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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, London River, by H. M. Tomlinson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: London River
+
+Author: H. M. Tomlinson
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2005  [eBook #15167]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON RIVER***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+LONDON RIVER
+
+by
+
+H. M. TOMLINSON
+
+Garden City, New York
+Garden City Publishing Co., Inc
+Alfred 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 begins
+imperceptibly, and very likely is no more than what a native knows is
+there.  It does not look like a foreshore.  It looks like another of
+the byways of the capital.  There is nothing to distinguish it from the
+rest of Fenchurch Street.  You will not find it in the Directory, for
+its 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 is
+and of its memories.  And why should he?  London is built of such old
+shadows; and while we are here casting our own there is not much time
+to turn and question what they fall upon.  Yet if some unreasonable
+doubt, a suspicion that he was being watched, made a stranger hesitate
+at that corner, he might begin to feel that London there was as
+different from Bayswater and Clapham as though deep water intervened.
+In a sense deep water does; and not only the sea, but legends of ships
+that have gone, and of the men who knew them, and traditions of a
+service older than anything Whitehall knows, though still as lively as
+enterprise itself, and as recent as the ships which moved on today's
+high water.
+
+In a frame outside one of its shops hangs a photograph of a sailing
+ship.  The portrait is so large and the beauty of the subject so
+evident that it might have been the cause of the stranger stopping
+there to fill his pipe.  Yet how could he know that to those groups of
+men loitering about the name of that ship is as familiar as Suez or
+Rio, even though they have never seen her?  They know her as well as
+they know their business.  They know her house-flag--it is
+indistinguishable in the picture--and her master, and it is possible
+the oldest of them remembers the clippers of that fleet of which she
+alone now carries the emblem; for this is not only another year, but
+another era.  But they do not look at her portrait.  They spit into the
+road, or stare across it, and rarely move from where they stand, except
+to pace up and down as though keeping a watch.  At one time, perhaps
+thirty years ago, it was usual to see gold rings in their ears.  It is
+said 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 engage
+them all at this corner, or at the taverns just up the turning.  The
+suggestion of such a voyage, in such a ship, would turn us to look on
+these men in wonder, for it is the way of all but the wise to expect
+appearance to betray admirable qualities.  These fellows, though, are
+not significant, except that you might think of some of them that their
+ease and indifference were assumed, and that, when trying not to look
+so, they were very conscious of the haste and importance of this great
+city into which that corner jutted far enough for them.  They have just
+landed, or they are about to sail again, and they might be standing on
+the shore eyeing the town beyond, in which the luck of ships is cast by
+strangers they never see, but who are inimical to them, and whose ways
+are inscrutable.
+
+If there are any inland shops which can hold one longer than the place
+where that ship's portrait hangs, then I do not know them.  That comes
+from 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 we
+try to make reasonable, betray that accidental shape.  It may be said
+that I looked into this window while still soft.  The consequence,
+everybody knows, would be incurable in a boy who saw sextants for the
+first time, compasses, patent logs, sounding-machines, signalling gear,
+and the other secrets of navigators.  And not only those things.  There
+was a section given to books, with classics like Stevens on _Stowage_,
+and Norie's _Navigation_, volumes never seen west of Gracechurch
+Street.  The books were all for the eyes of sailors, and were sorted by
+chance.  _Knots and Splices_, _Typee_, _Know Your Own Ship_, the _South
+Pacific Directory_, and _Castaway on the Auckland Islands_.  There were
+many 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.  On
+one wall between the windows a specimen chart was framed.  Maps are
+good; but how much better are charts, especially when you cannot read
+them except by guessing at their cryptic lettering!  About the coast
+line the fathom marks cluster thickly, and venture to sea in lines
+which attenuate, or become sparse clusters, till the chart is blank,
+being beyond soundings.  At the capes are red dots, with arcs on the
+seaward side to show at what distance mariners pick up the real lights
+at night.  Through such windows, boys with bills of lading and mates'
+receipts in their pockets, being on errands to shipowners, look
+outward, and only seem to look inward.  Where are the confines of
+London?
+
+Opposite Poverty Corner there is, or used to be, an archway into a
+courtyard where in one old office the walls were hung with half-models
+of sailing ships.  I remember the name of one, the _Winefred_.
+Deed-boxes stood on shelves, with the name of a ship on each.  There
+was a mahogany counter, an encrusted pewter inkstand, desks made secret
+with high screens, and a silence that might have been the reproof to
+intruders of a repute remembered in dignity behind the screens by those
+who kept waiting so unimportant a visitor as a boy.  On the counter was
+a stand displaying sailing cards, announcing, among other events in
+London 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 India
+Company's warehouses survived, a sombre relic among the new limestone
+and red granite offices, a massive archway in its centre leading, it
+could be believed, to an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth
+century, 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 which
+certainly existed, for it could often be seen in the distance, and the
+Abbey that was little more than something we had heard named, they were
+but the scenery close to the buses.  Yet London was more wonderful than
+anything they could make it appear.  About Fenchurch Street and
+Leadenhall Street wagons could be seen going east, bearing bales and
+cases, and the packages were port-marked for Sourabaya, Para, Ilo-Ilo,
+and Santos--names like those.  They had to be seen to be believed.  You
+could stand there, forced to think that the sun never did more than
+make the floor of asphalted streets glow like polished brass, and that
+the evening light was full of glittering motes and smelt of dust, and
+that life worked itself out in cupboards made of glass and mahogany;
+and suddenly you learned, while smelling the dust, that Acapulco was
+more than a portent in a book and held only by an act of faith.  Yet
+that astonishing revelation, enough to make any youthful messenger
+forget where he himself was bound, through turning to follow with his
+eyes that acceptance by a carrier's cart of the verity of the fable, is
+nowhere mentioned, I have found since, in any guide to London, though
+you may learn how Cornhill got its name.
+
+For though Londoners understand the Guildhall pigeons have as much
+right to the place as the aldermen, they look upon the seabirds by
+London Bridge as vagrant strangers.  They do not know where their city
+ends on the east side.  Their River descends from Oxford in more than
+one sense.  It has little history worth mentioning below Westminster.
+To the poets, the River becomes flat and songless where at Richmond the
+sea's remote influence just moves it; and there they leave it.  The
+Thames goes down then to a wide grey vacuity, a featureless monotony
+where men but toil, where life becomes silent in effort, and goes out
+through fogs to nowhere in particular.  But there is a hill-top at
+Woolwich from which, better than from Richmond, our River, the
+burden-bearer, the road which joins us to New York and Sydney, can be
+seen for what it is, plainly related to a vaster world, with the ships
+upon its bright path moving through the smoke and buildings of the
+City.  And surely some surmise of what our River is comes to a few of
+that multitude who cross London Bridge every day?  They favour the east
+side of it, I have noticed, and they cannot always resist a pause to
+stare overside to the Pool.  Why do they?  Ships are there, it is true,
+but only insignificant traders, diminished by sombre cliffs up which
+their cargo is hauled piece-meal to vanish instantly into mid-air
+caverns; London absorbs all they have as morsels.  Anyhow, it is the
+business of ships.  The people on the bridge watch another life below,
+with its strange cries and mysterious movements.  A leisurely wisp of
+steam rises from a steamer's funnel.  She is alive and breathing,
+though motionless.  The walls enclosing the Pool are spectral in a
+winter light, and might be no more than the almost forgotten memory of
+a dark past.  Looking at them intently, to give them a name, the
+wayfarer on the bridge could imagine they were maintained there only by
+the 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 ship
+below are real.  Through an arch beneath the feet a barge shoots out
+noiselessly on the ebb, and staring down at its sudden apparition you
+feel dizzily that it has the bridge in tow, and that all you people on
+it are being drawn unresisting into that lower world of shades.  You
+release yourself from this spell with an effort, and look at the faces
+of those who are beside you at the parapet.  What are their thoughts?
+Do they know?  Have they also seen the ghosts?  Have they felt stirring
+a 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 Bridge
+gates to be opened for her.  She is going.  We watch the eastern mists
+take her from us.  For we never are so passive and well-disciplined to
+the things which compel us but rebellion comes at times--misgiving that
+there is a world beyond the one we know, regret that we never ventured
+and 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 those
+unknown folk whose need created London out of reeds and mere.  It is
+our oldest road, and now has many bypaths.  Near Poverty Corner is a
+building which recently was dismissed with a brief, humorous reference
+in a new guide to our City--a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a
+brick front topped by a clock-face: Fenchurch Street Station.  Beyond
+its dingy platforms, the metal track which contracts into the murk is
+the road to China, though that is, perhaps, the last place you would
+guess to be at the end of it.  The train runs over a wilderness of
+tiles, a grey plateau of bare slate and rock, its expanse cracked and
+scored as though by a withering heat.  Nothing grows there; nothing
+could live there.  Smoke still pours from it, as though it were
+volcanic, from numberless vents.  The region is without sap.  Above its
+expanse project superior fumaroles, their drifting vapours dissolving
+great areas.  When the track descends slightly, you see cavities in
+that cliff which runs parallel with your track.  The desert is actually
+burrowed, and every hole in the plateau is a habitation.  Something
+does live there.  That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunneled
+and inhabited.  The unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke
+moving 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 amorphous
+movement, flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the idea
+of height, of rising, it is difficult to believe.  It has not been
+believed.  If life, you protest, is really there, has any purpose which
+is 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?  But
+that is for the desert to answer.  As by mocking chance the desert
+itself almost instantly shows what possibilities are hidden within it.
+The train roars unexpectedly over a viaduct, and below is a deep hollow
+filled with light, with a floor of water, and a surprise of ships.  How
+did that white schooner get into such an enclosure?  Is freedom nearer
+here than we thought?
+
+The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of
+gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which cabbage fields in
+long spokes radiate from the train and revolve.  There is the grotesque
+suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps in a
+nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way.  The journey
+ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on the far
+side by the rigging and smoke-stacks of great liners.  There is no
+doubt about it now.  At the corner of one shed, sheltering from the
+weather, is a group of brown men in coloured rags, first seen in the
+gloom because of the whites of their eyes.  What we remember of such a
+day is that it was half of night, and the wind hummed in the cordage,
+and swayed wildly the loose gear aloft.  Towering hulls were ranged
+down each side of a lagoon that ended in vacancy.  The rigging and
+funnels of the fleet were unrelated; those ships were phantom and
+monstrous.  They seemed on too great a scale to be within human
+control.  We felt diminished and a little fearful, as among the looming
+urgencies of a dream.  The forms were gigantic but vague, and they were
+seen in a smother of the elements; and their sounds, deep and mournful,
+were like the warnings of something alien, yet without form, which we
+knew was adverse, but could not recall when awake again.  We remember,
+that day, a few watchers insecure on an exposed dockhead that projected
+into a sullen dreariness of river and mud which could have been the
+finish of the land.  At the end of a creaking hawser was a steamer
+canting as she backed to head downstream--now she was exposed to a
+great adventure--the tide rapid and noisy on her plates, the reek from
+her funnel sinking over the water.  And from the dockhead, in the
+fuddle of a rain-squall, we were waving a handkerchief, probably to the
+wrong 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 a
+City station is seen to have had more in it than the time-table,
+hurriedly scanned, gave away.  Or it would be remembered as strange, if
+the 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 was
+passed as being quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and rather
+dismal, the usual boredom of a duty.  Its strangeness depends, very
+likely, as much on an idle and squandering mind as on the ships, the
+River, and the gasometers.  Yet suppose you first saw the River from
+Blackwall Stairs, in the days when the windows of the _Artichoke
+Tavern_, an ancient, weather-boarded house with benches outside, still
+looked towards the ships coming in!  And how if then, one evening, you
+had seen a Blackwall liner haul out for the Antipodes while her crew
+sang a chanty!  It might put another light on the River, but a light, I
+will admit, which others should not be expected to see, and if they
+looked for it now might not discover, for it is possible that it has
+vanished, like the old tavern.  It is easy to persuade ourselves that a
+matter is made plain by the light in which we prefer to see it, for it
+is our light.
+
+One day, I remember, a boy had to take a sheaf of documents to a vessel
+loading in the London Dock.  She was sailing that tide.  It was a hot
+July noon.  It is unlucky to send a boy, who is marked by all the omens
+for a City prisoner, to that dock, for it is one of the best of its
+kind.  He had not been there before.  There was an astonishing vista,
+once inside the gates, of sherry butts and port casks.  On the
+flagstones 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 many
+old quays, and through the openings of dark sheds that, on so sunny a
+day, were stored with cool night and cubes and planks of gold, he found
+his ship, the _Mulatto Girl_.  She was for the Brazils.  Now it is
+clear that one even wiser in shipping affairs than a boy would have
+expected to see a craft that was haughty and portentous when bound for
+the 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 went
+down to her, for she was no more than a schooner of a little over one
+hundred tons.  If that did not look like the beginning of one of those
+voyages reputed to have ended with the Elizabethans, then I am trying
+to convey a wrong impression.  On the deck of the _Mulatto Girl_ was
+her master, in shirt and trousers and a remarkable straw hat more like
+a 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 black
+beard and formidable eyes.  With his hands on his hips, he surveyed for
+a few seconds, without speaking, the messenger above.  Then he talked
+business, and more than legitimate business.  "Do you want to come?" he
+asked, 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 uncritical
+obedience to duty; see what may leave us for ever in that fatal pause,
+caused by the surprise of the challenge to our narrow experience and
+knowledge, the pause in which we allow habit to overcome adventurous
+instinct!  I never heard again of the _Mulatto Girl_.  I could not
+expect to.  Something, though, was gained that day.  It cannot be
+named.  It is of no value.  It is, you may have guessed, that very
+light which it has been admitted may since have gone out.
+
+Well, nobody who has ever surprised that light in Dockland will be
+persuaded that it is not there still, and will remain.  But what could
+strangers see of it?  The foreshore to them is the unending monotony of
+grey streets, sometimes grim, often decayed, and always reticent and
+sullen, that might never have seen the stars nor heard of good luck;
+and the light would be, when closely looked at, merely a high gas
+bracket on a dank wall in solitude, its glass broken, and the flame
+within it fluttering to extinction like an imprisoned and crippled moth
+trying to evade the squeeze of giant darkness and the wind.  The narrow
+and forbidding by-path under that glim, a path intermittent and
+depending on the weight of the night which is trying to blot it out
+altogether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs.  Prince Rupert once went that
+way.  The ketch _Nonsuch_, Captain Zachary Gillam, was then lying just
+off, about to make the voyage which established the Hudson's Bay
+Company.
+
+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 rough
+tracks.  It is a path by which the descendants of those primitives went
+out of London, when projecting the original enterprise of their
+forbears from Wapping to the Guinea Coast and Manitoba.  Why should we
+believe it is different today?  The sea does not change, and seamen are
+what they were if their ships are not those we admired many years ago
+in the India Docks.  It is impossible for those who know them to see
+those moody streets of Dockland, indeterminate, for they follow the
+River, which run from Tooley Street by the Hole-in-the-Wall to the
+Deptford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wapping High Street to
+Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs, as strangers would see them.  What
+could they be to strangers?  Mud, taverns, pawnshops, neglected and
+obscure churches, and houses that might know nothing but ill-fortune.
+
+So they are; but those ways hold more than the visible shades.  The
+warehouses of that meandering chasm which is Wapping High Street are
+like weathered and unequal cliffs.  It is hard to believe sunlight ever
+falls there.  It could not get down.  It is not easy to believe the
+River is near.  It seldom shows.  You think at times you hear the
+distant call of a ship.  But what would that be?  Something in the
+mind.  It happened long ago.  You, too, are a ghost left by the
+vanished past.  There is a man above at a high loophole, the topmost
+cave of a warehouse which you can see has been exposed to commerce and
+the elements for ages; he pulls in a bale pendulous from the cable of a
+derrick.  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, and
+cuts bread and cheese with a clasp-knife.  It was curious to hear that
+steamer call, but we knew what it was.  It was from a ship that went
+down, 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 call
+comes again just where the Stairs, like a shining wedge of day, hold
+the black warehouses asunder, and give us the light of the River and a
+release to the outer world.  And there, moving swiftly across the
+brightness, goes a steamer outward bound.
+
+That was what we wanted to know.  She confirms it, and her signal, to
+whomever it was made, carries farther than she would guess.  It is
+understood.  The past for some of us now is our only populous and
+habitable world, invisible to others, but alive with whispers for us.
+Yet the sea still moves daily along the old foreshore, and ships still
+come 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 hour
+and the place have been less promising in the beginning of many a
+strange 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 to
+the foreshore was unlighted and devious.  Yet it was somewhere near.
+This area of still and empty night railed off from the glare of the
+Commercial Road would be Limehouse Church.  It is foolish to suppose
+you know the Tower Hamlets because you have seen them by day.  They
+change.  They are like those uncanny folk of the fables.  At night,
+wonderfully, they become something else, take another form, which has
+never been more than glimpsed, and another character, so fabulous and
+secret that it will support the tales of the wildest romanticist, who
+rightly feels that if such yarns were told of 'Frisco or Timbuctoo they
+might get found out.  Was this the church?  Three Chinamen were
+disputing by its gate.  Perhaps they were in disagreement as to where
+the church would be in daylight.
+
+At a corner where the broad main channel of electric light ended, and
+perplexity began, a policeman stood, and directed me into chaos.
+"Anywhere," he explained, "anywhere down there will do."  I saw a
+narrow alley in the darkness, which had one gas lamp and many cobbled
+stones.  At the bottom of the lane were three iron posts.  Beyond the
+posts a bracket lamp showed a brick wall, and in the wall was an arch
+so full of gloom that it seemed impassable, except to a steady draught
+of cold air that might have been the midnight itself entering Limehouse
+from its own place.  At the far end of that opening in the wall was
+nothing.  I stood on an invisible wooden platform and looked into
+nothing with no belief that a voyage could begin from there.  Before me
+then should have been the Thames, at the top of the flood tide.  It was
+not seen.  There was only a black void dividing some clusters of
+brilliant but remote and diminished lights.  There were odd stars which
+detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void,
+sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of
+trembling fire.  Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on
+the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering
+light did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travelling
+road--that chasm before me was black because it was filled with fluid
+night.  Night, I discovered suddenly, was in irresistible movement.  It
+was swift and heavy.  It was unconfined.  It was welling higher to
+douse our feeble glims and to founder London, built of shadows on its
+boundary.  It moved with frightful quietness.  It seemed confident of
+its power.  It swirled and eddied by the piles of the wharf, and there
+it found a voice, though that was muffled; yet now and then it broke
+into 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 steamer
+going out was as if a soul, crossing this Styx, now knew all.  There is
+no London on the Thames, after sundown.  Most of us know very little of
+the River by day.  It might then be no more native to our capital than
+the Orientals who stand under the Limehouse gas lamps at night.  It
+surprises us.  We turn and look at it from our seat in a tram, and
+watch a barge going down on the ebb--it luckily misses the piers of
+Blackfriars 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.  The
+tram gets among the buildings again, and we are reassured by the
+confined and arid life we know.  But what a light and width had that
+surprising world where we saw a barge drifting as leisurely as though
+the narrow limits which we call reality were there unknown!
+
+But after dark there is not only no River, when you stand where by day
+is its foreshore; there is no London.  Then, looking out from
+Limehouse, you might be the only surviving memory of a city that has
+vanished.  You might be solitary among the unsubstantial shades, for
+about you are only comets passing through space, and inscrutable
+shapes; your neighbours are Cassiopeia and the Great Bear.
