely motes of the fog. We watched them--there was nothing else to do--for a change of wind. Achange did not seem likely, for the rigging was hoar with frost, and iceglazed our deck. 

Sometimes the fog would seem to rise a few feet. It was a crueldeception to play on the impatient. A mere cork, a tiny dark object likethat, drifting along some distance out, would make a focal point in thefog, and would give the illusion of a clearance. Once, parading the deckas the man on watch, giving an occasional shake to the bell, I wentsuddenly happy with the certainty that I was now to be the harbinger ofgood tidings to those below playing cards. A vague elevated lineappeared to starboard. I watched it grow into definition, a coastshowing through a haze that was now dissolving. Up they all tumbled atmy shout. They stared at the wonder hopefully and silently. The coastbecame higher and darker, and the skipper was turning to give orders--andthen our hope turned into a wide path on the ebbing River made by cindersmoving out on the tide. The cinders passed. We re-entered our silenttomb. There had been no sign of our many neighbours of the night before, but suddenly we heard some dreadful moans, the tentative efforts of abody surprised by pain, and these sounds shaped, hilariously lachrymose, into a steam hooter playing "Auld Lang Syne, " and then "Home, SweetHome. " There followed an astonishing amount of laughter from a hiddenaudience. The prisoners in the neighbouring cells were there after all, and were even jolly. The day thereafter was mute, the yellow walls atevening deepened to ochre, to umber, and became black, except where ourriding lights made luminous circles. Each miserable watcher who camedown to the saloon that night, muffled and sparkling with frost, to get adrink of hot coffee, just drank it, and went on deck again without a word. 

The motes next morning went drifting leisurely on the same light air, interminable. Our prison appeared even narrower. Then once again aclearance was imagined. Our skipper thought he saw a lane along theRiver, and up-anchored. The noise of our cable awoke a tumult ofstartled bells. 

Ours was a perishable cargo. We were much overdue. Our skipper waswilling to take any risk--what a good master mariner would call areasonable risk--to get home; and so, when a deck hand, on the thirdmorning, with the thawing fog dripping from his moustache, appeared inthe saloon with the news that it was clearing a little, the masterdecided he would go. 

I then saw, from the deck of the _Windhover_, so strange a vision that itcould not be related to this lower sphere of ours. It could be thoughtthat dawn's bluish twilight radiated from the _Windhover_. We were theluminary, and our faint aura revealed, through the melting veil, an outerworld that had no sky, no plane, no bounds. It was void. There was noRiver, except that small oval of glass on which rested our ship, like amodel. 

The universe, which that morning had only begun to form in the void, wasgrouped about us. This was the original of mornings. We were itsgravitational point. It was inert and voiceless. It was pregnant withunawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms. Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in anotherlife. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of thedawn, were beyond remembrance and recognition. The _Windhover_ alone wassubstantial and definite. But placed about us, suspended in a night thatwas growing translucent, were the shadows of what might once have beenships, perhaps were ships to be, but were then steamers and sailerswithout substance, waiting some creative word, shrouded spectres that hadleft the wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyages finished, andwere waiting to begin a new existence, having been raised to our level ina new world boundless and serene, with unplumbed deeps beneath them. There, on our level, we maintained them in their poise with our superiorgravity and our certain body, giving them light, being what sun there wasin this new system in another sky. Above them there was nothing, andaround them was blind distance, and below them the abyss of space. Theirlights gathered to our centre, an incoming of delicate and shiningmooring lines. 

It was all so silent, too. But our incoming cable shattered the spell, and when our siren warned them that we were moving, a wild pealingcommenced which accompanied us on the long drift up to Gravesend. Therewere eight miles of ships: barges, colliers, liners, clippers, cargosteamers, ghost after ghost took form ahead, and then went astern. Morethan once the fog thickened again, but the skipper never took way off herwhile he could make out a ship ahead of us. We drifted stern first onthe flood, with half-turns of the propeller for steering purchase, till aboatman, whom we hailed, cried that we were off Gravesend. And was thereany one for the shore?

There was. I took no more risks. I had been looking for that life-boat. And what a thing it was to have solid paving-stones under one's feetagain. There were naphtha flares in the fog, dingy folk in muddy ways, and houses that kept to one place. There was a public-house, too. Outside that place I remembered the taste of everlasting fried fish, andcondensed milk in weak tea; and so entered, and corrected therecollection with a glass of port--several glasses, to make sure ofit--and that great hunk of plum-cake which I had occasionally seen in adream. Besides, this was Christmas Eve. 

XI. An Old Lloyd's Register

With the sensation that I had survived into a strange and a hostile erathat had nothing to do with me, for its affairs were not mine, I wasinside a submarine, during the War, talking to her commander. He wasunravelling for me the shining complexity of his "box of tricks, " as hecalled his ship. He was sardonic (there was no doubt he was master ofthe brute he so lightly villified), and he was blithe, and heillustrated his scientific monologue with stories of his ownexperiences in the Heligoland Bight. These, to me, were like thebedevilments of those dreams from which we groan to awake, but cannot. The curious doings of this new age, I thought as I listened to him, would have just the same interest for me as the relics of an extinctrace of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of themonstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now. That made anacute difference. This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, butactuality. And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he waslike the men of that group on the _Queen Mary_ who were similarlymocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks before, their expert share inforwarding the work we had given them in this new age; and then wherewere they? Ships I knew, but not such ships as these, nor such work. 