+
+But where was our barge, the _Lizzie_?  I became aware abruptly of the
+skipper of this ship for our midnight voyage among the stars.  He had
+his coat-collar raised.  The _Lizzie_, he said, was now free of the
+mud, and he was going to push off.  Sitting on a bollard, and pulling
+out his tobacco-pouch, he said he hadn't had her out before.  Sorry
+he'd got to do it now.  She was a bitch.  She bucked her other man
+overboard three days ago.  They hadn't found him yet.  They found her
+down by Gallions Reach.  Jack Jones was the other chap.  Old Rarzo they
+called him.  Took more than a little to give him that colour.  But he
+was All Right.  They were going to give a benefit concert for his wife
+and kids.  Jack's brother was going to sing; good as Harry Lauder, he
+is.
+
+Below us a swirl of water broke into mirth, instantly suppressed.  We
+could see the _Lizzie_ now.  The ripples slipped round her to the tune
+of 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 did
+not seem to be much of the _Lizzie_.  She was but a little raft to
+drift out on those tides which move among the stars.  "Now's your
+chance," said her crew, and I took it, on all fours.  The last remnant
+of London was then pushed from us with a pole.  We were launched on
+night, which had begun its ebb towards morning.
+
+The punt sidled away obliquely for mid-stream.  I stood at one end of
+it.  The figure of Charon could be seen at the other, of long
+acquaintance with this passage, using his sweep with the indifference
+of habitude.  Perhaps it was not Charon.  Yet there was some
+obstruction to the belief that we were bound for no more than the
+steamer _Aldebaran_, anchored in Bugsby's Reach.  From the low deck of
+the barge it was surprising that the River, whose name was Night, was
+content with the height to which it had risen.  Perhaps it was taking
+its time.  It might soon receive an influx from space, rise then in a
+silent upheaval, and those low shadows that were London, even now half
+foundered, would at once go.  This darkness was an irresponsible power.
+It was the same flood which had sunk Knossos and Memphis.  It was
+tranquil, indifferent, knowing us not, reckoning us all one with the
+Sumerians.  They were below it.  It had risen above them.  Now the time
+had come when it was laving the base of London.
+
+The crew cried out to us that over there was the entrance to the West
+India Dock.  We knew that place in another life.  But should Charon
+joke with us?  We saw only chaos, in which the beams from a reputed
+city glimmered without purpose.
+
+The shadow of the master of our black barge pulled at his sweep with a
+slow confidence that was fearful amid what was sightless and unknown.
+His pipe glowed, as with the profanity of an immortal to whom eternity
+and infinity are of the usual significance.  Then a red and green eye
+appeared astern, and there was a steady throbbing as if some monster
+were in pursuit of us.  A tug shaped near us, drew level, and exposed
+with its fires, as it went ahead, a radiant _Lizzie_ on an area of
+water 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 were
+alone again in the beyond.  There was no sound now but the water
+spattering under our craft, and the fumbling and infrequent splash of
+the sweep.  Once we heard the miniature bark of a dog, distinct and
+fine, as though distance had refined it as well as reduced it.  We were
+nearly round the loop the River makes about Millwall, and this unknown
+region before us was Blackwall Reach by day, and Execution Dock used to
+be dead ahead.  To the east, over the waters, red light exploded
+fan-wise and pulsed on the clouds latent above, giving them momentary
+form.  It was as though, from the place where it starts, the dawn had
+been 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.  But
+this, I was told, was the beginning of Bugsby's Reach.  It was first a
+premonition, then a doubt, and at last a distinct tremor in the
+darkness ahead of us.  A light appeared, grew nearer, higher, and
+brighter, and there was a suspicion of imminent mass.  "Watch her,"
+warned the skipper.  Watch what?  There was nothing to watch but the
+dark and some planets far away, one of them red.  The menacing one
+still grew higher and brighter.  It came at us.  A wall instantly
+appeared to overhang us, with a funnel and masts above it, and our
+skipper's yell was lost in the thunder of a churning propeller.  The
+air shuddered, and a siren hooted in the heavens.  A long, dark body
+seemed minutes going by us, and our skipper's insults were taken in
+silence by her superior deck.  She left us riotous in her wake, and we
+continued our journey dancing our indignation on the uneasy deck of the
+_Lizzie_.
+
+The silent drift recommenced, and we neared a region of unearthly
+lights and the smell of sulphur, where aerial skeletons, vast and
+black, and columns and towers, alternately glowed and vanished as the
+doors of infernal fires were opened and shut.  We drew abreast of this
+phantom 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 was
+our own progress which brought them nearer.  She was anchored.  We made
+out 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.  I
+was never a stranger to it.  I should suppose it to be a face almost
+vacant, perhaps a little conventionally picturesque, for it is grey and
+seamed.  It might be even an altogether expressionless mask, staring at
+nothing.  Anyhow, there must be very little to be learned from it, for
+those bright young cultured strangers, admirable in their eagerness for
+social service, who come and live with us for a time, so that they may
+understand the life of the poor, never seem to have made anything of
+us.  They say they have; they speak even with some amount of assurance,
+at places where the problem which is us is examined aloud by confident
+politicians and churchfolk.  But I think they know well enough that
+they always failed to get anywhere near what mind we have.  There is a
+reason for it, of course.  Think of honest and sociable Mary Ann, of
+Pottles Rents, E., having been alarmed by the behaviour of good
+society, as it is betrayed in the popular picture Press, making odd
+calls in Belgravia (the bells for visitors, too), to bring souls to God.
+
+My parish, to strangers, must be opaque with its indifference.  It
+stares beyond the interested visitor, in the way the sad and
+disillusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger would not
+understand if he were told.  He has reason, therefore, to say we are
+dull.  And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be an
+amorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would be
+distressing to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrifying, as
+all that is alive but inexplicable must be.  No more conscious purpose
+shows in our existence than is seen in the coral polyp.  We just go on
+increasing and forming more cells.  Overlooking our wilderness of tiles
+in the rain--we get more than a fair share of rain, or else the sad
+quality of wet weather is more noticeable in such a place as ours--it
+seems a dismal affair to present for the intelligent labours of mankind
+for generations.  Could nothing better have been done than that?  What
+have we been busy about?
+
+Well, what are people busy about anywhere?  Human purpose here has been
+as blind and sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to any fixed
+star, lucky to fill the need of the day, building without any distant
+design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered.  As
+elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past.
+Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless
+accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour;
+and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this
+area of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its
+day on the piled strata of the dead.  Yet this is the reef to which I
+am connected by tissue and bone.  Cut the kind of life you find in
+Poplar 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 hand
+moves, not loyally so much as instinctively, to impulses which come
+from 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 but
+an unremarkable level of East-Enders, much like other Londoners, with
+no past worth recording, and no future likely to be worth a book of
+gold, I see, looking to the past, a spectral show of fine ships and
+brave affairs, and good men forgotten, or almost forgotten, and moving
+among the plainer shades of its foreground some ghosts well known to
+me.  I think they were what are called failures in life.  And turning
+from those shades, and their work which went the way of all forgotten
+stuff before the inexorable tide of affairs, I look forward from
+Poplar, unreasonably hopeful (for so we are made), though this time
+into the utter dark, for the morning that shall show us the more
+enduring towers of the city of our dreams, the heart of the commune,
+the radiant spires of the city that shall be lovelier than that dear
+city of Cecrops.
+
+But for those whose place it is not, memories and dreams can do nothing
+to transform it.  Dockland would seem to others as any alien town would
+seem to me.  There is something, though, you must grant us, a heritage
+peculiarly ours.  Amid our packed tenements, into the dark mass where
+poorer London huddles as my shipping parish, are set our docks.
+Embayed in the obscurity are those areas of captured day, reservoirs of
+light brimmed daily by the tides of the sun, silver mirrors through
+which 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 and
+the flood come together, and walls and roofs which topmasts and funnels
+surmount, suggestions of a vagabondage hidden in what seemed so arid a
+commonplace desert.  These are of first importance.  They are our ways
+of escape.  We are not kept within a division of the map.  And Orion,
+he strides over our roofs on bright winter nights.  We have the
+immortals.  At the most, your official map sets us only lateral bounds.
+The heavens here are as high as elsewhere.  Our horizon is beyond our
+own limits.  In this faithful chronicle of our parish I must tell of
+our boundaries as I know them.  They are not so narrow as you might
+think.  Maps cannot be so carefully planned, nor walls built high
+enough nor streets confined and strict enough, to hold within limits
+our lusty and growing population of thoughts.  There is no census you
+can take which will give you forewarning of what is growing here, of
+the way we increase and expand.  Take care.  Some day, when we discover
+the time has come for it, we shall tell our numbers, and be sure you
+will then learn the result.  Travelling through our part of the
+country, you see but our appearance.  You go, and report us casually to
+your friends, and forget us.  But when you feel the ground moving under
+your feet, that will be us.
+
+From my high window in central Dockland, as from a watch tower, I look
+out over a tumbled waste of roofs and chimneys, a volcanic desert,
+inhabited only by sparrows and pigeons.  Humanity burrows in swarms
+below that surface of crags, but only faint cries tell me that the
+rocks are caverned and inhabited, that life flows there unseen through
+subterranean galleries.  Often, when the sunrise over the roofs is
+certainly the coming of Aurora, as though then the first illumination
+of the sky heralded the veritable dayspring for which we look, and the
+gods were nearly here, I have watched for that crust beneath, which
+seals the sleepers under, to heave and roll, to burst, and for released
+humanity to pour through fractures, from the lower dark, to be renewed
+in the fires of the morning.  Nothing has happened yet.  But I am
+confident it would repay society to appoint another watcher when I am
+gone, to keep an eye on the place.
+
+Right below my window there are two ridges running in parallel jags of
+chimneys, 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 cornice
+overhangs a sheer fall of cliff.  That is as near the ground as can be
+got from my outlook.  Several superior peaks rise out of the
+wilderness, where the churches are; and beyond the puzzling middle
+distance, where smoke dissolves all form, loom the dock warehouses, a
+continuous range of far dark heights.  I have thoughts of a venturesome
+and lonely journey by moonlight, in and out of the chimney stacks, and
+all 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 country
+of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and
+protean.  From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the
+shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in
+surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and
+dissolve.  The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long
+run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till
+change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die.  You see
+that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form.  I
+doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ironic display on
+their roofs.
+
+My eyes more frequently go to one place in that high country.  In that
+distant line of warehouses is a break, and there occasionally I see the
+masts and spars of a tall ship, and I remember that beyond my dark
+horizon of warehouses is the path down which she has come from the
+Indies to Blackwall.  I said we were not inland.  Cassiopeia is in that
+direction, and China over there.
+
+For my outlook is more than the centre of Dockland.  I call it the
+centre of the world.  Our high road is part of the main thoroughfare
+from Kensington to Valparaiso.  Every wanderer must come this way at
+least once in his life.  We are the hub whence all roads go to the
+circumference.  A ship does not go down but we hear the cry of
+distress, 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, Nankin
+Street, Pekin Street, Canton Street.  And John Company has left its
+marks.  You pick up hints of the sea here as you pick old shells out of
+dunes.  We have, still nourishing in a garden, John Company's Chapel of
+St. Matthias, a fragment of a time that was, where now the vigorous
+commercial life of the Company shows no evidence whatever of its
+previous urgent importance.  Founded in the time of the Commonwealth as
+a symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked up
+from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a
+reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel
+has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered
+the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for
+antiquaries.  So little do men really change.  They always leave their
+temples, whether they lived in Poplar or Nineveh.  Only the names of
+their gods change.  The Chapel at Poplar it was then, when this
+shipping parish had no docks, and the nearest church was over the
+fields to Stepney.  Our vessels then lay in the river.  We got our
+first dock, that of the West India Merchants, at the beginning of last
+century.  A little later the East India Dock was built by John Company.
+Then another phase began to reshape Dockland.  There came a time when
+the Americans looked in a fair way, sailing ahead fast with the
+wonderful clippers Donald McKay was building at Boston, to show us a
+tow rope.  The best sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, and
+the Thames building yards were working to create the ideal clipper
+which should beat them.  This really was the last effort of sails, for
+steamers were on the seas, and the Americans were actually making
+heroic efforts to smother them with canvas.  Mr. Green, of Poplar,
+worried over those Boston craft, declared we must be first again, and
+first we were.  But both Boston and Poplar, in their efforts to perfect
+an old idea, did not see a crude but conquering notion taking form to
+magnify and hasten both commerce and war.
+
+But they were worth doing, those clippers, and worth remembering.  They
+sail clear into our day as imperishable memories.  They still live, for
+they did far more than carry merchandise.  When an old mariner speaks
+of the days of studding sails it is not the precious freight, the real
+purpose of his ships, which animates his face.  What we always remember
+afterwards is not the thing we did, or tried to do, but the friends who
+were about us at the time.  But our stately ships themselves, with our
+River their home, which gave Poplar's name, wherever they went, a ring
+on the counter like a sound guinea, at the most they are now but planks
+bearded with sea grass, lost in ocean currents, sighted only by the
+albatross.
+
+Long ago nearly every home in Dockland treasured a lithographic
+portrait of one of the beauties, framed and hung where visitors could
+see 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 his
+prejudice about the last pennyworth of tar.  She was not a transporter
+to us, an earner of freights, something to which was attached a profit
+and loss account and an insurance policy.  She had a name.  She was a
+sentient being, perhaps noble, perhaps wilful; she might have any
+quality of character, even malice.  I have seen hands laid on her with
+affection 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 that
+beautiful lady's portrait known.  Here and there it survives, part of
+the flotsam which has drifted through the years with grandmother's
+sandalwood chest, the last of the rush-bottomed chairs, and the
+lacquered tea-caddy.  I well remember a room from which such survivals
+were saved when the household ship ran on a coffin, and foundered.  It
+was 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 I
+was lifted to sit on one of its horsehair chairs, its seat like a
+hedgehog, and I was cautioned to sit still.  It was rather a long drop
+to the floor from a chair for me in those days, and though sitting
+still 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, and
+boots profaned it.  Its door was nearly always shut and locked, and
+only the chance formal visit of respect-worthy strangers brought down
+its key from the top shelf of the kitchen dresser.  That key was seldom
+used for relatives, except at Christmas, or when one was dead.  The
+room was always sombre.  Light filtered into it through curtains of
+wire gauze, fixed in the window by mahogany frames.  Over the door by
+which you entered was the picture of an uncle, too young and jolly for
+that serious position, I thought then, with his careless neckcloth, and
+his cap pulled down over one eye.  The gilt moulding was gone from a
+corner of the picture--the only flaw in the prim apartment--for once
+that 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 was
+in that chamber, covered with a cloth on which was worked a picture
+from the story of Ruth.  But only puzzling bits of the latter were to
+be seen, for on the circumference of the table-cover were books, placed
+at precise distances apart, and in the centre was a huge Bible, with a
+brass clasp.  With many others my name was in the Bible, and my
+birthday, and a space left blank for the day of my death.  Reflected in
+the pier-glass which doubled the room were the portraits in oils of my
+grandparents, looking wonderfully young, as you may have noticed is
+often the case in people belonging to ancient history, as though,
+strangely enough, people were the same in those remote days, except
+that they wore different clothes.
+
+I have often sat on the chair, and when patience had inured me to the
+spines of the area I occupied, looked at the reflections in the mirror
+of those portraits, for they seemed more distant so, and in a
+perspective according to their age, and became really my grandparents,
+in a room, properly, of another world, which could be seen, but was
+not.  A room no one could enter any more.  I remember a black sofa,
+which smelt of dust, an antimacassar over its head.  That sofa would
+wake to squeak tales if I stood on it to inspect the model of a ship in
+yellow ivory, resting on a wall-bracket above.  There were many old
+shells in the polished brass fender, some with thick orange lips and
+spotted backs; others were spirals of mother-o'-pearl, which took
+different colours for every way you held them.  You could get the only
+sound in the room by putting the shells to your ear.  Like the people
+of the portraits, it was impossible to believe the shells had ever
+lived.  The inside of the grate was filled with white paper, and the
+trickles of fine black dust which rested in its crevices would start
+and run stealthily when people walked in the next room.  Over the
+looking-glass there hung a pair of immense buffalo horns, with a piece
+of curly black hair dividing them which looked like the skin of our
+retriever dog.  Above the horns was the picture of "The Famous Tea
+Clipper _Oberon_, setting her Studding Sails off the Lizard"; but so
+high was the print, and so faint--for the picture, too, was old--that
+some 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 old
+Dockland, and is now no more than something remembered.  The clipper's
+picture went with the wreckage, when the room was strewn, and I expect
+in that house today there is a photograph of a steamer with two funnels.
+
+Nothing conjures back that room so well as the recollection of a
+strange odour which fell from it when its door opened, as though
+something bodiless passed as we entered.  There was never anything in
+the room which alone could account for the smell, for it had in it
+something of the sofa, which was old and black, and of the lacquered
+tea-caddy, within the lid of which was the faint ghost of a principle
+indefinably ancient and rare; and there was in it, too, something of
+the shells.  But you could never find where the smell really came from.
+I have tried, and know.  A recollection of that strange dusky fragrance
+brings back the old room on a summer afternoon, so sombre that the
+mahogany sideboard had its own reddish light, so quiet that the clock
+could be heard ticking in the next room; time, you could hear, going
+leisurely.  There would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless atoms
+swimming in it, slanting from a corner of the window to brighten a
+patch of carpet.  Two flies would be hovering under the ceiling.
+Sometimes they would dart at a tangent to hover in another place.  I
+used to wonder what they lived on.  You felt secure there, knowing it
+was old, but seeing things did not alter, as though the world were
+established and content, desiring no new thing.  I did not know that
+the old house, even then, quiet and still as it seemed, was actually
+rocking on the flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, sick with
+anxiety and bewilderment in guiding his home in the years he did not
+understand, which his experience had never charted, was sinking
+nerveless at his helm.  For he heard, when his children did not, the
+premonition of breakers in seas having no landmark that he knew; felt
+the trend and push of new and inimical forces, and currents that
+carried 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 worth
+mentioning, and it is true that sixteenth-century prints show the town
+to finish just where the Dock of St. Katherine is now.  Beyond that,
+and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to
+mark recognizable country.  On the south side the marshes were very
+extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable
+distance.  The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides
+was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now
+begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian
+seaboard.  Once it serpentined as far as the upper Pool, disappearing
+as the wharves and docks were built to accommodate London's increasing
+commerce.  There is no doubt, then, that the Lower Thames parishes are
+really young; but, when we are reminded that they have no history worth
+mentioning, it may be understood that the historian is simply not
+interested enough to mention it.
+
+So far as age goes my shipping parish cannot compare with a cathedral
+city; but antiquity is not the same as richness of experience.  One
+remembers the historic and venerable tortoise.  He is old enough,
+compared with us.  But he has had nothing so varied and lively as the
+least of us can show.  Most of his reputed three hundred years is
+sleep, no doubt, and the rest vegetables.  In the experience of
+Wapping, Poplar, Rotherhithe, Limehouse, and Deptford, when they really
+came to life, there was precious little sleep, and no vegetables worth
+mentioning.  They were quick and lusty.  There they stood, long
+knee-deep and busy among their fleets, sometimes rising to cheer when a
+greater adventure was sailing or returning, some expedition that was
+off to find further avenues through the Orient or the Americas, or else
+a broken craft bringing back tragedy from the Arctic; ship after ship;
+great captain after great captain.  No history worth mentioning!  There
+are Londoners who cannot taste the salt.  Yet, no doubt, it is
+difficult for younger London to get the ocean within its horizon.  The
+memory of the _Oberon_, that famous ship, is significant to me, for she
+has gone, with all her fleet, and some say she took Poplar's best with
+her.  Once we were a famous shipping parish.  Now we are but part of
+the East End of London.  The steamers have changed us.  The tides do
+not rise high enough today, and our shallow waters cannot make home for
+the new keels.
+
+But to the old home now the last of the sailing fleet is loyal.  We
+have enough still to show what once was there; the soft gradations of a
+ship's entrance, rising into bows and bowsprit, like the form of a
+comber at its limit, just before it leaps forward in collapse.  The
+mounting spars, alive and braced.  The swoop and lift of the sheer, the
+rich and audacious colours, the strange flags and foreign names.  South
+Sea schooner, whaling barque from Hudson's Bay, the mahogany ship from
+Honduras, the fine ships and barques that still load for the antipodes
+and 'Frisco.  Every season they diminish, but some are still with us.
+At Tilbury, where the modern liners are, you get wall sides mounting
+like great hotels with tier on tier of decks, and funnels soaring high
+to dominate the day.  There the prospect of masts is a line of derrick
+poles.  But still in the upper docks is what will soon have gone for
+ever from London, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with sometimes a
+white sail floating in it like a cloud.  We had a Russian barquentine
+there yesterday.  I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships,
+the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse
+spars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered lift
+skywards of main and mizzen poles.  The model of this Russian ship was
+as memorable as a Greek statue.  It is a ship's sheer which gives
+loveliness to her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, finely
+poised, sure of herself, in profile.  She was so slight a body, so tall
+and slender, but standing alert and illustriously posed, there was
+implied in her slenderness a rare strength and swiftness.  And to her
+beauty of line there went a richness of colour which made our dull
+parish a notable place.  She was of wood, painted white.  Her masts
+were of pine, veined with amber.  Her white hull, with the drenchings
+of the seas, had become shot with ultramarine shadows, as though
+tinctured with the virtue of the ocean.  The verdigris of her sheathing
+was vivid as green light; and the languid dock water, the colour of
+jade, glinting round her hull, was lambent with hues not its own.  You
+could believe there was a soft radiation from that ship's sides which
+fired the water about her, but faded when far from her sides, a
+delicate and faery light which soon expired.
+
+Such are our distinguished visitors in Dockland, though now they come
+to us with less frequency.  If the skipper of the _Oberon_ could now
+look down the Dock Road from the corner by North Street, what he would
+look for first would be, not, I am sure, what compelled the electric
+trams, but for the entrance of the East Dock and its familiar tangle of
+spars.  He would not find it.  The old dock is there, but a lagoon
+asleep, and but few vessels sleeping with it.  The quays are vacant,
+except for the discarded lumber of ships, sun-dried boats, rusted
+cables and anchors, and a pile of broken davits.  The older dock of the
+West India Merchants is almost the same.  Yet even I have seen the
+bowsprits and jib-booms of the Australian packets diminish down the
+quays of the East Dock as an arcade; and of that West Dock there is a
+boy who well remembers its quays buried under the largess of the
+tropics and the Spanish Main, where now, through the colonnades of its
+warehouse supports, the vistas are empty.  Once you had to squeeze
+sideways through the stacked merchandise.  There were huge hogsheads of
+sugar and hillocks of coconuts.  Molasses and honey escaped to spread a
+viscid carpet which held your feet.  The casual prodigality of it
+expanded the mind.  Certainly this earth must be a big and cheerful
+place if it could spread its treasures thus wide and deep in a public
+place under the sky.  It corrected the impression got from the retail
+shops for any penniless youngster, with that pungent odour of sugar
+crushed under foot, with its libations of syrup poured from the plenty
+of the sunny isles.  Today the quays are bare and deserted, and grass
+rims the stones of the footway, as verdure does the neglected stone
+covers in a churchyard.  In the dusk of a winter evening the high and
+silent warehouses which enclose the mirrors of water enclose too an
+accentuation of the dusk.  The water might be evaporating in shadows.
+The hulls of the few ships, moored beside the walls, become absorbed in
+the dark.  Night withdraws their substance.  What the solitary wayfarer
+sees then is the incorporeal presentment of ships.  Dockland expires.
+The living and sounding day is elsewhere, lighting the new things on
+which the young are working.  Here is the past, deep in the obscurity
+from which time has taken the sun, where only memory can go, and sees
+but the ineffaceable impression of what once was there.
+
+There is a notable building in our Dock Road, the Board of Trade
+offices, retired a little way from the traffic behind a screen of plane
+trees.  Not much more than its parapet appears behind the foliage.  By
+those offices, on fine evenings, I find one of our ancients, Captain
+Tom Bowline.  Why he favours the road there I do not know.  It would be
+a reasonable reason, but occult.  The electric trams and motor buses
+annoy him.  And not one of the young stokers and deck-hands just ashore
+and paid off, or else waiting at a likely corner for news of a ship,
+could possibly know the skipper and his honourable records.  They do
+not know that once, in that office, Tom was a famous and respected
+figure.  There he stands at times, outside the place which knew him
+well, but has forgotten him, wearing his immemorial reefer jacket, his
+notorious 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 has
+the form of its early black and abundant vitality.  As long ago as 1885
+he landed from his last ship, and has been with us since, watching the
+landmarks go.  "The sea," he said to me once, "the sea has gone.  When
+I look down this road and see it so empty--(the simple truth is it was
+noisy with traffic)--I feel I've overstayed my time allowance.  My
+ships are firewood and wreckage, my owners are only funny portraits in
+offices that run ten-thousand-ton steamers, and the boys are bones.
+Poplar?  This isn't Poplar.  I feel like Robinson Crusoe--only I can't
+find 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 is
+finished and you are only waiting and looking on.  When Captain Tom is
+in that mood we go to smoke a pipe at a dockhead.  It will be high tide
+if we are in luck, and the sun will be going down to give our River
+majesty, and a steamer will be backing into the stream, outward bound.
+The quiet of a fine evening for Tom, and the great business of ships
+and the sea for me.  We see the steamer's captain and its pilot leaning
+over the bridge, looking aft towards the River.  I think the size of
+their vessel is a little awful to Tom.  He never had to guide so many
+thousand tons of steel and cargo into a crowded waterway.  But those
+two 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 the
+movement, and so do not know of it.  Tom, now at rest, sitting on a
+pierhead bollard, sees the world leaving him, going ahead past his
+cogitating tobacco smoke.  Let it go.  We, watching quietly from our
+place 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, perhaps
+its presiding god, who is determined the world shall go round, would be
+foolish 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, becomes
+vaporous and unreal.  Moving so fast then?  But the definite sky
+remains, a hard dome of glowing saffron based on thin girders of iron
+clouds.  The heaven alone is trite and plain.  The wharves, the
+factories, the ships, the docks, all the material evidence of hope and
+industry, merge into a dim spectral show in which a few lights burn,
+fumbling with ineffectual beams in dissolution.  Out on the River a
+dark 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, and
+had stopped moving.  But from the waiting steamer looming over us, a
+gigantic 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 steam
+is too subdued a sound in the palpable and oppressive dusk to be
+significant.  Then a boatswain's pipe rends the heavy dark like the
+gleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from the
+steamer's bridge.  There is a sudden commotion, we hear the voice
+again, and answering cries, and by us, towards the black chasm of the
+River in which hover groups of moving planets, the mass of the steamer
+glides, its pale funnel mounting over us like a column.  Out she goes,
+turning broadside on, a shadow sprinkled with stars, then makes slow
+way down stream, a travelling constellation occulting one after another
+all the fixed lights.
+
+Captain Tom knocks out his pipe on the heel of his boot, his eyes still
+on 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 man
+there.  Where's she bound for, I wonder?"
+
+Now who could tell him that? What a question to ask me.  Did Tom ever
+know his real destination? Not he!  And have I not watched Dockland
+itself in movement under the sun, easily mobile, from my window in its
+midst?  Whither was it bound?  Why should the old master mariner expect
+the young to answer that?  He is a lucky navigator who always finds his
+sky quite clear, and can set his course by the signs of unclouded
+heavenly bodies, and so is sure of the port to which his steering will
+take him.
+
+
+
+
+IV. The Heart's Desire.
+
+If the evening was one of those which seem longer than usual but still
+have far to go, it was once a custom in Millwall to find a pair of
+boots 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's
+shop was in a street that had the look of having retired from the hurry
+and press of London, aged, dispirited, and indifferent even to its
+defeat, and of waiting vacantly for what must come to elderly and
+shabby despondence.  Each grey house in the street was distinguished
+but by its number and the ornament which showed between the muslin
+curtains of its parlour window.  The home of the Jones's had a
+geranium, and so was different from one neighbour with a ship's model
+in gypsum, and from the other whose sign was a faded photograph askew
+in its frame.  On warm evenings some of the women would be sitting on
+their doorsteps, watching with dull faces their children at play, as if
+experience had told them more than they wanted to know, but that they
+had nothing to say about it.  Beyond this street there was emptiness.
+It ended, literally, on a blind wall.  It was easy for a wayfarer to
+feel in that street that its life was caught.  It was secluded from the
+main stream, and its children were a lively yet merely revolving eddy.
+They could not get out.  When I first visited Mr. Pascoe, as there was
+no window ornament to distinguish his place from the others, and his
+number was missing, I made a mistake, and went next door.  Through a
+hole drilled in that wrong door a length of cord was pendant, with a
+greasy knot at its end.  Underneath the knot was chalked "Pull."  I
+pulled.  The door opened on a mass of enclosed night.  From the street
+it was hard to see what was there, so I went inside.  What was there
+might have been a cavern--narrow, obscure, and dangerous with dim
+obstructions.  Some of the shadows were darker than others, because the
+cave ended, far-off, on a port-light, a small square of day framed in
+black.  Empty space was luminous beyond that cave.  Becoming used to
+the gloom I saw chains and cordage hanging from the unseen roof.  What
+was faintly like the prow of a boat shaped near.  Then out from the
+lumber and suggestions of things a gnome approached me.  "Y' want ole
+Pascoe?  Nex' dore, guv'nor!"  At that moment, in the square of bright
+day at the end of the darkness, the apparition of a ship silently
+appeared, and was gone again before my surprise.  That open space
+beyond 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 a
+tiny yellow fan of gaslight which could be heard making a tenuous
+shrilling whenever the bootmaker looked up, and ceased riveting.  When
+his head was bent over his task only the crown of a red and matured
+cricketing cap, which nodded in time to his hammer, was presented to
+you.  When he paused to speak, and glanced up, he showed a face that
+the gas jet, with the aid of many secluded years, had tinctured with
+its own artificial hue, a face puckered through a long frowning intent
+on old boots.  He wore an apron that had ragged gaps in it.  He was a
+frail and dingy little man, and might never have had a mother, but
+could have been born of that dusty workroom, to which he had been a
+faithful son all his life.  It was a murky interior shut in from the
+day, a litter of petty tools and nameless rubbish on a ruinous bench, a
+disorder of dilapidated boots, that mean gas jet, a smell of leather;
+and there old Pascoe's hammer defiantly and rapidly attacked its
+circumstances, driving home at times, and all unseen, more than those
+rivets.  If he rose to rake over his bench for material or a tool, he
+went spryly, aided by a stick, but at every step his body heeled over
+because one leg was shorter than the other.  Having found what he
+wanted he would wheel round, with a strange agility that was apparently
+a consequence of his deformity, continuing his discourse, and driving
+his points into the air with his hammer, and so hobble back, still
+talking; still talking through his funny cap, as his neighbours used to
+say of him.  At times he convoluted aerial designs and free ideas with
+his hammer, spending it aloft on matters superior to boots.  The boots
+were never noticed.  Pascoe could revivify his dust.  The glitter of
+his spectacles when he looked up might have been the sparkling of an
+ardent vitality suppressed in his little body.
+
+The wall space of his room was stratified with shelves, where half-seen
+bottles and nondescript lumps were to be guessed at, like fossils
+embedded in shadow.  They had never been moved, and they never would
+be.  Hanging from a nail on one shelf was a framed lithograph of the
+ship _Euterpe_, off S. Catherine's Point, July 21, 1849.  On the shelf
+below 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 man
+because of the notion that some day they would come in handy.  Once,
+when waiting for Pascoe, who was out getting a little beer, I glanced
+at the volumes, and supposed they bore some relation to the picture of
+the ship; perhaps once they had been owned by that legendary brother of
+Pascoe's, a sailor, of whom I had had a misty apprehension.  It would
+be difficult to say there had been a direct word about him.  There were
+manuals on navigation, seamanship, and ship-building, all of them
+curiosities, in these later days, rather than expert guides.  They were
+full of marginal notes, and were not so dusty as I had expected to find
+them.  The rest of the books were of journeys in Central America and
+Mexico: _Three Years in Guatemala_; _The Buried Cities of Yucatan_;
+_Scenes on the Mosquito Coast_; _A Voyage to Honduras_.  There was more
+of it, and of that sort.  They were by authors long forgotten; but
+those books, too, looked as though they were often in use.  Certainly
+they 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 those
+books.  "Somebody told me," he said one evening, while offering me a
+share 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 a
+very big world.
+
+"Yes," he said, after a pause: "and what a world.  Think of those
+buried cities in Yucatan--lost in the forest, temples and gods and
+everything.  Men and women there, once upon a time, thinking they were
+a fine people, the only great people, with a king and princesses and
+priests who made out they knew the mysteries, and what God was up to.
+And there were processions of girls with fruit and flowers on
+feast-days, and soldiers in gold armour.  All gone, even their big
+notions.  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 had
+suddenly glowed before my eyes, become magical with moving opalescence.
+What right had old Pascoe to be staring like that to the land and
+romance of the Toltecs?  I had been under the impression that he read
+nothing but the Bible and _Progress and Poverty_.  There was a
+biography of Bradlaugh, too, which he would quote copiously, and his
+spectacles used fairly to scintillate over that, and his yellow face to
+acquire a new set of cunning and ironic puckers; for I believe he
+thought, when he quoted Bradlaugh--whose name was nearly all I knew of
+that famous man--that he was becoming extremely modern, and a little
+too strong for my conventional and sensitive mind.  But here he was,
+telling of Incas, Aztecs, and Toltecs, of buried cities, of forgotten
+treasures, though mainly of the mind, of Montezuma, of the quetzal
+bird, and of the vanished splendour of nations that are now but a few
+weathered stones.  It was the forlorn stones, lost in an uninhabited
+wilderness, to which he constantly returned.  A brother of his, who had
+been there, perhaps had dropped a word once into Pascoe's ear while his
+accustomed weapon was uplifted over a dock-labourer's boot-heel, and
+this was what that word had done.  Pascoe, with a sort of symbolic
+gesture, rose from his bobbing foot before me, tore the shoe from it,
+flung it contemptuously on the floor, and approached me with a
+flamboyant 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 of
+his memory, and believing that I was not uninterested, now, of course,
+he would be always displaying, for the ease of his soul, supposing we
+had a fellowship and a bond, his fascinating quetzals and Toltecs.  Yet
+I never heard any more about them.  There was another subject though,
+quite homely, seeing where we both lived, and equally absorbing for us
+both.  He knew our local history, as far as our ships and house-flags
+were concerned, from John Company's fleet to the _Macquarie_.  He knew,
+by reputation, many of our contemporary master mariners.  He knew, and
+how he had learned it was as great a wonder as though he spoke Chinese,
+a fair measure of naval architecture.  He could discuss ships' models
+as some men would Greek drama.  He would enter into the comparative
+merits of rig suitable for small cruising craft with a particularity
+which, now and then, gave me a feeling almost akin to alarm; because in
+a man of Pascoe's years this fond insistence on the best furniture for
+one's own little ship went beyond fair interest, and became the
+day-dreaming of romantic and rebellious youth.  At that point he was
+beyond my depth.  I had forgotten long ago, though but half Pascoe's
+age, what my ship was to be like, when I got her at last.  Knowing she
+would 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 I
+had stumbled on my first visit to Pascoe.  He said it was a fine
+afternoon.  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, he
+signed to me to follow him along his loft.  He led me clean through the
+port-light of his cave, and down a length of steps outside to his yard
+on the foreshore of the Thames, where, among his barges hauled up for
+repairs, 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 a
+vessel whose hull was nearing completion.  I did not ask if it was
+Pascoe's work.  It was such an amusing and pathetic surprise, that,
+with the barge-builder's leering face turned to me waiting for my
+guess, there was no need to answer.  "He reckons," said the
+barge-builder, "that he can do a bit of cruising about the mouth of the
+Thames in that.  'Bout all she wants now is to have a mast fitted, and
+to keep the water out, and she'll do."  He chuckled grimly.  Her lines
+were crude, and she had been built up, you could see, as Pascoe came
+across timber that was anywhere near being possible.  Her strakes were
+a patchwork of various kinds of wood, though when she was tarred their
+diversity would be hidden from all but the searching of the elements.
+It was astonishing that Pascoe had done so well.  It was still more
+astonishing that he should think it would serve.
+
+"I've given him a hand with it," remarked the barge-builder, "an' more
+advice than the old 'un 'ud take.  But I dessay 'e could potter about
+with the dam' tub round about as far as Canvey, if 'e keeps it out of
+the wash of the steamers.  He's been at this job two years now, and I
+shan't be sorry to see my yard shut of it. . . .  Must humour the old
+boy, though. . . . Nigglin' job, mending boots, I reckon.  If I mended
+boots, 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 that
+his ship, so far as I was concerned, did not exist.  One Saturday
+evening, when I called, his room was in darkness.  Striking a match,
+there was his apron shrouding his hobbing foot.  This had never
+happened before, and I turned into the barge-builder's.  The proprietor
+there faced me silently for a moment, treasuring a jest he was going to
+give me when I was sufficiently impatient for it.  "Come to see whether
+your boots are done?  Well, they ain't.  Pascoe's gone.  Christened his
+boat this morning, and pushed off.  Gone for a trial trip.  Gone down
+river."
+
+"Good Lord," I said, or something of the sort.
+
+"Yes," continued the barge-builder, luxuriating in it, "and I've often
+wondered what name he'd give her, and he done it this morning, in gold
+leaf.  D'yer remember what she looked like?  All right.  Well, 'er name
+is the _Heart's Desire_, and her skipper will be back soon, if she
+don't fall apart too far off."
+
+Her skipper was not back soon, nor that day.  We had no news of him the
+next day.  A few women were in his workshop, when I called, hunting
+about for footwear that should have been repaired and returned, but was
+not.  "'Ere they are," cried one.  "'Ere's young Bill's boots, and
+nothing done to 'em.  The silly old fool.  Why didn't 'e tell me 'e was
+going to sea?  'Ow's young Bill to go to school on Monday now?"  The
+others found their boots, all urgently wanted, and all as they were
+when Pascoe got them.  A commination began of light-minded cripples who
+took in young and innocent boots, promising them all things, and then
+treacherously abandoned them, to do God knew what; and so I left.
+
+This became serious; for old Pascoe, with his _Heart's Desire_, had
+vanished, like his Toltecs.  A week went by.  The barge-builder, for
+whom this had now ceased to be a joke, was vastly troubled by the
+complete 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 quite
+clear, for it was a humorous paragraph.  But the evidence was strong
+enough for me, and on behalf of the barge-builder and a few others I
+went at once to that west-coast harbour.