Another officer joined us, an older man, and said this to him wasstrange navigation. He was a merchant seaman. He had served his timein sailing ships. I asked him to name some of them, having the feelingthat I could get back to the time I knew if I could but hail the ghost, with another survivor from the past, of one of those forgotten ships. "Well, " he replied, "there was the _Cutty Sark_. "

If he had said the _Golden Hind_ I should not have been moreastonished. In a sense, it was the same thing. The _Cutty Sark_ wasin the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, but at the end. Thatera, though it closed so recently, was already as far as a vaguememory. The new sea engines had come, and here we were with them, puzzled and embarrassed, having lost our reasonable friends. I toldhim I had known the _Cutty Sark_, and had seen that master of hers--acharacter who went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap--who gave one of hermasts (the mizzen, I think) a golden rooster, after he had driven herfrom Sydney Heads to the Channel to break the record--Captain Woodget. His men said it was like living in a glass house. 

I recalled to him that once, when my business was concerned with billsof lading and freight accounts, I was advised to ship four hundredcases to Sydney, New South Wales; and one-half of that consignment, myinstructions ran, was to arrive a month before the other. The firstlot went in a modern steel barque, the _Cairnbulg_. ("I have seenher, " said this submarine officer). More than a fortnight later, beingtoo young to remember that the little _Cutty Sark_ had been one of theChina tea clippers, I shipped the last half of the consignment in her. But she disordered all the careful plans of the consignees. She got ina fortnight ahead of the _Cairnbulg_. 

The effect of that casual recollection on the submarine officer wasdistinctly unwarlike. This memory, and not his present work, mighthave been the real thing. He knew Woodget, the man in the Glengarry. He wanted to know more; ever so much more. He mentioned other shipsand masters, to induce me. I got the idea that he would let his mind, at least, escape into that time, if only I would help him to let it go. But there was that potent and silent enigma about us. . . . 

No such escape for him. We have fashioned other ships, and must usethem. What we have conjured up compels us to live with it. But whenyou do not go to sea you may have what ships you like. There is somebut not much interest in the reappearance in the newspapers of thesailing lists; a few of the old names appear again, though new shipsbear them. But late at night, when a westerly wind with rain turns forme a neighbouring yew tree into an invisible surge, then it is thefortune of one who remembers such as the _Cutty Sark_ to choosedifferent ships and other times. Why not choose them? They werecomely ships, and now their time seems fair. Who would care toremember the power and grey threat of a modern warship, or the exoticluxury of a liner of this new era? Nobody who remembers thegraciousness of the clippers, nor the pride and content of the seamenwho worked them. To aid the illusion of the yew, I have one of thosebooks which are not books, a _Lloyd's Register of Shipping_ for 1880, that by some unknown circuitous route found its way from its firstowner in Madras to my suburb. It goes very well with the surge of yew, when westerly weather comes to unite them. 

I should like to know how that book got to London. Somewhere in it isthe name of the ship which carried it. Anyhow, I think I can make outin it the houseflag of that ship. It, was, I believe, one of J. H. Allan's teak-built craft, a forgotten line--the _Rajah of Cochin_, the_Copenhagen_, the _Lincelles_, --though only just before the War, in theSouth-West India Dock, I met a stranger, a seaman looking for work, whoregretted its disappearance, and the new company-owned steamers; for hesaid they were good ships, "but more than that, " he told me, "Allan wasan old gentleman who knew his own ships, and knew his men. " Thisstranger said you forget a ship now as soon as you are paid off, "andglad to, " and "you don't ever know who owns her, even if there's astrike. Parsons and old maids and Cardiff sharks, I reckon. "

Very likely. But what sharks once were in it have all disappeared frommy Register. It belongs to those days when, if you went to NewZealand, you had to go by sailer; when the East India Dock had anarcade of jib-booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a varnished shark'stail terminal--the _Euterpe_, _Jessie Readman_, _Wanganui_, _Wazmea_, _Waimate_, _Opawa_, _Margaret Galbraith_, _Helen Denny_, _Lutterworth_, and _Hermione_. There were others. What is in these names? But howcan we tell? There were personal figureheads, there were shapelyforms, each with its own narrative of adventure, there was theundiscovered sea, and there was youth; and these have gone. 