+
+It was late at night when I arrived, and bewildering with rain, total
+darkness, and an upheaval of cobbles in by-ways that wandered to no
+known purpose.  But a guide presently brought me to a providential
+window, and quarters in the _Turk's Head_.  In my room I could hear a
+continuous murmuring, no doubt from the saloon bar below, and
+occasional rounds of hearty merriment.  That would be the place for
+news, and I went down to get it.  An oil-lamp veiled in tobacco smoke
+was hanging from a beam of a sooty ceiling.  A congregation of
+longshoremen, visible in the blue mist and smoky light chiefly because
+of their pink masks, was packed on benches round the walls.  They
+laughed aloud again as I went in.  They were regarding with indulgent
+interest and a little shy respect an elegant figure overlooking them,
+and posed negligently against the bar, on the other side of which
+rested the large bust of a laughing barmaid.  She was as amused as the
+men.  The figure turned to me as I entered, and stopped its discourse
+at once.  It ran a hand over its white brow and curly hair with a
+gesture of mock despair.  "Why, here comes another to share our _Hearts
+Desire_.  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 business
+to allow any place to keep its secrets to itself; indeed, his
+reputation including even a capacity for humour, the world was
+frequently delighted with more than the place itself knew even in
+secret.  Other correspondents from London were also in the room.  I saw
+them vaguely when Hopkins indicated their positions with a few graceful
+flourishes of his hand.  They were lost in Hopkins's assurance of
+occupying superiority.  They were looking on.  "We all got here
+yesterday," explained Hopkins.  "It's a fine story, not without its
+funny touches.  And it has come jolly handy in a dull season when
+people want cheering up.  We have found the Ancient Mariner.  He was
+off voyaging again but his ship's magic was washed out by heavy
+weather.  And while beer is more plentiful than news, we hope to keep
+London going with some wonders of the deep."
+
+In the morning, before the correspondents had begun on the next
+instalment of their serial story, I saw Pascoe sitting up in a bed at
+another inn, his expenses an investment of the newspaper men.  He was
+unsubdued.  He was even exalted.  He did not think it strange to see me
+there, though it was not difficult to guess that he had his doubts
+about the quality of the publicity he had attracted, and of the motive
+for the ardent attentions of his new and strange acquaintances from
+London.  "Don't be hard on me," he begged, "for not telling you more in
+London.  But you're so cautious and distrustful.  I was going to tell
+you, but was uncertain what you'd say.  Now I've started and you can't
+stop me.  I've met a man here named Hopkins, who has given me some help
+and advice.  As soon as my craft is repaired, I'm off again.  It was
+unlucky 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 no
+more than a fortnight to put right."
+
+There was no need to argue with him.  The _Heart's Desire_, a centre of
+attraction in the place, answered any doubt I had as to Pascoe's
+safety.  But he was humoured.  Hopkins humoured him, even openly
+encouraged him.  The Heart's Desire was destined for a great adventure.
+The world was kept in anticipation of the second departure for this
+strange voyage to Guatemala.  The _Heart's Desire_ on the edge of a
+ship-repairer's yard, was tinkered, patched, refitted, made as right as
+she could be.  The ship-repairer, the money for the work made certain
+for him, did what he was told, but made no comment, except to
+interrogate me curiously when I was about.
+
+A spring tide, with a southerly wind, brought us to a natural
+conclusion.  An unexpected lift of the water washed off the _Heart's
+Desire_, rolled her about, and left her broken on the mud.  I met the
+journalists in a group on their way to the afternoon train, their faces
+still reflecting the brightness of an excellent entertainment.  Hopkins
+took me aside.  "I've made it right with old Pascoe.  He hasn't lost
+anything by it, you can be sure of that."  But I was looking for the
+cobbler, and all I wished to learn was the place where I was likely to
+find him.  They did not know that.
+
+Late that evening I was still looking for him, and it had been raining
+for hours.  The streets of the village were dark and deserted.  Passing
+one 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 a
+match 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 of
+his line became a coloured button beyond his forelock.  He used to come
+home occasionally--and it was always when we were on the point of
+forgetting him altogether.  He came with a huge bolster in a cab, as
+though out of the past and nowhere.  There is a tradition, a book
+tradition, that the boy apprenticed to the sea acquires saucy eyes, and
+a self-reliance always ready to dare to that bleak extreme the very
+thought of which horrifies those who are lawful and cautious.  They
+know better who live where the ships are.  He used to bring his young
+shipmates to see us, and they were like himself.  Their eyes were
+downcast.  They showed no self-reliance.  Their shyness and politeness,
+when the occasion was quite simple, were absurdly incommensurate even
+with 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 as
+abrupt and unannounced as his appearance, we could willingly endure
+him.  But he was extraneous to the household.  He had the impeding
+nature 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 wooden
+manner, till it is placed elsewhere.  There was a morning when, as he
+was leaving the house, during one of his brief visits to his home, I
+noticed to my astonishment that he had grown taller than myself.  How
+had that happened?  And where?  I had followed him to the door that
+morning because, looking down at his cap which he was nervously
+handling, he had told me he was going then to an examination.  About a
+week later he announced, in a casual way, that he had got his masters
+ticket.  After the first shock of surprise, caused by the fact that
+this information was an unexpected warning of our advance in years, we
+were amused, and we congratulated him.  Naturally he had got his
+certificate as master mariner.  Why not?  Nearly all the mates we knew
+got it, sooner or later.  That was bound to come.  But very soon after
+that he gave us a genuine surprise, and made us anxious.  He informed
+us, as casually, that he had been appointed master to a ship; a very
+different matter from merely possessing the licence to command.
+
+We were even alarmed.  This was serious.  He could not do it.  He was
+not the man to make a command for anything.  A fellow who, not so long
+ago, used to walk a mile with a telegram because he had not the
+strength of character to face the lady clerk in the post office round
+the corner, was hardly the man to overawe a crowd of hard characters
+gathered by chance from Tower Hill, socialize them, and direct them
+successfully in subduing the conflicting elements of a difficult
+enterprise.  Not he.  But we said nothing to discourage him.
+
+Of course, he was a delightful fellow.  He often amused us, and he did
+not always know why.  He was frank, he was gentle, but that large
+vacancy, the sea, where he had spent most of his young life, had made
+him--well, slow.  You know what I mean.  He was curiously innocent of
+those dangers of great cities which are nothing to us because we know
+they are there.  Yet he was always on the alert for thieves and
+parasites.  I think he enjoyed his belief in their crafty omnipresence
+ashore.  Proud of his alert and knowing intelligence, he would relate a
+long story of the way he had not only frustrated an artful shark, but
+had enjoyed the process in perfect safety.  That we, who rarely went
+out of London, never had such adventures, did not strike him as worth a
+thought or two.  He never paused in his merriment to consider the
+strange fact that to him, alone of our household, such wayside
+adventures fell.  With a shrewd air he would inform us that he was
+about to put the savings of a voyage into an advertised trap which a
+country parson would have stepped over without a second contemptuous
+glance,
+
+He took his ship away.  The affair was not discussed at home, though
+each of us gave it some private despondency.  We followed him silently,
+apprehensively, through the reports in the _Shipping Gazette_.  He made
+point after point safely--St. Vincent, Gibraltar, Suez, Aden--after him
+we went across to Colombo, Singapore, and at length we learned that he
+was safe at Batavia.  He had got that steamer out all right.  He got
+her home again, too.  After his first adventure as master he made
+voyage after voyage with no more excitement in them than you would find
+in Sunday walks in a suburb.  It was plain luck; or else navigation and
+seamanship were greatly overrated arts.
+
+A day came when he invited me to go with him part of his voyage.  I
+could leave the ship at Bordeaux.  I went.  You must remember that we
+had never seen his ship.  And there he was, walking with me to the dock
+from a Welsh railway station, a man in a cheap mackintosh, with an
+umbrella I will not describe, and he was carrying a brown paper parcel.
+He was appropriately crowned with a bowler hat several sizes too small
+for him.  Glancing up at his profile, I actually wondered whether the
+turmoil was now going on in his mind over that confession which now he
+was bound to make; that he was not the master of a ship, and never had
+been.
+
+There she was, a bulky modern freighter, full of derricks and
+time-saving appliances, and her funnel lording it over the
+neighbourhood.  The man with the parcel under his arm led me up the
+gangway.  I was not yet convinced.  I was, indeed, less sure than ever
+that 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 a
+seamed and resolute face, which any one would have recognized at once
+as 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 do
+with 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, rapid
+and incisive, sure of its subject, resolving doubts, and making the
+crooked straight.  It was the man with the brown paper parcel.  That
+was still under his arm--in fact, the parcel contained pink pyjamas,
+and there was hardly enough paper.  The respect of the mate was not
+lessened by this.
+
+The skipper went to gaze down a hatchway.  He walked to the other side
+of the ship, and inspected something there.  Conned her length, called
+up in a friendly but authoritative way to an engineer standing by an
+amid-ship rail above.  He came back to the mate, and with an easy
+precision directed his will on others, through his deputy, up to the
+time of sailing.  He beckoned to me, who also, apparently, was under
+his august orders, and turned, as though perfectly aware that in this
+place I should follow him meekly, in full obedience.
+
+Our steamer moved out at midnight, in a drive of wind and rain.  There
+were bewildering and unrelated lights about us.  Peremptory challenges
+were shouted to us from nowhere.  Sirens blared out of dark voids.  And
+there was the skipper on the bridge, the lad who caused us amusement at
+home, with this confusion in the dark about him, and an immense
+insentient mass moving with him at his will; and he had his hands in
+his pockets, and turned to tell me what a cold night it was.  The
+pier-head searchlight showed his face, alert, serene, with his brows
+knitted in a little frown, and his underlip projecting as the sign of
+the pride of those who look direct into the eyes of an opponent, and
+care not at all.  In my berth that night I searched for a moral for
+this 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 it
+is a house with nothing about it to distinguish its fame to those who do
+not know that a man may say to his friend, when their ships go different
+ways out of Callao, "I may meet you at the _Negro Boy_ some day."  It is
+in a road which returns to the same point, or near to it, after a
+fatiguing circuit of the Isle of Dogs.  No part of the road is better
+than the rest.  It is merely a long road.  That day when I first heard of
+Bill Purdy I was going to the tavern hoping to meet Macandrew, Chief of
+the _Medea_.  His ship was in again.  But there was nobody about.  There
+was nothing in sight but the walls, old, sad, and discreet, of the yards
+where ships are repaired.  The dock warehouses opposite the tavern
+offered me their high backs in a severer and apparently an endless
+obduracy.  The _Negro Boy_, as usual, was lost and forlorn, but resigned
+to its seclusion from the London that lives, having stood there long
+enough to learn that nothing can control the ways of changing custom.
+Its windows were modest and prim in green curtains.  Its only adornment
+was 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 pair
+of silver shoe-buckles--there was nothing left of the boy himself but the
+whites of his eyes.  The tavern is placed where men moving in the new
+ways of a busy and adventurous world would not see it, for they would not
+be there.  Its dog Ching was asleep on the mat of the portico to the
+saloon bar; a Chinese animal, in colour and mane resembling a lion whose
+dignity has become sullenness through diminution.  He could doze there
+all day, and never scare away a chance customer.  None would come.  But
+men who had learned to find him there through continuing to trade to the
+opposite 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 intrusion
+into the city of a maze of dock basins, a gate giving those who know the
+district a short cut home from the ships and quays; the tavern was sited
+not altogether without design.  And there came Macandrew through that
+gate, 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 the
+yellow lump of Chinese apathy to talk to him, and went through the swing
+doors into the saloon.  The saloon was excluded from the gaze of the rest
+of 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 all
+the 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.  A
+settee in red plush, salvage from the smoke-room of a liner, ran round
+the walls, with the very mahogany tables before it which it knew when
+afloat.  Some men in dingy uniforms and dungarees were at the tables.
+Two men I did not know stood leaning over the bar talking confidentially
+across it to a woman who was only a laugh, for she was hidden.  One of
+the 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's
+going to leave us."
+
+A woman's hand, spoiled by many heavy rings, moved across the counter and
+shook his arm in warning.  The youngster merely closed his own hand over
+it.  "Isn't it hard.  Really going to forsake us.  Won't mix your whiskey
+or uncork my lemonade any more.  What are we going to do when we come
+home now?"
+
+There was an impatient muttering beyond him, and he made public a
+soothing and exaggerated apology.  All the men in the room, even the
+group bent over a diagram of a marine engine they had drawn in chalk on
+their table, looked up in surprise, first at the youngster who had raised
+his voice, and then to watch the tall shadow of a woman pass quickly down
+the counter-screen and vanish.  Still laughing, the young man, with his
+uniform cap worn a little too carelessly, nodded to the company, and went
+out with his companion.
+
+Macandrew stared in contempt at the back of the fellow as he went.  "A
+nice boy that.  Too bright and bonny for my ship.  What's that he was
+saying about Jessie?"  He tried to see where she was, and lowered his
+voice.  "I know his kind.  I saw them together last night, in the Dock
+Road.  What does she have anything to do with him for? We know her of
+course . . . but even then. . . .  She's really not a bad sort.  She's
+like 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-going
+engineer, 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 petulant
+face, with its pale eyes set like aquamarines in bronze, into an opening
+too 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 handsome
+gargoyle.  His height compelled him to lean forward and to grin downward,
+even when speaking to a big man like Macandrew.  He turned to his chief
+now, and both hands went up to his spectacles.  In the way the corners of
+his mouth turned up before he spoke, whimsically wrinkling his nose, and
+in his intent and amused regard, there was a suggestion of the mockery of
+a low immortal for beings who are fated earnestly to frustrate
+themselves.  His grin gave you the uncomfortable feeling that it was
+useless to pretend you were keeping nothing from him.
+
+"Here goes," said Hanson.  "Never mind Jessie.  I've got something to
+tell you, Chief.  I'm leaving you this voyage."
+
+Macandrew was instantly annoyed.  "Going?  Dammit, you can't.  Look at
+the crowd I've got now.  You mustn't do it."
+
+"I must.  They are a thin lot, but you could push the old _Medea_ along
+with anything.  I've got another ship.  My reason is very good, from the
+way I look at it."
+
+Hanson turned his grin to me.  He was going to enjoy the privilege of
+seeing his reasons deemed unreasonable.  "Don't think it's a better job
+I'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's
+called the _Cygnet_.  I've been over her, and we shall call her something
+different 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 there
+a 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 like
+winding up a clock and going to sleep.  Do you know the _Cygnet_ has six
+inches of freeboard?"  He was talking to me, but kept glancing sideways
+to see what effect this had on Macandrew.  But Macandrew's broad back was
+impassive.
+
+"Six inches of freeboard, barring her false bulwarks of deal boards, and
+she's going out to--I forget the name of the place, but I could show you
+where 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, spoke
+more seriously.  "I don't think she'll ever get there, but it will be
+interesting to see where she stops, and why."
+
+Macandrew heaved round on his junior.  "There's drivel.  It sounds well
+from an engineer and a mathematician, doesn't it?"  He turned away again.
+"Supposing," he said, over his shoulder, "supposing you pull this ship
+through all right, then where will you be?  Any better off?"
+
+"I think so," said Hanson.  He couldn't talk to Macandrew's back, so he
+bent over me and pointed a challenging finger at my necktie.  "I've never
+risked anything yet, not even my job.  This is where I do it.  It'll be
+nice to attempt something when the odds are that you can't finish it, and
+there's nothing much in it if you do.  Why," he said, grinning at his
+Chief's back, "if I were to stay with him I'd become so normal that I'd
+slip into marriage and safety as a matter of course, and have to give up
+everything."
+
+"Who's in charge of this lunacy?" asked Macandrew.  His voice was a
+little truculent.
+
+"All right, Chief.  I shan't remember his name any the better because
+you're annoyed with me.  I haven't seen the skipper yet.  I think I heard
+him called Purdy."
+
+"Purdy?  Bill Purdy?" Macandrew was incredulous.  "Do you know what
+you've let yourself in for?  If Purdy's got the job, I know why.  Nobody
+else 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 long
+time, and I like him, but he'll never do.  He can't make up his mind to a
+course.  Don't you remember the _Campeachy_ case? I expect it was before
+your time.  Purdy had her.  He was coming up-Channel, and got nervous
+over 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 that
+as he was in shelter he'd better stay there till a pilot arrived, because
+getting 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 got
+over the fuss Lloyd's raised about it he refused to take command again
+for some time.  He couldn't even make up his mind whether he wanted a
+ship at all."
+
+Hanson listened to this with the air of one who was being reassured in a
+doubtful enterprise.
+
+"You mistake me, Chief," he said.  "You are only improving my reasons for
+going.  Not only is the ship crank, but so is her skipper.  Now tell me
+. . ."
+
+Macandrew frowned at his junior, and his curiously pale eyes became
+distinctly inhuman.  I believe he thought his counsel was being laughed
+at.  But the door opened, and he touched Hanson's arm.  A little man of
+middle age stood there, who turned, and actually prevented the doors from
+swinging together with their usual announcement of another customer.  For
+only a moment he raised his downcast eyes to see who was there, and then
+nodded sadly to Macandrew.  His drooping moustache conformed to the
+downward lines of his face, which was that of a man who had been long
+observing life with understanding, and had not a lively opinion of it.
+
+Macandrew's demeanour changed.  It was now mild and almost affectionate
+as he greeted the little man.  "Come over here, Purdy, and tell us what
+you've been doing.  Here's Hanson, this young fellow.  I hear he's
+sailing with you.  He's your Chief.  You'd better know him."
+
+Purdy raised his eyes in a grave and momentary survey, made to shake
+hands with Hanson, but hesitated, and did so only because Hanson put out
+his own great fist with decision.  Purdy did not speak, except to say to
+Hanson: "We're signing-on tomorrow.  I'll meet you at the shipping office
+then."  He seemed to forget the pair of them, paused, and went to a far
+vacant corner of the bar.  The barmaid, as he got there, returned, and
+stopped 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 you
+take 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'd
+like to know.  He's only wearing a bowler hat."
+
+
+2
+
+The _Medea_ had been ordered unexpectedly to Barry for loading, to take
+the place of an unready sister-ship; and Macandrew, of whom I have had
+much experience, would be active, critical of what a dog must put up with
+in life, and altogether unfit for intimate, amiable, and reminiscent
+conversation.  Yet I wanted to see him again before he left, and went
+past the Board of Trade Office hoping for signs of the _Medea_, for I had
+heard she was assembling a crew that morning.  But the marine-store
+shops, with their tarpaulin suits hanging outside open-armed and
+oscillating, looked across to the men lounging against the
+shipping-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.  Behind
+the brass grille there a clerk, solitary and absorbed in his duties, bent
+over a pile of ships' articles, and presented to the seamen in the public
+space beyond him only the featureless shine of a bald head.  The seamen,
+scattered about in groups, shabby and listless, with a few of their
+officers among them, were as sombre and subdued as though they had
+learned life had nothing more to offer them, and they were present only
+because they might as well use up the salvage of their days.  The clerk
+raised his head and questioned the men before him with a quick, inclusive
+glance.  "Any men here of the _Cygnet_?" he demanded.  His voice, raised
+in certainty above the casual murmuring of the repressed, made them all
+as self-conscious and furtive as though discovered in guilt.  Hanson's
+head appeared above the crowd, as he rose from a bench and went to the
+official.  "I'm the engineer of the _Cygnet_.  We're waiting for Captain
+Purdy."
+
+The clerk complained.  He pulled out his watch.  "He said he would be
+ready for me at ten this morning.  Now you've lost your turn, and there
+are three other ships."  He turned away in a manner which told every one
+that Hanson had now become non-existent, pushed aside the _Cygnet's_
+papers, and searched the room once more.  "Ah, good morning, Captain
+Hudson.  You ready for me?  Then I'll take you next."  The captain went
+around to stand beside the official, and his crew clustered on their side
+of the bars, with their caps in their hands.
+
+"A good start that," said Hanson to me.  "Perhaps, after all, we never
+shall start.  Must be a rum chap, that Purdy."
+
+He told me the _Medea's_ crowd was there, but perhaps Macandrew had
+already signed, and so would not appear.  That meant I might not see him
+for another year; but as I left the office I found him coming up its
+steps outside, and not as though there were the affairs of a month to be
+got into two days, but in leisurely abstraction.  He might have been
+making up his mind that, after all, there was no need to call there, for
+he was studying each step as if he were looking for the bottom of a
+mystery.  His fingers were twirling the little ivory pig he carries as a
+charm on his watchguard.  The pig is supposed to assist him when he is in
+a difficulty.  He raised his eyes.
+
+"Anyhow," he despaired to me with irrelevance, "I can't do anything for
+him."
+
+I waited for the chance of a clue.  "I thought," Macandrew quietly
+soliloquized, "he knew better than that.  He's been a failure, but all
+the same, he's got a better head than most of us.  She's sure to bring
+him to grief."
+
+"What's all this about?" I ventured.
+
+"I've just been talking to Purdy.  You remember what Hanson said of that
+voyage he's making?  Purdy is taking Jessie with him.  You don't know
+Purdy, 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 would
+jump 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 what
+another 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 to
+death 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.  "Your
+lot are signing-on now."  The master of the _Medea_ was round with the
+official tallying the men by the ship's papers.  "I see it," Macandrew
+answered.  "I've signed.  I wanted to catch the old man before he began
+that job."
+
+"We're hung up for Purdy," Hanson told him.  "Nobody seems to know where
+he is."  Hanson was amused.
+
+"Yes.  Well . . . he'll be here all right . . . and now this new job
+which you think so funny, young Hanson.  See it goes through.  Presently
+it won't be so funny.  Hang on to it then."
+
+Hanson was surprised by this, and a trifle hurt.  He was beginning to
+speak, making the usual preliminary adjustment of his spectacles, when a
+movement 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 a
+barmaid in a public office was designed.
+
+The bent gaze of the master of the _Cygnet_ might have noticed the boots
+of his engineer, for he took in the room no higher than that.  Then he
+came forward with his umbrella, still in contemplation.  It might have
+been no more than a coincidence.  She, too, approached, a little behind
+him, but obscuring his dull meagreness, for she was a head taller, and a
+bold and challenging figure.  Her blond hair distinguished her even more
+than the emphasis of her florid hat.  Her pallor that morning refined the
+indubious coarseness of her face, and changed vulgarity into the
+attractive originality of a spirited character.  Many there knew her, but
+she recognized nobody.  She yawned once, in a fair piece of acting, and
+in her movements and the poise of her head there was a disdain almost
+plain enough to be insolence.  Purdy turned to her, and the strange pair
+conferred.  I heard Hanson say to himself: "What on earth."  She left
+Purdy, bent her head with a gracious but stressed smile to Macandrew, and
+went to the bench by the wall, where she sat, waiting, with her legs
+crossed 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 that
+acted as a screen, though she turned its pages with a nervous abruptness
+which betrayed her imitation of indifference.
+
+
+3
+
+The _Medea_ and the _Cygnet_, and the other ships I knew which carried
+those whose fortunes were some concern of mine, might have sailed over
+the edge of the world.  My only communication was with an occasional
+familiar name in the reports of the _Shipping List_.  Then Macandrew came
+home again.  But it was difficult to meet him.  Mrs. Macandrew told me he
+was working by his ship in drydock.  They had had trouble with the
+engines that voyage, and she herself had seen little of him, except to
+find 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 greasy
+overalls, 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 worked
+thirty-two hours on end.  Think of that, and he had not been home for six
+months.  She would strongly advise any girl not to marry a man who went
+to sea, and if I met Macandrew I was to bring him home at once.  Did I
+hear?
+
+When I found the _Medea_ it was late in the day, for she was not in the
+dry-dock that had been named.  Her Chief had just gone ashore.  There was
+a chance that he would have called at the _Negro Boy_, but he had not
+been seen there.  Except for the landlord, who was at a table talking to
+a stranger, the saloon was empty.  A silk hat was on the table before the
+stranger, beside a tankard, and the hat was surmounted by a pair of
+neatly folded kid gloves.  "Come over here," said the landlord.  "Sit
+here for a bit, Macandrew may come in.  This is Dr. Maslin."  A monocle
+fell 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," explained
+the 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 his
+tankard.  He placed it on the table again delicately and deliberately,
+and wiped his grizzled moustache with a crimson silk handkerchief.  He
+put up his monocle, and seemed to be intently inspecting a gas globe over
+the counter.  I thought his grimace in this concentration came from an
+effort to reinforce his will against all curiosity on our part.  But it
+appeared he was really looking at what showed, at an angle, of a portrait
+on 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 his
+friend's interest.  "Looking at that crayon portrait, Doctor?  Ah, showy
+woman, isn't she?  Used to be barmaid here.  The Lord knows where she is
+now.  Went to sea, like a fool.  Stewardess, or something worse.  Much
+more useful here."
+
+The doctor's seamed face, sour and ironic, made it impossible to know
+whether his expression was one of undisguised boredom, or only his show
+of conventional politeness.  I began to feel I had broken into the
+intimacy of two men whose minds were dissimilar, but friendly through old
+associations, and that the doctor's finer wit was reproving me for an
+intrusion.  So I rose, and asked indifferently what sort of a place was
+Tabacol.  Had he been there before?
+
+"Never," said the doctor, "nor is it the kind of place one wishes to see
+twice.  We were kept at Tabacol because so many of our men were down with
+fever.  It is a little distance up the Pondurucu River . . . maybe two
+hundred 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 only
+on the edge of what romantic people call the unknown."
+
+It was evident he thought I could be one of the romantic.  He looked at
+me for the first time, twisting the cord of his eyeglass with his finger
+and thumb in a fastidious way, and I thought his glance was to dissipate
+some doubt he had that he ought to be speaking to me at all.  He dropped
+the cord suddenly as if letting go his reserve, and said slyly, with a
+grave smile: "Perhaps the romantic think the unknown is worth looking
+into because it may be better than what they know.  At Tabacol I used to
+think the unknown country beyond it looked even duller than usual.  There
+was a forest, a river, a silence, and it was either day or night.  That
+was all.  If the voice of Nature is the voice of God. . . ."
+
+The landlord was observing in surprise this conversational excursion by
+his 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, he
+told us he must leave us for a few minutes, for he had business.  "Look
+more cheerful before I get back, Doctor."
+
+The doctor chuckled, and stretched across to give his gloves a more
+satisfactory position on his hat.  "I don't understand what it can be
+that 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 such
+places.  Then they did not give me the impression that they were
+satisfied with their romance.  Impossible, of course.  Romance is never
+in the place unless we put it there, and who would put even a sentimental
+dream 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 increasing
+noise in the night, rattled by on the cobbles outside, their occupants
+roaring a sentimental chorus, and drowned what the doctor was saying.
+
+". . . folly.  Worse than folly."  He was holding his gloves now, and was
+lightly flicking the edge of the table with them in place of verbal
+emphasis.  He suddenly regarded me again as if he strongly suspected me
+of being his antipathy.  "Who but a fool would take a woman to such a
+country as that?  Any romantic sentimentalist, I suppose.  I forget the
+name of the ship.  There was, you might say, hardly sufficient room to
+paint a name on her.  She was no more than a tug.  It was a miracle she
+survived to get there at all, for she had crossed from England.  Crossed
+the Western ocean in such a craft, and brought a woman with him.  Did
+ever you hear of such folly?"
+
+Now I was certain of our whereabouts, and felt a weak inclination to show
+an elder that I, too, knew something about it; but when I leaned forward
+eagerly and was about to speak, the doctor screwed in that devastating
+monocle, and I felt I was only a curious example of the sort of thing he
+especially disliked.  For a minute, in which I wondered if I had quite
+stopped his guarded flow, he said no more.  Then he addressed his
+eyeglass 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 gave
+her no attention.  I had sixteen men to attend to with complexions like
+lemons, and one died.  There was no time to bother with other folk's
+troubles.  Our skipper, one breakfast-time, told me there was a woman
+aboard that little thing, and he'd been asked whether I'd go over.  She
+was ill.
+
+"I've seen some queer packets of misery at sea, but never one that
+touched that ship.  Her skipper seemed a regular fool.  I had to ask him
+to speak up, for he mumbled like a boy who has been caught out, and knows
+it is useless to pretend.  I learned from him that he was only just
+beginning 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 out
+now whether he wanted to put that woman ashore to get home in comfort at
+the first opportunity, or whether . . . it's impossible to say.  One
+would sooner believe the best of another man, with half a chance.  After
+all," said the doctor bitterly, "as long as the woman survived I suppose
+she was some consolation in misery.
+
+"I scrambled over the deck lumber.  There was hardly room to move.  I
+found 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 could
+make 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 have
+known well enough that that river was no place for any sort of white
+woman.  He was condemning her perhaps to death just to make an ugly job
+more attractive.
+
+"I admit," said the doctor, with a sly glance, "that she could make it
+attractive, 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 me
+feel, the way she looked at me, that I was indiscreet in asking personal
+questions.  I could see what was wrong with her.  It was debility, but
+all 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 must
+take it.'
+
+"'I don't,' she said.  She was quiet enough, but she seemed a very wilful
+woman.  'I've got my job here.'
+
+"I told her that the skipper of her ship would never carry out his
+orders, because they could not be carried out.  I told her, what was
+perfectly true, that their craft would rot on a sandbar, or find
+cataracts, or that they'd all get eaten by cannibals, or die of something
+nasty.  I admit I tried to frighten her.
+
+"'It's no good, Doctor,' she said.  'You can't worry me.  I've got my
+work to do in this ship, like the others.'
+
+"'Pooh!' I said to her.  'Cooking and that.  Anybody could do it.  Let
+the 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 she
+would die, if she didn't leave the working of that ship to those who
+ought to do it.
+
+"'Who ought?' she asked me, in a bit of a temper.  'I know what I have to
+do.  I'm going through with it.  It's no good talking.  I'll take my
+chance, like the rest.'
+
+"So I had to tell her that I was there because the master of her ship had
+sent for me to give my advice.  My business was to say what she ought to
+do.
+
+"'I don't want to be told.  I know,' she said.  'The captain sent for
+you.  Talk to him.'
+
+"My temper was going, and I told her that it was something to know the
+captain himself had enough sense to send for me.
+
+"'Look here,' she told me.  'I've had enough of this.  I want to be
+alone.  Thank you for troubling to come over.'"
+
+The doctor lifted his shoulders, and made a wry face, that might have
+been disdain or pity.
+
+"I was leaving her, but she called to me, and I went back.  She held out
+her hand.  'I do thank you for troubling about me.  Of course I do.  But
+I 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 about
+penalties.  Good-bye!'
+
+"I must say she made me feel that if the skipper of that ship had been of
+different metal, she might almost have pulled him through.  But what a
+man.  What a man!  I saw his miserable little figure standing not far
+from where my boat was when I was going.  He made as if he were coming to
+me, and then stopped.  I was going to take no notice of him, but went up
+and explained a thing or two.  I'll bet he'll remember them.  All he said
+was: 'I was afraid you'd never change her mind,' and turned away.  What a
+man!  There was a pair for you.  I could understand him, but what could
+have been in her mind?  Whatever made her talk like that?  That's the way
+of it.  There's your romance of the tropics, and your squalid Garden of
+Eden, when you know it.  A monotonous and dreary job, and a woman."
+
+The landlord returned.  The monocle fixedly and significantly regarded
+me.  "Have another, Doctor," said the landlord, pointing to the empty
+tankard.  "How long were you in Macassar?"  The doctor turned briskly to
+his old friend, and began some chaff.
+
+
+4
+
+Ferguson, who had just come into port with a damaged propeller shaft, was
+telling us how it was.  This was his first expansive experience, and
+there could be no doubt the engine-room staff of the _Torrington_ had
+behaved very well.  The underwriters had recognized that, and handsomely,
+at a special meeting at Cornhill.  Though Ferguson was young for a chief
+engineer, his professional elders, who were listening to him, showed some
+critical appreciation of the way he solved his problem.  He was sitting
+at a table of the _Negro Boy_, drawing a diagram on it, and they stood
+round.
+
+"There.  That was where it was.  You see what we had to do.  It would not
+have been so bad in calm weather, but we were labouring heavily, all the
+way from Savannah.  Our old man did not think it possible to do it.  But
+it was no good waiting for something worse to happen."
+
+The matter grew too technical for me.  There was cargo jettisoned, and
+ballast tanks emptied aft.  The stern of the _Torrington_ was lifted so
+that her propeller at intervals was clear.  Ferguson then went overside
+on life-lines.  When he was not submerged, he was trying to put his ship
+right again; and when he became exhausted, one of his colleagues took his
+place, to see whether, while escaping drowning, he could continue the
+work of salvation.  They all escaped, and the _Torrington_ put back to
+Tampa for repairs, which her own engineers accomplished.
+
+The demonstration was over, and Ferguson's story was lapsing into general
+gossip.  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 had
+chucked the sea.  It was in the Customs Office.  I'd been there to make a
+declaration, and in one of those long corridors there he stood, all
+alone, with his hat in his hand, perhaps cooling his head.  I hardly knew
+him.  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 rather
+ill.  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 Ferguson
+was listening now, with the detachment of youth, to the end of a bawdy
+story that two men were laughing over.  This had already displaced Purdy
+in his mind.
+
+"Didn't he say anything at all?  Didn't he mention Hanson?" we asked
+Ferguson.
+
+"Eh?  What, old Purdy?  I don't think so.  I don't remember.  Now you
+mention it, I think I did hear somewhere that Hanson was with Purdy.  But
+I don't believe he said anything about him.  I was just going to ask him
+to come and have a drink, when he said good-bye.  All I know is I saw him
+standing there like a sorrowful saint.  Then he walked off slowly down
+the 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 discovered
+that the tavern was under Entirely New Management.  The picture sign over
+the principal door had been renewed.  The mythical little figure which
+had given the public-house its name was no longer lost in the soot of
+half a century.  He was now an obvious negro boy, resplendent in a golden
+coat.  The reticence of the green window-curtains had become a bright
+vacancy of mirrors, and the tavern was modern within.  Reform had
+destroyed the exclusiveness of the saloon bar; instead of privacy,
+distant mirrors astonished you with glimpses of your own head which were
+incredible and embarrassing in their novelty.  The table-tops were of
+white marble supported on gilded iron.  The prints and lithographs of
+ships had gone from the walls, and were replaced by real pictures
+converted to the advertisement of various whiskies--pictures of
+battleships, bull-dogs, Scotsmen, and figures in armour tempted from
+their ancient posts in baronial halls, after midnight, to finish the
+precious drink forgotten by the guests.  In accordance with this
+transformation the young lady in attendance at the bar was in neat black
+and white, with her hair as compact and precise as a resolution at a
+public meeting which had been passed even by the women present.  She was
+severe and decisive, and without recognition of anything there but the
+tariff of the house, and sold her refreshments as in a simple yet
+exacting ritual which she despised, but knew to be righteous.
+
+It was many months since I had been there.  Macandrew was no nearer than
+Rotterdam, and perhaps would not see London that voyage.  There had been
+a long period in which change had been at work at the docks, even to
+their improvement, but through it all not one of my old friends had
+returned home.  They had approached no nearer than Falmouth, the
+Hartlepools, or Antwerp, with a slender chance that they would come to
+the Thames, and next we heard of them when they were bound outwards once
+more, and for a period known not even to their wives.  The new _Negro
+Boy_ had not the appearance of a place where I could expect to find a
+friend, and I was leaving it again, instantly, when a tall figure rose in
+a corner waving a reassuring hand.  I did not recognize the man, but
+thought I knew his smile, which made me look at him in dawning hope.  The
+grin, evidently knowing its power, was maintained till I saw it
+indubitably as Hanson's.  He made a remembered gesture with his
+spectacles.  "I was just about sick of this place," he said.  "I've
+waited here for an hour hoping somebody would turn up.  Where's Macandrew
+now?"
+
+"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 have
+you 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's
+too savage and cold.  How is Macandrew?  I came up from Liverpool because
+I felt I must see him again.  I heard he was here."
+
+From the way he talked, I thought he preferred those subjects requiring
+the least effort for a casual occasion.  "Now and then," I had to tell
+him, "some of us have wondered what happened to the _Cygnet_."
+
+Hanson's smile became effulgent.  My remark might have reminded him of a
+most 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 had
+nearly gone.  "I should like somebody to confirm it.  The reason I came
+to this house tonight, to be candid, was just to see this room again, to
+settle a doubt I had.  Didn't Macandrew stand over there, and show
+concern 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 must
+say 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 for
+anything.  But somehow, now and then, I want to be quite sure I had it
+myself, and not some other fellow."  He beamed with the very remembrance
+of the experience, and nodded his head at me.  He leaned over the table
+to me in confidence.  "Have you ever been to the tropics?  I don't mean
+calling at Colombo or Rio.  I mean the back of things where there's a
+remarkable sun experimenting with low life and hardly anybody looking on.
+If ever you get the chance, you take it.  It alters all your ideas of
+time and space.  You begin to learn what stuff life is made of when you
+see a tropical forest, and see nothing else for months.  On the other
+hand," he said, "you become nothing.  You see it doesn't matter to others
+what 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 young
+mathematician 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 hear
+what this strange voyage was like."
+
+"As you know," Hanson assured me, "I went out merely to see what would
+happen to myself, in certain circumstances.  I knew I was going to be
+scared, and I was.  There is a place called Tabacol on the river, and we
+anchored there after our ocean passage for more than a week.  I don't
+know why, and it was no use asking Purdy.  Probably he didn't know.  I
+had 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 something
+which had been waiting there for you at once pounced.  The quiet was of
+an awful weight.  I could hardly breathe, and chanced to look at the
+thermometer.  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 after
+me.  I remember wondering then how a big, fleshy woman like her could
+stand 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 having
+a merrier time.  Well, we left Tabacol, and I felt we were leaving
+everything we knew behind us.  I got the idea, in the first day on the
+river, 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 the
+forest.  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 impression
+on it.  It wouldn't matter to anybody but ourselves if it swallowed us
+up.  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.'  The
+watching face vanished on the instant, and I always felt afterwards that
+the forest knew all about us, but wouldn't let us know anything.  I got
+the idea that it wasn't of the least use going on, unless we didn't
+intend to treat the job seriously.  If we were serious about it then it
+was 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 on
+both sides of it, and the sun over us.  Nothing else but the quiet; and
+we didn't know where our destination was.  We anchored every evening,
+close to the bank.  One evening, as we anchored, a shower of arrows
+clattered about us.  There was just one shower, out of the trees, or out
+of 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.  I
+suppose she was there for the only reason I had--because she asked for
+it.  It was the same next day, except that instead of more arrows we
+found a python in the bunkers.  Came aboard over the hawsers, I suppose.
+We were a lively lunatic asylum below while killing it with fire-shovels
+and crowbars.  That was what the voyage was like.  The whole lot of it
+was the same, and you knew quite well that the farther you went the less
+anything 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 something
+I wanted to hear, "what happened to your company.  Once we had a word of
+Purdy, but never of Jessie or of you."