It is all very well to say that the names and mere words in this oldRegister have no more meaning today than a railway time-table of thesame date. Hardly to be distinguished in the shadows in some cornersof St. Paul's Cathedral from which night never quite goes, there arecertain friendless regimental colours. Few of us know now who borethem, and where, and why; but imagine the deserved fate of one whowould allow a brutal word to disturb their dust! They mean nothing, except that men, in a world where it is easy to lose faith, treasurethe few tokens of faithfulness, courage, and enterprise proved in theirfellows; and so those old staffs, to which cling faded and dusty rags, in a real sense support the Cathedral. Poplar once was a parish whosename was more familiar in Eastern seas and on the coasts of theAmericans, and stood for something greater and of more value, than thenames of some veritable capital cities. That vista down the East IndiaDock Road from North Street, past the plane trees which support on acloud the cupola of Green's Chapel, to the gateway of the dock whichwas built for John Company, was what many would remember as essentialLondon who would pass the Mansion House as though it were a dingy andnameless tavern. At the back of that road today, and opposite a churchwhich was a chapel-of-ease to save the crews of the East Indiamen lyingoff Blackwall the long walk to Stebonhythe Church, is the publiclibrary; and within that building are stored, as are the regimentalcolours in the Cathedral, the houseflags of those very ships myRegister helps me to remember--the tokens of fidelity and courage, of aservice that was native, and a skill in that service which wastraditional to the parish. Tokens that now are dusty and in theirnight, understood only by the few who also belong to the past. 

There is the houseflag of the _Cutty Sark_, and her sister ships the_Dharwar_, _Blackadder_, _Coldstream_--but one must be careful, andrefuse to allow these names to carry one-way. There are so many ofthem. They are all good. Each can conjure up a picture and a memory. They are like those names one reads in spring in a seed-merchant'scatalogue. They call to be written down, to be sung aloud, to beshared with a friend. But I know the quick jealousy of some oldsailor, his pride wounded here by an unjustifiable omission of the shipthat was the one above all others for him, is bound to be moved byanything less than a complete reprint here of the Register. How, forexample, could I give every name in the fleet of the White Star ofAberdeen? Yet was not each ship, with her green hull and white spars, as moving as a lyric? Is there in London River today a ship asbeautiful as the old _Thermopylae_? There is not. It is impossible. There was the _Samuel Plimsoll_ of that line--now a coal hulk atGibraltar--which must be named, for she was Captain Simpson's ship (hewas commodore afterwards), the "merry blue-eyed skipper" of Froude's_Oceana_, but much more than that, a sage and masterful Scot whose talkwas worth a long journey to hear. 

The houseflag of Messrs. R. And H. Green, in any reference to the shipsof Blackwall, should have been mentioned first. There is a sense inwhich it is right to say that the founder of that firm, at a time whenAmerican craft like the Boston clippers of Donald McKay were in a fairway to leave the Red Ensign far astern, declared that Blackwall had tobeat those American flyers, and did it. But that was long before theeighties, and when steam was still ridiculed by those who could not seeit equalling clippers that had logged fourteen knots, or made a day'srun of over three hundred miles. Yet some of Green's ships came downto the end of the era, like the _Highflyer_ and the _Melbourne_. Thelatter was renamed the _Macquarie_, and was one of the last of theclippers to come home to Poplar, and for that reason, and because ofher noble proportions, her picture is kept, as a reminder, by many whowish to think of ships and the sea as they were. It is likely thatmost who live in Poplar now, and see next to its railway station thecurious statue of a man and a dog, wonder who on earth Richard Green, Esq. , used to be; though there are a few oldsters left still whoremember Blackwall when its shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers, andcaulkers were men of renown and substance, and who can recall, not onlyRichard Green, but that dog of his, for it knew the road to the dockprobably better than most of those who use it today. Poplar was thenursery of the Clyde. The flags which Poplar knew well would puzzleLondon now--Devitt and Moore's, Money Wigram's, Duthie's, Willis's, Carmichael's, Duncan Dunbar's, Scrutton's, and Elder's. But whenlately our merchant seamen surprised us with a mastery of their craftand a fortitude which most of us had forgotten were ever ours, whatthose flags represented, a regard for a tradition as ancient and asrigorous as that of any royal port, was beneath it all. 

But if it were asked what was this tradition, it would not be easy tosay. Its authority is voiceless, but it is understood. Then what isit one knows of it? I remember, on a day just before the War, theflood beginning to move the shipping of the Pool. Eastward the blackcliffs lowered till they sank under the white tower of LimehouseChurch; and the church, looking to the sunset, seemed baseless, shiningwith a lunar radiance. Upriver, the small craft were uncertain, movinglike phantoms over a pit of bottomless fire. But downstream every shipwas as salient as though lighted with the rays of a great lantern. Andthere in that light was a laden barque, outward bound, waiting at thebuoys. She headed downstream. Her row of white ports diminished alongthe length of her green hull. The lines of her bulwarks, her sheer, fell to her waist, then airily rose again, came up and round to mergein one fine line at the jibboom. The lines sweeping down and airilyrising again were light as the swoop of a swallow. The symmetry of herladen hull set in a plane of dancing sun-points, and her soaring ambermasts, cross-sparred, caught in a mesh of delicate cordage, and shiningtill they almost vanished where they rose above the buildings and stoodagainst the sky, made her seem as noble and haughty as a burst of greatmusic. One of ours, that ship. Part of our parish.