+
+"Well, now I'm telling you.  But you'd have been past wondering if you'd
+been with us.  Purdy wasn't companionable.  He'd tell me it was hot.  And
+it was.  You could feel that yourself.  Jessie cooked our meals.  Her
+galley could have been only a shade better than the engine-room.  She
+began to look rather faded.  At last I was the only one who hadn't been
+down with fever.  We crawled on and on, and the only question was where
+we 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 the
+thing 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 anything
+really drastic after turning a corner.  I suppose we had had about a
+month of it, and God knows where we were, but we had nobody to ask; and
+then we ran on a sandbar.  The jungle met overhead.  We were in what was
+only a dark drain through the forest.  So this, I thought, is where we
+throw in our hand.  We might as well have been in another planet for all
+the chance we had of getting away from that place.  We were aground for
+two days; the river then rose a foot, and we came off.  The men were
+complaining among themselves by then.  I heard them talking to each other
+about chucking it.  It was bound to come.  This day they went aft in a
+body to Purdy.  There stood Purdy, a little object in white against the
+gloom of the forest, and he looked about as futile as the last match in a
+wind at night.  He stood fingering a beard he had grown.  One of the men
+was beginning to talk truculently at him.  Just then Jessie appeared from
+below, between me and the group.  She had been down with fever for some
+days, and she surprised me as much as a ghost.  She looked rather like
+one, too.  She stood watching Purdy, without moving.  He didn't look at
+her, though he must have known she was there.  I'm pretty sure we had to
+thank her for what happened to us afterwards, for it was then that Purdy
+began shaking his finger at that big stoker who was shouting.  I'd never
+seen him with such an expression before.  As near as he could be wild, he
+was.  'We're going on,' said Purdy to them very distinctly.  'This ship
+continues her voyage.  If you want to leave her here, I'll put you
+ashore.'  He walked away some paces, and came back to the men.  Then he
+said something more in his usual voice.  'Do you men tell me you're
+afraid 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 very
+curious, 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 usual
+ornamental and soothing lies, in which they believed long enough to keep
+the steam up.  What more could you ask of human nature?  So we kept her
+plugging along, getting nearer and nearer nowhere.  We turned another of
+those dramatic corners, later on, though I forget how much later, and
+ahead of us the river was piled high with rocks, and was tumbling from
+above.  The _Cygnet_ had had her fair share of luck, but luck could not
+get her over that.  We were all looking at the white water ahead, and
+feeling--at least I was--that we were being laughed at, when I heard
+Purdy call me, and turned round.  He was hurrying towards me round the
+gear, and I thought from the look of him that this complete frustration
+had 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 over
+his berth, 'what can I do?'
+
+"Jessie was curled up on her side in his berth, and there was nothing
+anyone could do.  I didn't know she was alive.  But she half opened her
+eyes, without looking up, and her hand began moving towards Purdy.  'That
+you, 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 next
+thing.  That affair disheartened the men a lot, and I took it for
+granted, from their faces as they stood round that figure in a tarpaulin
+under a tree in the forest, that we were witnessing the end.  There was
+Purdy, too . . . you couldn't expect much from him after a funeral."
+
+Hanson bent over the table, and began tapping it with a finger, and spoke
+slowly through a surprise he still felt.  "Old Purdy came to me the
+following morning, and told me what he intended to do.  What do you
+think?  He reckoned that, though we were still a hundred miles from the
+headquarters of the consignees, an outpost was probably no farther than
+just above the falls.  He himself was going to prospect, for there should
+be a native trail through the woods, past the rapids; and he left me in
+charge.
+
+"Macandrew was all wrong about that fellow.  In two days he was back.  He
+had found an outpost, four miles above, but nobody was there, so we could
+get no help.  He was going to land our cargo of a ton and a half of
+machinery, and place it on the company's territory above the falls.  'You
+can see for yourself,' Purdy said to me pathetically, 'that I can't
+deliver the _Cygnet_ there.  But I think I am right in making her secure
+and leaving her here, and reporting it.  What else can I do?  They ought
+to give me a clean receipt.'
+
+"It was funny enough, that anxiety about a ship and machinery where there
+was nothing but monkeys and parrots, but I agreed with him, and we got to
+work landing those packages of mining gear, which only an expert could
+understand, in a place where nothing was likely to happen till the Last
+Day.  The way we sweated over it!  And then warped the stuff with snatch
+blocks through four miles of jungle.  Yes; and buried two men of our
+company on the way.  But we did get the cargo on to the company's damned
+land at last, and a nice lot of half-naked scarecrows we looked, with
+nothing to fill our hollow cheeks but whiskers.  There the name of the
+place was all right, 'Tres Irmaos,' painted over a shed.  The shed was
+falling to pieces.  There was nobody about.  Nothing but a little open
+space, 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 we
+didn't bury those.  Purdy kept on the move.  He told me, after an
+eternity, that it was just ahead of us, and at last we did come to some
+other men.  They were Colombians.  We astonished them, but nothing could
+astonish us any more.  Purdy learned that he had got to our ultimate
+destination all right.  Then some fellow appeared, in a gaudy uniform and
+a sword, who spoke English.  When Purdy asked to be taken to the manager
+of the company, this gay chap laughed fiercely, and kept looking at Purdy
+in 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 more
+company.  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 stare
+beyond me with big eyes at something which couldn't possibly have been
+there."
+
+
+
+
+VII. Not in the Almanac
+
+It was an unlucky Friday morning; "and, what's more," the chief officer
+stopped on the gangway to call down to me on the quay, "a black cat
+crossed my path when I left home this morning, and a very nice black
+cat it was."  The gangway was hauled up.  The tugs began to move the
+big steamer away from us, a process so slow that the daylight between
+us and the ship increased imperceptibly.
+
+On my way home I paused by the shop which sells such antiques as old
+spring mattresses, china dogs, portable baths, dumb-bells, and even the
+kind of bedroom furniture which one would never have supposed was
+purchasable at second-hand.  But lower, much lower in the shopkeeper's
+estimate than even such commodities--thrown into a bin because they
+were 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 at
+the ships in dock today, without figure-heads, with masts that are only
+the support of derricks and the aerials of wireless, and with science
+and an official certificate of competency even in the galley!  Could
+anything happen in such ships to bring one to awe and wonder?  The dark
+of the human mind is now lighted, one may say, with electricity.  We
+have no shadows to make us hesitate.  That book of sea superstitions
+was on my table, some weeks later, and a sailor, who gave up trading to
+the East to patrol mine-fields for three years, and who has never been
+known to lose any time when in doubt through wasting it on a secret
+propitiatory gesture, picked up the book, smiling a little
+superciliously, lost his smile when examining it, and then asked if he
+might borrow it.
+
+We are not superstitious, now we are sure a matter may be mysterious
+only when we have not had the leisure to test it in the right way, but
+we have our private reservations.  There is a ship's doctor, who has
+been called a hard case by those who know him, for he has grown grey
+and serious in watching humanity from the Guinea Coast to the South
+Seas.  He only smiles now when listening to a religious or a political
+discussion, and might not be supposed to have any more regard for the
+mysteries than you would find in the _Cold Storage Gazette_.  When he
+is 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 curious
+stories are whispered.  "No you don't," he exclaimed peremptorily.  He
+gave me no argument, but I gathered that it is very well to be funny
+about such coincidences, yet that one never certainly knows, and that
+it is better to regard the unexplored dark with a well-simulated
+respect till one can see through it.  He had, he said, known of affairs
+in the East, and they were not provided for in the books; he had tried
+to see through them from all points, but not with the satisfaction he
+desired.  For that reason he never invited trouble unless he knew it
+was not there.
+
+Another man, very like him, a master mariner, and one who knew me well
+enough for secrets, was bringing me from the French Coast for Barry at
+full speed, in a fog.  He was a clever, but an indiscreet navigator.  I
+was mildly rebuking him by the door of his chart-room for his
+foolhardiness, but he laughed quietly, said he intended to make a good
+passage, which his owners expected, and that when the problem was
+straightforward he used science, but that when it was all a fog he
+trusted mainly to his instinct, or whatever it might be, to inform him
+in time.  I was not to be alarmed.  We should have the Lizard eight
+miles on the starboard beam in another hour and a half.  By this time
+we were continuing our talk in the chart-room.  An old cap of his was
+on the floor, upside down.  I faced him there, in rebuke of this
+reliance on instinct, but he was staring at the cap, a little startled.
+Then he dashed past me without a word for the bridge.  While following
+him at leisure I heard the telegraph ring.  Outside I could see nothing
+but the pallor of a blind world.  The flat sea was but the fugitive
+lustre of what might have been water; but all melted into nothing at a
+distance which could have been anywhere.  The tremor of the ship
+lessened, 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 the
+skippers voice, quick but quiet, and arrived on the bridge in time to
+see the man at the wheel putting it hard over.  Something had been
+sighted ahead of us, and now was growing broad on the starboard bow--a
+faint presentment of land, high and unrelated, for there was a luminous
+void below it.  It was a filmy and coloured ghost in the sky, with a
+thin shine upon it of a sun we could not see.  It grew more material as
+we watched it, and brighter, a near and indubitable coast.  "I know
+where I am now," said the skipper.  "Another minute or two, and we
+should have been on the Manacles."
+
+Smiling a little awkwardly, he explained that he had seen that old cap
+on the floor before, without knowing how it could have got there, and
+at the same time he had felt very nervous, without knowing why.  The
+last time was when, homeward bound in charge of a fine steamer, he
+hoped Finisterre was distant, but not too far off.  Just about _there_,
+as it were; and that his dead reckoning was correct.  The weather had
+been dirty, the seas heavy, and the sun invisible.  He went on, to find
+nothing but worse weather.  He did sight, however, two other steamers,
+on the same course as himself, evidently having calculated to pass
+Ushant in the morning; his own calculation.  He would be off Ushant
+later, for his speed was less than theirs.  There they were, a lucky
+and unexpected confirmation of his own reasoning.  His chief officer,
+an elderly man full of doubt, smiled again, and smacked his hands
+together.  That was all right.  My friend then went into the
+chart-room, and underwent the strange experience we know.  He wondered
+a little, concluded it was just as well to be on the safe side, and
+slightly altered his course.  Early next morning he sighted Ushant.
+There was nothing to spare.  He was, indeed, cutting it fine.  The seas
+were great, and piled up on the rocks of that bad coast were the two
+steamers he had sighted the day before.
+
+Why had not the other two masters received the same nudge from
+Providence before it was too late?  That is what the unfortunate, who
+cannot genuinely offer solemn thanks like the lucky, will never know,
+though they continually ask.  It is the darkest and most unedifying
+part of the mystery.  Moreover, that side of the question, as a war has
+helped us to remember, never troubles the lucky ones.  Yet I wish to
+add that later, my friend, when in waters not well known, in charge of
+a ship on her maiden voyage--for he always got the last and best ship
+from his owners, they having recognized that his stars were
+well-assorted--was warned that to attempt a certain passage, in some
+peculiar circumstances, was what a wise man would not lightly
+undertake.  But my friend was young, daring, clever, and fortunate.
+That morning his cap was _not_ on the floor.  At night his valuable
+ship with her exceptionally valuable cargo was fast for ever on a coral
+reef.
+
+What did that prove?  Apart from the fact that if the young reject the
+experience of their elders they may regret it, just as they may regret
+if they do pay heed to it, his later misfortune proves nothing; except,
+perhaps, that the last thing on which a man should rely, unless he
+must, is the supposed favour of the gods of whom he knows nothing but,
+say, a cap unreasonably on the floor; yet gods, nevertheless, whose
+existence even the wise and dubious cannot flatly deny.
+
+It may have been for a reason of such a sort that I did not lend my
+book to my young sailor friend who wished to borrow it.  I should never
+have had it back.  Men go to sea, and forget us.  Our world has
+narrowed and has shut out Vanderdecken for ever.  But now that
+everything private and personal about us which is below the notice even
+of the Freudian professor is pigeon-holed by officials at the Town
+Hall, I enjoy reading the abundant evidence for the Extra Hand, that
+one of the ship's company who cannot be counted in the watch, but is
+felt to be there.  And now that every Pacific dot is a concession to
+some registered syndicate of money-makers, the Isle-of-No-Land-At-All,
+which some lucky mariners profess to have sighted, is our last chance
+of 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 front
+gate.  It was evening, and from the distant River a steamer called.
+Mrs. Williams did not see me, for her grey head was turned away.  She
+was watching, a little down the street, an officer of the Merchant
+Service, with his cap set like a challenge, for he was very young, and
+a demure girl with a market-basket who was with him.  They were
+standing in amused perplexity before their house door.  It was a house
+that had been empty since the foundering of the _Drummond Castle_.  The
+sailor was searching his pockets for the door-key, and the girl was
+laughing at his pretended lively nervousness in not finding it.  Mrs.
+Williams had not heard me stop at her elbow, and continued to watch the
+comedy.  She had no children, and she loved young people.
+
+I did not speak, but waited for her to turn, with that ship's call
+still 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 was
+thought so near to night that they lit their lamp, though it was not
+only possible to see the bottles of sweet-stuff and the bundles of wood
+in the window, but to make out the large print of a bill stuck to a
+pane announcing a concert at the Wesleyan Mission Room.  The lamp was
+alight also in the little beer-house next door to it, where the
+_Shipping Gazette_ could be borrowed, if it were not already out on
+loan; for children constantly go there for it, with a request from
+mother, learning their geography that way in Malabar Street, while
+following a father or a brother round the world and back again, and
+working out by dead-reckoning whether he would be home for Christmas.
+
+The quiet street, with every house alike, had that air of conscious
+reserve which is given by the respectable and monotonous; but for a
+moment then it was bright with the glory of the sky's afterglow
+reflected on its wet pavements, as though briefly exalted with an
+unexpected revelation.  The radiance died.  Night came, and it was as
+if the twilight native to the street clouded from its walls and brimmed
+it with gloom, while yet the sky was bright.  The lamplighter set his
+beacon at the end of the street.
+
+That key had been found.  Mrs. Williams laughed to herself, and then
+saw me.  "Oh," she exclaimed.  "I didn't know you were there.  Did you
+see that?  That lamplighter!  When Williams was at sea, and I was
+alone, it was quite hopeful when the lamplighter did that.  It looked
+like a star.  And that Number Ten is let at last.  Did you see the
+young 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 the
+table laid for tea, Mrs. Williams speculated with interest and hope
+about 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 for
+them.  They were starting very young.  It was better to start young.
+She looked such a good little soul, that girl.  It was pleasant to know
+that house was let at last.  It had been empty too long.  It was
+getting 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 the
+better, don't you?  But Williams, he will have it they change for the
+worse.  I don't know, I'm sure.  He thinks nothing really good except
+the old days."  She laughed quietly, bending to tickle the cat's
+ear--"nothing good at all except the old days.  Even the wrecks were
+more like wrecks."  She looked at me, smiling.
+
+"As you know," she said, "there's many men who follow the sea with
+homes in this street, but Williams is so proud and strong-willed.  He
+says he doesn't want to hear about them.  What do they know about the
+sea?  You know his way.  What do they know about the sea?  That's the
+way 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 door
+surrendered to him.  His is a peremptory summons.  The old master
+mariner 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, all
+unconsciously, disdainful noises in its throat.  It would have been
+worse than useless for me to interfere.  The pair would have repelled
+me.  This was a domestic rite.  Once in his struggle with his coat the
+dominant 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 effort
+as taking from his broad back a reluctant coat, and the unvarying fixed
+intentness of the dark eyes over which the lids, loose with age, had
+partly folded, giving him the piercing look of a bird of prey; and the
+swarthiness of his face, massive, hairless, and acutely ridged, with
+its crown of tousled white hair, his was a figure which made it easy to
+believe 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 the
+Channel.
+
+The coat was off.  His wife had it over her arm, and was regarding with
+concern the big petulant face above her.  She said to him: "Number Ten
+is let at last.  They're a young couple who have got it.  He's a
+sailor."
+
+The old man sat down at a corner of the table, stooped, and in one
+handful abruptly hauled the cat off the rug, laying its unresisting
+body across his knees, and rubbing its ribs with a hand that half
+covered it.  He did not appear to have heard what he had been told.  He
+did not look at her, but talked gravely to the fire.  "I met Dennison
+today," he said, as if speaking aloud to himself, in surprise at
+meeting Dennison.  "Years since I saw him," he continued, turning to
+me.  "Where was it now, where was it?  Must have been Canton River, the
+year he lost his ship.  Extraordinary to find Dennison still afloat.
+Not many of those men about now.  You can go the length of the Dock
+Road today and see nothing and meet nobody."
+
+He looked again into the flames, fixedly, as though what he really
+wanted 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 spoke
+aloud, though more to herself than to us.  "She seemed such a nice
+little woman, too.  I couldn't see the badge on his cap."
+
+"Eh?" said the old man, throwing the cat back to the floor and rounding
+to his wife.  "What's that?  Let's have tea, Mrs. Williams.  We're both
+dreaming, and there's a visitor.  What are you dreaming about?  You've
+nothing to dream about."
+
+There was never any doubt, though, that the past was full and alive to
+him.  There was only the past.  And what a memory was his!  He would
+look at the portrait of his old clipper, the _Oberon_--it was central
+over the mantel-shelf--and recall her voyages, and the days in each
+voyage, and just how the weather was, what canvas she carried, and how
+things happened.  Malabar Street vanished.  We would go, when he was in
+that mood, and live for the evening in another year, with men who have
+gone, among strange affairs forgotten.
+
+Mrs. Williams would be in her dream, too, with her work-basket in her
+lap, absently picking the table-cloth with her needle.  But for us, all
+we knew was that the _Cinderella_ had a day's start of us, and the
+weather in the Southern Ocean, when we got there, was like the death of
+the world.  I was aware that we were under foresail, lower topsails,
+and stay-sails only, and they were too much.  They were driving us
+under, and the _Oberon_ was tender.  Yes, she was very tricky.  But
+where 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 we
+were in the middle of one of our voyages.
+
+"Eh?" questioned her husband, instantly bending to her, but keeping his
+forefinger pointing to his old ship; thinking, perhaps, his wife was
+adding 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 at
+the weather we've had.  I know what it is."
+
+I did then leave our voyage in the past for a moment, to listen to the
+immediate weather without.  It was certainly a wild night.  I should
+get wet when I left for home.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the puzzled captain, suddenly enlightened, with his
+finger still addressing the picture on the wall.  "She means the man
+down the street.  An engineer, isn't he?  The missis calls him a
+sailor."  He continued that voyage, made in 1862.
+
+There was one evening when, on the home run, we had overhauled and
+passed our rivals in the race, and were off the Start.  Captain
+Williams was serving a tot all round, in a propitiatory act, hoping to
+lower the masts of the next astern deeper beneath the horizon, and to
+keep them there till he was off Blackwall Point.  He then found he
+wanted to show me a letter, testimony to the work of his ship, which he
+had received that voyage from his owners.  Where was it?  The missis
+knew, 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, and
+there was all the East, and such ships, and men who were seamen and
+navigators in a way that is lost.  As the old master mariner, who had
+lived 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 to
+schedule, one behind the other, in processions.  They have nothing to
+overcome.  They do not fail, and they cannot triumph.  They are
+predestined engines, and the sea is but their track.  Yet it had been
+otherwise.  And the old man would brood into the greater past, his
+voice would grow quiet, and he would gently emphasize his argument by
+letting one hand, from a fixed wrist, rise, and fall sadly on the
+table, in a gesture of solemn finality.  He was in that act, early one
+evening, 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 were
+lesser days, and their petty demands and trivial duties made of men but
+mere 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 with
+surprise and shock in her eyes, as though she had just repelled that
+mean print in a malicious attempt at injury.  Her husband took no
+notice.  She handed me the paper, with a finger on a paragraph.  "The
+steamer _Arab_, which sailed on December 26 last for Buenos Aires, has
+not 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 to
+find a key while a girl was laughing at him.  As I left the house I
+could see in the dusk, a little down the street, the girl standing at
+her gate.  The street was empty and silent.  At the end of it the
+lamp-lighter set his beacon.
+
+
+
+
+IX. In a Coffee-Shop
+
+With a day of rain, Dockland is set in its appropriate element.  It
+does not then look better than before, but it looks what it is.  Not
+sudden April showers are meant, sparkling and revivifying, but a
+drizzle, thin and eternal, as if the rain were no more than the shadow
+cast by a sky as unchanging as poverty.  When real night comes, then
+the street lamps dissolve ochreous hollows in the murk.  It was such a
+day 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 right
+there, nor anywhere, and knew it, slinking along with his head and tail
+held low, trailing a length of string through the puddles.  The other,
+too, seemed lost.  He was idling as if one street was the same as
+another, 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 me
+briskly, with a sudden decision, when he drew level.  Water dripped
+from 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 of
+it."  His cheerful and rather insolent assurance faltered for a moment.
+He then mumbled: "I've been on the booze y'understand."  But there was
+still something in his tone which suggested that any good man might
+have done the same thing.
+
+It is not easy to be even sententious with the sinful when an open
+confession robs us of our moral prerogative, so I only told him that it
+seemed likely booze had something to do with it.  His age could have
+been forty; but it was not easy to judge, for the bridge of his nose
+was a livid depression.  Some accident had pushed in his face under the
+eyes, giving him the battered aspect of ancient sin.  His sinister
+appearance would have frightened any timid lady if he had stopped her
+in such a street, on such a day, with nobody about but a lost dog, and
+the houses, it could be supposed, deserted, or their inmates secluded
+in an abandonment to misery.  And, taking another glance at him, I
+thought it probable, from the frank regard of the blue and frivolous
+eye which met mine, that he would have recognized timidity in a lady at
+a distance, and would have passed her without seeing her.  Uncertain
+whether his guess in stopping me was lucky, he began pulling nervously
+at a bleached moustache.  His paw was the colour of leather.  Its nails
+were 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 in
+himself, and perhaps convinced him that he had, after all, stopped a
+fool.  He took his cap off, and flung a shower from it--it had been
+draining into his moustache--and asked whether I did not think he
+looked poor enough for a sailor.
+
+Then I heard how he came to be there.  Two days before he had signed
+the articles of the steamship _Bilbao_.  His box had gone aboard, and
+that contained all his estate.  The skipper, to be sure of his man, had
+taken care of his discharge book, and so was in possession of the only
+proof of his identity.  Then he left the shipping office, and met some
+friends.
+
+Those friends!  "That was a fine girl," he said, speaking more to the
+rain than to me.  "I never seen a finer."  I began to show signs of
+moving away.  "Don't go, mister.  She was all right.  I lay you never
+seen a finer.  Look here.  I reckon you know her."  He plunged an eager
+hand into an inner pocket.  "Ever heard of Angel Light?  She's on the
+stage.  It's a fact.  She showed me her name herself on a programme
+last night.  There y'are."  He triumphed with a photograph, and his
+gnarled forefinger pointed at an exposed set of teeth under an
+extraordinary hat.  "Eh, ain't that all right? On the stage, too.  Met
+her at the corner of Pennyfields."
+
+It was still raining.  He flung another shower from his cap.  I was
+impatient, 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 so
+as his own mother 'ud turn her back on him.  I would.  Ten quid."
+
+He had, it appeared, lost those friends.  He was now seeking, with
+varying emotions, both the girl and the swab.  I suggested the dock and
+his ship would be a better quest.  No, it was no good, he said.  He
+tried that late last night.  Both had gone.  The policeman at the gate
+told him so.  The dock was there again this morning, but a different
+policeman; and whatever improbable world the dock and the policeman of
+midnight had visited, there they had left his ship, inaccessible,
+tangled hopelessly in a revolving mesh of saloon lights and collapsing
+streets.  Now he had no name, no history, no character, no money, and
+he was hungry.
+
+We went into a coffee-shop.  It stands at the corner of the street
+which is opposite the _Steam Packet_ beerhouse.  You may recognize the
+place, for it is marked conspicuously as a good pull-up for carmen,
+though then the carmen were taking their vans steadily past it.  The
+buildings of a shipwright's yard stand above it, and the hammers of the
+yard beat with a continuous rhythmic clangour which recedes, when you
+are 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, and
+alone the men of the iron-yard made audible the unseen life of the
+place.  We had the coffee-shop to ourselves.  On the counter a jam roll
+was derelict.  Some crumpled and greasy newspapers sprawled on the
+benches.  The outcast squeezed into a corner of a bench, and a stout
+and elderly matron appeared, drying her bare arms on her apron, and
+looked at us with annoyance.  My friend seized her hand, patted it, and
+addressed her in terms of extravagant endearment.  She spoke to him
+about 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 picture
+in the dark by the side of the door of Lord Beaconsfield, with its
+motto: "For God, King, and Country"; and there was a smell which comes
+of long years of herrings cooked on a gas grill.  At last the hungry
+child had finished scraping his plate and wiping his moustache with his
+hands.  He brought out a briar pipe, and a pouch of hairy skin, and
+faded behind a blue cloud.  From behind the cloud he spoke at large,
+like a confident disreputable Jove who had been skylarking for years
+with the little planet Earth.
+
+At a point in his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest
+vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of
+the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt.  The lost sailor himself
+was insignificant.  What was he?  A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and
+could take a trick at the wheel when some one was watching him.  The
+place outside might have been any dismal neighbourhood of London.  Its
+character had gone.
+
+The tap-tapping on iron plates in the yard next door showed where we
+were today.  The sailor was silent for a time, and we listened together
+to 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 told
+him.
+
+"What?  I didn't know it was about here.  That place!  Well, it's a
+good yard, that.  They're all right.  I was on a steamer that went in
+there, one trip.  She wanted it, too.  You could put a chisel through
+her.  But they only put in what they were paid for, not what she
+wanted.  The old _Starlight_.  She wouldn't have gone in then but for a
+bump she got.  Do you know old Jackson?  Lives in Foochow Street round
+about here somewhere.  He's lived next to that pub in Foochow Street
+for years and years.  He was the old man of the _Starlight_.  He's a
+sailor all right, is Jackson.
+
+"The last trip I had with him was ten months ago.  The _Starlight_ came
+in here to the West Dock with timber.  She had to go into dry-dock, and
+I 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 at
+all?  Poplar's all right.  We went over to Rotterdam for something or
+other, but sailed from there light, for Fowey.  We loaded about three
+thousand tons of china clay for Baltimore.
+
+"The sea got up when we were abreast of the Wolf that night, and she
+was 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 the
+table, putting close his flat and brutish face, with his wet hair
+plastered over all the brow he had.  He appeared to be a little drowsy
+with food.  "Ever crossed the Western ocean in winter?  Sometimes
+there'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, and
+rolling enough to shift the boilers.  We reckoned something was coming
+all right.  Then when it began to blow, from dead ahead, the old man
+wouldn't ease her.  That was like old Jackson.  It makes you think of
+your comfortable little home, watching them big grey-backs running by
+your ship, and no hot grub because the galley's flooded.  The Wolf was
+only 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 get
+something for the men.  They'd been roping her hatches.  The covers
+were beginning to come adrift, y'understand.  The cook, he was slipping
+about, grousing all round.  Then she stopped dead, and the lights went
+out.  Something swept right over us with a hell of a rush, and I felt
+the 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 hear
+the old man shouting.  The engines had stopped.  I fell over some
+wreckage."  The sailor stroked his nose.  "This is what it did.
+
+"Next morning you wouldn't have known the old _Starlight_.  All her
+boats had gone, and she had a list to port like a roof.  You wanted to
+be a bird to get about her.  The crowd looked blue enough when they saw
+the falls flying around at daylight, and only bits of boats.  It was a
+case.  Every time she lay down in the trough, and a sea went over her
+solid, 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 the
+donkey going.  In the afternoon we sighted a steamer's smoke to
+westward.  She bore down on us.  I never seen anything I liked better
+than that.  Then the Chief came up, and I saw him talking to the old
+man.  The old man climbed round to us.  'Now, lads,' he said, 'there's
+a Cunarder coming.  But the engineer says he reckons he's getting her
+clear of water.  What about it?  Shall I signal the liner, or will you
+stand 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 the
+bulwarks, and looked out.  He began cursing the sun, shaking his fist
+at it every time it popped over the seas.  It was low down.  It was
+funny to hear him.  'So long, chaps,' he said, and dropped overside.
+
+"We waited all night.  I couldn't sleep, what with the noise of the
+seas running over us, and waiting for something to happen.  It was
+perishing cold, too.  At sun-up I could see she might pitch under at
+any time.  She was about awash.  The old man came to me and the
+steward, and said: 'Give the men all the gin they'll drink.  Fill 'em
+up.'  Some of 'em took it.  I never knew a ship take such a hell of a
+time to sink as that one.
+
+"I sighted the steamer, right ahead, and we wondered whether the iron
+under us would wait till she come.  We counted every roller that went
+over us.  The other steamer was a slow ship all right.  But she came
+up, and put out her boats.  We had to lower the drunks into them.  I
+left in the last boat with the old man.  'Jim,' he said, looking at her
+as we left her, 'she's got no more than five minutes now.  I just felt
+her drop.  Something's given way.'  Before we got to the other ship we
+saw the _Starlight's_ propeller in the air.  Right on end.  Yes.  I
+never seen anything like that--and then she just went . . ."
+
+The sailor made a grimace at me and nodded.  From the shipwright's next
+door 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 a
+winter of the kind when the heaven of the capital is a brown obscurity
+not much above the highest reached by the churches, and a December more
+years before the War then it would be amusing to count.  There was enough
+of the sun in that morning to light my way down Mark Lane, across Great
+Tower 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 the
+daylight, the only certainty in it was its antiquity.  It was a gloom
+that was not only because the year was exhausted, but because darkness
+was falling at the end of an epoch.  It was not many years before the
+War, to be a little more precise, though then I was unaware of the reason
+of the darkness, except common fog.
+
+Besides, why should a Londoner, and even an East-Ender whose familiar
+walls are topped by mastheads, believe in the nearness of the ocean?  We
+think of the shipping no more than we do of the paving stones or of the
+warnings of the pious.  It is an event of the first importance to go for
+a first voyage, though mine was to be only by steam-trawler to the Dogger
+Bank; yet, as the event had come to me so late, I had lost faith in the
+omens of London's foreshore, among which, at the bottom of Mark Lane, was
+an 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 a
+twopenny journey to Shepherd's Bush.  I had believed in the signs so
+little that I had left my bag at a railway station, miles away.
+
+Three small steamers, the size of tugs, but with upstanding bows and a
+sheer suggesting speed and buoyancy, were lying off the fish market, and
+mine, 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 the
+heat from her engine-room casing, were challenging to a stranger.  It was
+no place for me.  The men and porters tramping about their jobs knew
+that, and did not order me out of their way.  This was Billingsgate, and
+there was a tide to be caught.  They hustled me out of it.  But the
+skipper had to be found, for I must know when I had to come aboard.  A
+perpendicular iron ladder led to her saloon from a hatch, and through
+unintelligence and the dark I entered that saloon more precipitously than
+was a measure of my eagerness, picked myself up with a coolness which I
+can only hope met with the approval of some silent men, watching me, who
+sat at a table there, and offered my pass to the man nearest me.
+
+It was the mate.  He scrutinized the simple document at unnecessary
+length, and with a gravity that was embarrassing.  He turned up slowly a
+large and weather-beaten sadness, with a grizzled moustache that curled
+tightly into his mouth from under a long, thin nose which pointed at me
+like 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 not
+find on my document.  I thought he was searching me for the proof of my
+sanity.  Presently he spoke: "Have you _got_ to come?" he said, and in a
+gentle voice that was disconcerting from a figure so masculine.  While I
+was wondering what was hidden in this question, the ship's master entered
+the saloon briskly.  He was plump and light.  His face was a smooth round
+of unctuous red, without a beard, and was mounted upon many folds of
+brown woollen scarf, like an attractive pudding on a platter.  He looked
+at me with amusement, as I have no doubt those lively eyes, with their
+brows of arched interest, looked at everything; and his thick grey hair
+was curved upwards in a confusion of interrogation marks.
+
+He chuckled.  "This is not a passenger ship," he said.  "That will have
+to be your berth." He pointed to a part of the saloon settee which was
+about six feet forward and above the propeller.  "A sou'-wester washed
+out our only spare cabin, comin' in.  There you are."  He began to climb
+the ladder out of it again, but stopped, and put his rosy face under the
+lintel of the door.  "You've got twenty minutes now.  Get your luggage
+aboard."
+
+My bag was where it could not be reached in twenty minutes.  Roughing it
+may have its humours, but to suffer through it, as I was aware I must, if
+I stayed, would more than outweigh the legitimate interest of a first
+voyage, except for heroic youth with its gift of eternal life.  Simple
+ignorance, as usual, made me heroic.  I went on deck, and found the
+steward sitting on a box, with a bucket of sprats before him, tearing off
+their heads, and then throwing the bodies contemptuously into another
+bucket.  The ends of his fingers and thumbs were pink and bright, and
+were separated from the remainder of his dark hands by margins of
+glittering scales.  He compared to me, as he beheaded the fish, the girls
+of Hull and London.  But what I knew of the girls of but one city was so
+meagre in comparison that I could only listen to his particulars in
+silent surprise.  It was notable that a man like that, who pulled the
+heads and guts of fish like that, should have acquired a knowledge so
+peculiar, so personal, of the girls of two cities.  While considering
+whether what at first looked like the mystery of this problem might not
+be in reality its clue, I became aware of another listener.  Its lean and
+dismal length was disproportionate to that small ship.  It had on but
+dungarees and a singlet, and the singlet, because of the length of the
+figure, was concave at the stomach, where, having nothing to rest upon,
+it was corrugated through the weight of a head made brooding by a heavy
+black beard.  Hairy wrists were thrust deeply into the pockets to hold up
+the trousers.  The dome of its head was as bald and polished as yellow
+metal.  The steward introduced me to the Chief Engineer.  "Yon's a dirty
+steward," 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.  "I
+should like to hear some Beethoven or Mozart tonight.  Aye, but we're
+awa'.  It'll be yon sprats."  He sighed his affirmative again in
+resignation, and stood regarding the steward bending over the pails on
+the deck.  "What make ye," he asked, "of this war between the Japs and
+Russia?  Come awa' doon, and have a bit talk.  I canna' look at that
+man'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 go
+ashore and purchase what necessaries could be remembered while narrowly
+watching the clock.  I was astride the bulwarks again when the
+_Windhover_ was free of her moorings.  There was a lack of deliberation
+and dignity in this departure which gave it the appearance of
+improvisation, of not being the real thing.  I could not believe it
+mattered whether I went or not.  My first voyage had, that is, those
+common circumstances which always make our crises incredible when they
+face 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.  Yet
+that significant gesture, obviously made to my ship, was watched with an
+indifference which was little better than cynicism.  What was this city,
+past which we moved?  In that haze it was only the fading impress of what
+once was there, of what once had overlooked the departure of voyagers,
+when on memorable journeys, in famous ships.  Now it had almost gone.  It
+had 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 who
+had forgotten his overcoat?  The steward rose, raised his bucket of fish
+offal, emptied it overboard, and went below.  It was not easy to believe
+that such a voyage could come to anything, for London itself was
+intangible, and when we got past those heavier shades which were the
+city, and were running along the Essex marshes, though there was more
+light, there was nothing to be seen, not even land substantial enough to
+be a shadow.  There was only the length of our own ship.  Our pilot left
+us, and we felt our way to the Lower Hope, a place I could have accepted
+if it had not been on the chart, and anchored.
+
+Night came, and drove me below to the saloon, where we made five who sat
+with the sprats, now fried, and mugs of tea before us.  The saloon was
+the hollow stern, a triangle with a little fireplace in its base, and
+four bunks in its sides.  Its centre was filled with a triangular table,
+over which, pendent from the skylight, was an oil-lamp in chains.  A
+settee ran completely round the sides, and on that one sat for meals, and
+used it as a step when climbing into a bunk.  The skipper cheerily hailed
+me.  "As you're in for it, make yourself comfortable.  Sorry we can't do
+more than give you the seat to sleep on.  But the chief thing in this
+ship 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, but
+regarded four bent heads, so intent they might have been watching a
+ritual 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 the
+confines of this life.
+
+
+2
+
+What the time was next morning when I woke I do not know, for the saloon
+was too dark to show the clock, over the fireplace.  But the skylight was
+a pale cube of daylight, and through it I could see a halyard quivering
+and swaying, apparently in a high wind.  My bench was in a continuous
+tremor.
+
+We were off again.  Somebody appeared at the doorway, a pull of cotton
+waste in his hand, and turned a negroid face, made lugubrious by white
+lines which sweat had channelled downwards through its coal dust.  It
+looked at me, this spectre with eyes brilliant yet full of unutterable
+reproach, saw that I was awake, and winked slowly.  It was the second
+engineer.  He said it was a clear morning.  We had been under way an
+hour.  He had got sixty revolutions now.  He then receded into the gloom
+beyond; but materialized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of two
+disembodied eyes appeared, and the same voice said that it had won
+seventeen and six-pence last night, but there was something funny about
+the way the skipper shuffled cards.
+
+Feeling as though I were in one piece, I got up, made my joints bend
+again, and went on deck.  Our ship, tilting at the immobile world, might
+have 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 this
+steady current.  A low coast was dim on either hand, hardly superior to
+the flawless glass of the Thames.  By the look of it, we were the first
+ever to break the tranquillity of that stream.  We ourselves made
+scarcely a sound; we could have been attempting a swift, secret and, so
+far, unchallenged escape.  The shores unfolded in a panorama without
+form.  Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship before
+the world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghost
+shrouded in the still folds of diaphanous night, its riding lights
+following us like eyes.  In the horny light of that winter dawn we
+overhauled, one after another, the lamps of the Thames estuary, the
+Chapman, the Nore, and the Mouse, and dropped them astern.  We made a
+course east by north to where the red glints of the Maplin and Gunfleet
+lights winked in their iron gibbets.  Above the shallows of the Burrows
+Shoal 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 clutch
+at nothing.
+
+We got abreast of Orfordness, and went through the gate of the North
+Channel 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 and
+unsuspecting under the brown depression of its canopy; and as to this
+surprise of light and space so near to that city, so easily entered, yet
+for so long merely an ancient rumour, an old tale of our streets to which
+the ships and the wharves gave credence--how shall the report of it sound
+true?  Not at all, except to those who still hold to a faith, through all
+foul times, in the chance hints of a better world.
+
+A new time was beginning in such a world.  There was a massive purple
+battlement on the sea, at a great distance, the last entrenchment of
+night; but a multitude of rays had stormed it, poured through clefts and
+chasms in the wall, and escaped to the _Windhover_ on a broad road that
+was newly laid from the sky to this planet.  The sun was at one end of
+the road, and we were at the other.  There were only the two of us on
+that road.  On our port beam the shadow which was East Anglia became
+suddenly that bright shore which is sometimes conjectured, but is never
+reached.
+
+The _Windhover_ drove athwart the morning, and her bows would ride over
+the horizon to divide it, and then the skyline joined again as she sank
+below it.  We were beginning to live.  I did not know what the skipper
+would think of it, so I did not cheer.  Sometimes the sea did this for
+me, making a loud applause as it leaped over the prow.  The trawler was a
+good ship; you could feel that.  She was as easy and buoyant as a
+thoroughbred.  She would take a wave in a stride.  I liked her start of
+surprise when she met a wave of unexpected speed and strength, and then
+leaped at it, and threw it, white and shouting, all around us.  It was
+that part of a first voyage when you feel you were meant to be a
+navigator.  To stand at the end of the bridge, rolling out over the
+cataracts roaring below, and to swing back, and out again, watching the
+ship's head decline into a hollow of the seas, and then to clutch the
+saddle as she reared with a sudden twist and swing above the horizon, and
+in such a vast and illuminated theatre, was to awake to a new virtue in
+life.  We were alone there.  There were only comets of smoke on the
+bright wall of the sky, of steamers out of sight.
+
+At sunset we made Smith's Knoll Light, and dropped the land.  The cluster
+of 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-house
+on the bridge, while listening to the seas getting up, only signals from
+Orion and the Great Bear, the glow of the pipe of the silent fellow at
+the wheel, and the warm shaft of light which streamed from somewhere in
+the ship's body and isolated the foremast as a column of gold.  There was
+the monody, confident but subdued, the most ancient song in the world, of
+invisible waters.  Sometimes there was a shock when she dropped into a
+hollow, and a vicious shower whipped across the glass of the wheel-house.
+I then got the sad feeling, much too soon, that the inhospitable North
+was greeting us.  It is after sundown at sea, when looking through the
+dark to the stars, listening to sounds that are as though ancient waters
+were 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 thoughts
+are of destiny, and then the remembrance of our late eager activities
+brings a little smile.  There being no illumination in the wheel-house
+but the restricted glow from the binnacle, this silent comment of mine on
+man and his fate caused the helmsman no amusement.  "I hope you are
+bringing us luck this trip," said the sailor to me.  "Last trip we got a
+poor 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 the
+right sort of mascot to the Windhover, we should pick up on the evening
+of the next day.
+
+
+3
+
+When I left the wheel-house to go below, it was near midnight.  As I
+opened the heavy door of the house the night howled aloud at my
+appearance.  The night smelt pungently of salt and seaweed.  The
+hand-rail was cold and wet.  The wind was like ice in my nose, and it
+tasted like iron.  Sometimes the next step was at a correct distance
+below my feet; and then all that was under me would be swept away.  I
+descended into the muffled saloon, which was a little box enclosing light
+and warmth partially submerged in the waters.  There it smelt of hot
+engine-oil and stale clothes.  I got used to the murmuring transit of
+something which swept our outer walls in immense bounds, and the flying
+grind of the propeller, and the bang-clang of the rudder when it was
+struck . . . 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 fully
+awake--it was four in the morning, the fire was out, and violent draughts
+kept ballooning the blanket over me--and in another minute I might have
+become quite aware that I had gone to sea for the first time.  It was my
+bench 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 return
+journey, for then there came the swooning sensation one feels in the
+immediate ascent of a lift.  When the bench was as high as it could go it
+overbalanced, canting acutely, and, grabbing my blanket, I left
+diagonally for a corner of the saloon, accompanied by some sea-boots I
+met under the table.  As I was slowly and carefully climbing back, the
+floor reversed, and I stopped falling when my head struck a panel.  The
+panel slid gently along, and the mate's severe countenance regarded me
+from inside the bunk.  I expected some remonstrance from a tired man who
+had been unfairly awakened too soon.  "Hurt yourself?" he asked.  "It's
+getting 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 my
+hand to the table I managed to keep where I was, even when, in those
+moments of greatest insecurity, the screw was roaring in mid-air.  Our
+fascinating hanging lamp would perform the impossible, hanging acutely
+out of plumb; and then, when I was watching this miracle, rattle its
+chain and hang the other way.  A regiment of boots on the floor--I
+suppose it was boots--would tramp to one corner, remain quiet for a
+while, and then clatter elsewhere in a body.  Towards daybreak the
+skipper appeared in shining oilskins, tapped the barometer, glanced at
+me, and laughed because my pillow--which was a linen bag stuffed with old
+magazines--at that moment became lower than my heels, and the precipitous
+rug tried to smother me.  I enjoyed that laugh.
+
+Later still, I saw that our dark skylight was beginning to regain its
+sight.  Light was coming through.  Our lunatic saloon lamp was growing
+wan.  I ventured on deck.  When my face was no more than out of the
+hatch, what I saw was our ship's stern upturned before me, with our boat
+lashed to it.  It dropped out of view instantly, and exposed the blurred
+apparition of a hill in pursuit of us--the hill ran in to run over
+us--and in that very moment of crisis the slope of wet deck appeared
+again, and the lashed boat.  The cold iron was wet and slippery, but I
+grasped it firmly, as though that were an essential condition of
+existence in such a place.
+
+The _Windhover_, too, looked so small.  She was diminished.  She did not
+bear herself as buoyantly as yesterday.  Often she was not quick enough
+to escape a blow.  She looked a forlorn trifle, and there was no aid in
+sight.  I cannot say those hills, alive and deliberate on all sides, were
+waves.  They were the sea.  The dawn astern was a narrow band of dead
+white, an effort at daybreak suddenly frustrated by night, but not
+altogether expunged.  The separating black waters bulked above the dawn
+in regular upheavals, shutting out its pallor, and as incontinently
+collapsed again to release it to make the _Windhover_ plainer in her
+solitude.
+
+The skipper waddled briskly aft, and stood beside me.  He put his nose
+inside the galley.  "I smell coffee," he said.  His charge reared, and
+pitched him against the bulwarks.  "Whoa, you bitch," he cried
+cheerfully.  "Our fleet ought not to be far off," he explained.  "Ought
+to see something of them soon."  He glanced casually round the emptinesss
+of the dawn.  He might have been looking for some one with whom he had
+made an appointment at Charing Cross.  He then backed into the hatch and
+went below.  The big mate appeared, yawned, stooped to examine a lashed
+spar, did not give the sunrise so much as a glance, did not allow the
+ocean to see that he was even aware of its existence, but went forward to
+the bridge.
+
+The clouds lowered during the morning, and through that narrowed space
+between 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 mile
+away, and we could have gone on, still looking for it.  The day early
+surrendered its light, a dismal submission to conditions that had made
+its brief existence a failure.  It had nearly gone when we sighted
+another trawler.  She was the _Susie_.  She was smaller than the
+_Windhover_.  We went close enough to hail the men standing knee-deep in
+the wash on her deck.  It would not be easy to forget the _Susie_.  I
+shall always see her, at the moment when our skipper began to shout
+through his hands at her.  She was poised askew, in that arrested
+instant, on a glassy slope of water, with its crest foaming above her.
+Surge blotted her out amid-ships, and her streaming forefoot jutted
+clear.  She plunged then into the hollow between us, showing us the plan
+of 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 dropped
+astern.  She seemed a poor little thing, with a squirt of steam to keep
+her alive in that stupendous and hurrying world.  A man on her raised his
+arm to us in salute, and she vanished.
+
+
+4
+
+The talk of our skipper, who began to be preoccupied and abrupt veered to
+the subject of Jonah.  We should now have been with our fleet, but were
+alone in the wilderness, and any course we took would be as likely as
+another.  "This hasn't happened to me for years," he apologized.  He
+stared about him, tapping the weather-dodger with his fingers, and
+whistled reflectively.  He turned to the man at the wheel.  "Take her
+east for an hour, and then north for an hour," and went below.
+
+Day returned briefly at sunset.  It was an astonishing gift.  The clouds
+rapidly lifted and the sky cleared, till the sea extended far to a bright
+horizon, hard and polished, a clear separation of our planet and heaven.
+The waves were still ponderous.  The _Windhover_ laboured heavily.  We
+rolled over the bright slopes aimlessly.  She would rear till the forward
+deck stuck up in front of us, then drop over, flinging us against the
+dodger, and the shock would surround her with foam that was an eruption
+of greenish light.
+
+The sun was a cold rayless ball halved by the dark sea.  The wall of
+heaven above it was flushed and translucent marble.  There was a silver
+paring of moon in a tincture of rose.  When the sun had gone, the place
+it had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while we
+might have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetrated
+by a glow that was without.  The purple waters took the light from above
+and the waves turned to flames.  The fountains that mounted at the bows
+and fell inboard came as showers of gems.  (I heard afterwards it was
+still foggy in London.)  And now, having made all I can of sunset and
+ocean, and a spray of amethysts, jacinths, emeralds, zircons, rubies,
+peridots, and sapphires, it is no longer possible for me to avoid the
+saloon, the thought of which, for an obscure reason, my mind loathed.
+
+And our saloon, compared with the measure of the twilight emptiness now
+about us, was no bigger than the comfort a man feels amid mischance when
+he remembers that he is still virtuous.  The white cloth on its table, I
+noticed, as I sat down, was contaminated by a long and sinful life.  But
+the men round it were good and hearty.  I took my share of ham and fish
+on the same plate, and began to feel not so hungry as before.  I was
+informed that ashore we are too particular about trifles, because we have
+the room for it, but on a trawler there is not much room.  You have to
+squeeze together, and make do with what is there, because fish is the
+most important passenger.  My hunk of bread was placed where the cloth
+bore the imprint of a negro's hand.  The mugs of tea were massive, and
+sweetish (I could smell that) with condensed milk.  Did I want my tea?  I
+noticed 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 pale
+and faintly apprehensive, compelling me, now I was beset, to take hold of
+it firmly, and to tell it that this was not the time to be a miserable
+martyr, but a coarse brute; and that, whether it liked it or not, I was
+going to feed at once on fish, ham, and sickly liquor, and heaven help us
+if it failed me before these sailors.  It made no response, being a thin
+nonconformist soul, so I had to leave it, and alone I advanced on the
+food.  As so often happens, the conquest was a little less hard than it
+appeared to be.  I progressed, though slowly, and at last was
+sufficiently disengaged from my task to count the minutes moving at their
+funeral pace to the end of the meal.  The heat of the room mounted.  The
+movements of the ship continued to throw my stomach against the edge of
+the table.
+
+My companions, however, were in no hurry to move.  They discussed, among
+other things, Hull, and its unfortunate system of sanitation.  While this
+gossip, which was explicit with exuberant detail, was engaging us, I
+summoned my scientific mind, which is not connected with my soul, to
+listen to what was being said, and the rest of me was deaf.  They went on
+to tell each other about other trawlers and other crews.  Other ships and
+men, 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 went
+down to take over this morning, Mac was singing Scotch songs.  What more
+could 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 wish
+singing would do it," he said gravely.  "I don't know.  How do you
+account for some fellows getting most of the luck? Their ships are the
+same, and they don't know any more."
+
+Mac shook his head.  "The owners think they do.  There's their big
+catches, y'ken.  Ye'll no convince owners that the sea bottom isna' wet
+and onsairten."
+
+The rosy face of the skipper became darker, and there was a spark in his
+eyes.  This was unfair.  "But dammit, man, you don't mean to say the
+owners 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 from
+another.  What does he do?  Can't go to sea without taking his trawler
+right over all the fish there is.  Is that his sense?  Ain't God good to
+him?  Shows him the fish every time."
+
+The engineer stood up, bending his head beneath a beam, crooking an elbow
+to consider one hairy arm.  "Ah weel, I wouldna call it God.  Ye canna
+tell.  Man Billy has his last trip to make.  Likely he'll catch fish
+that'd frighten Hull.  Aye."
+
+The skipper moved impatiently, made noises in his throat, rose, and both
+went out.  The mate, who had been chewing and looking at nothing all the
+time, chuckled.
+
+The mate pulled off his big boots, and climbed into his bunk.  The
+steward cleared the table.  I had the saloon to myself, and tried to read
+from a magazine I extracted from my pillow.  The first story was
+rollicking of the sea, and I have never seen more silly or such dreary
+lies in print.  And the others were about women, magazine women, and the
+land, that magazine land which is not of this earth.  The bench still
+heaved, and there was a new smell of sour pickles.  I think a jar had
+upset in a store cupboard.  Perhaps I should feel happier in the
+wheel-house.  It was certain the wheel-house would not smell of vinegar,
+boots, and engine oil.  It would have its own disadvantages--it would be
+cold and damp--and the wind and seas on the lively deck had to be faced
+on the way to it.  The difficulty there is in placing the second course
+on London's cosy dinner-tables began to surprise me.
+
+Our wooden shelter, the wheel-house, is ten feet above the deck, with
+windows through which I could look at the night, and imagine the rest.  I
+had, to support me, the mono-syllabic skipper and a helmsman with nothing
+to say.  I saw one of them when, drawing hard on his pipe, its glow
+outlined a bodyless face.  The wheel chains rattled in their channels.
+There was a clang when a sea wrenched the rudder.  I clung to a
+window-strap, flung back to look upwards through a window which the ship
+abruptly placed above my head, then thrown forward to see wreaths of
+water speeding below like ghosts.  The stars jolted back and forth in
+wide arcs.  There were explosions at the bows, and the ship trembled and
+hesitated.  Occasionally the skipper split the darkness with a rocket,
+and we gazed round the night for an answer.  The night had no answer to
+give.  We were probably nearing the North Pole.  About midnight, the
+silent helmsman put away his pipe, as a preliminary to answering a
+foolish question of mine, and said, "Sometimes it happens.  It's bound
+to.  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 our
+hands, Jim Budge, who was laid up, and he reckoned he'd better get home
+quick.  So he joined her.  We were off the Tail of the Dogger, and it
+blew that night.  Next morning Jim's mate swore Jim's bunk had been laid
+in.  It was wet.  He said the _Mavis_ had gone.  I could see the bunk was
+wet 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 note
+its passage.  For that morning I made out the skipper, drenched with
+spray, and his eyes bloodshot, no doubt through weariness and the
+weather, watching me from the saloon doorway.  I did not ask any
+questions, but pretended I was merely turning in my sleep.  It is
+probably better not to ask the man who has succeeded in losing you where
+you are, particularly when his eyes are bloodshot and he is wondering
+what the deuce he shall do about it.  And greater caution still is
+required when his reproachful silence gives you the idea that he thinks
+you a touch of ill-luck in his enterprise.  My companions, I believe,
+regretted I had not been omitted.  I tried, therefore, to be
+inconspicuous, and went up to seclude myself at the back of the boat on
+the poop, there to understudy a dog which is sorry it did it.  Not
+adverse fate itself could show a more misanthropic aspect than the empty
+overcast waste around us.  It was useless to appeal to it.  It did
+vouchsafe us one ship that morning, a German trawler with a fir tree
+lashed to her deck, ready for Christmas morning, I suppose, when perhaps
+they would tie herrings to its twigs.  But she was no good to us.  And
+the grey animosity granted us three others during the afternoon, and they
+were equally useless, for they had not sighted our fleet for a week.  All
+that interested me was the way the lookout on the bridge picked out a
+mark, which I could not see, for it was obscured where sea and sky were
+the same murk, and called it a ship.  Long before I could properly
+discern it, the look-out behaved as though he knew all about it.  But it
+was never the sign we wanted.  We had changed our course so often that I
+was beginning to believe that nobody aboard could make a nearer guess at
+our position than the giddy victim in blindman's-buff.  A sextant was
+never used.  Apparently these fishermen found their way about on a little
+mental arithmetic compounded of speed, time, and the course.  That leaves
+a large margin for error.  So if they felt doubtful they got a plummet,
+greased it, and dipped it overboard.  When it was hauled up they
+inspected whatever might be sticking to the tallow, and at once announced
+our position.  At first I felt sceptical.  It was as though one who had
+got lost with you in London might pick up a stone in an unknown
+thoroughfare, and straightway announce the name of that street.  That
+would be rather clever.  But I discovered my fishermen could do something
+like it.
+
+Our skipper no longer appeared at meals.  He was on the bridge day and
+night.  He acted quite well a pose of complete indifference, and said no
+more than: "This has not happened to me for years."  He repeated this
+slowly at reasonable intervals.  But he had lost the nimble impulse to
+chat about little things, and also his look of peering and innocent
+curiosity.  As now he did not come to our table, the others spoke of
+Billingsgate carriers, such as ours, which had driven about the Dogger
+till there was no more in the bunkers than would take them to Hull to get
+more coal.  From the way they spoke I gathered they would crawl into
+port, in such circumstances, without flags, and without singing.  This
+gave my first trip an appearance I had never expected.  Imagination,
+which is clearly of little help in geography, had always pictured the
+Dogger as a sea where you could hail another trawler as you would a cab
+in London.  A vessel might reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunk
+it had left behind.  But here we were with our ship plunging round the
+compass merely expectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly like the
+others,
+
+But at last we had them.  We spoke a rival fleet of trawlers.  Their
+admiral cried through a speaking-trumpet that he had left "ours" at six
+that morning twenty miles NNE., steaming west.  It was then eleven
+o'clock.  Hopefully the _Windhover_ put about.  We held on for three
+hours at full speed, but saw nothing but the same waves.  The skipper
+then rather violently addressed the Dogger, and said he was going below.
+The mate asked what course he should steer.  "Take the damned ship where
+you like," said the skipper.  "I'm going to sleep."  He was away ten
+minutes.  He reappeared, and resumed his silent parade of the bridge.
+The helmsman grinned at the mate.  By then the wind had fallen, the seas
+were more deliberate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight,
+insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, for the night began to
+fill the hollows of the Dogger almost at once, and soon there was nothing
+to be seen but the glimmer of breaking waves.
+
+
+6
+
+There is nothing to be done with an adventure which has become a misprise
+than to enjoy it that way instead.  What did I care when they complained
+at breakfast of the waste of rockets the night before?  What did that
+matter 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' thumbs
+were more numerous and patent than ever, in such a light?  Not in the
+least.  For I myself had long since given up washing, as a laborious and
+unsatisfactory process, and was then cutting up cake tobacco with the
+rapture of an acolyte preparing the incense.  If this was what was meant
+by getting lost on the Dogger, then the method, if only its magic could
+be formulated, would make the fortunes of the professional fakirs of
+happiness in the capitals of the rich.  Yet mornings of such a quality
+cannot be purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of virtue.
+
+On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic.  The wind
+was steady and generous.  The warm sunlight danced.  I should not have
+been surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the
+greatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek,
+smiling with approval of the scene below--melancholy approval, for we
+would remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale and
+sickly 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.  For
+the _Windhover_ had drifted into a time and place as innocent of man's
+highest achievements as is joy of death.  The wind and sea were chanting.
+The riding of the ship kept time to that measure.  The vault was
+turquoise, and the moving floor was cobalt.  The white islands of the
+Olympians were in the sky.
+
+Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, with
+nothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over from
+earth's earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in the
+north.  That cloud did not rise.  It blew towards us straight over the
+seas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail,
+heading east of south of us.  She was, when at a distance, a baffling
+mass of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed.  She
+got abeam of us.  Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper to
+give grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the ship
+of romance, and in such a time and place.  She was a cloud that, when it
+mounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into the
+meridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mist
+blown forward on the wind.  She might have risen at any moment.  Her
+green hull had the sheer of a sea hollow.  Her bows pressed continually
+onward, like the crest of a wave curving forward to break, but held, as
+though enchanted.  Sometimes, when her white mass heeled from us under
+the pressure of the wind, a red light flashed from her submerged body.
+She passed silently, a shining phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms
+do.
+
+
+7
+
+When the boots, exploded on the saloon floor by the petulant mate, woke
+me, 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.  "I
+never thought I should want to see our fleet so much."
+
+"Aye," remarked the chief engineer, who came shuffling in then for some
+sleep, "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 to
+smell Hull."
+
+A kick of the ship overturned the fireshovel, and I woke again to look
+with surprise at so small a cause of a terrible sound, and was leaving
+the shovel to its fate when it came to life, and began to crawl
+stealthily over the floor.  It was an imperative duty to rise and
+imprison it.  When that was forgotten the steward arrived, and roused me
+to watch the method of setting a breakfast-table at sea; but I had seen
+all that before, and climbed out of the saloon.  There are moments in a
+life afloat when the kennel and chain of the house-dog appear to have
+their merits.  The same wash was still racing past outside, and the ship
+moving along.  The halyards were shaking in the cold.  The funnel was
+still 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 flapping
+overcoat, still searching the distance for what was not there.  A train
+of gulls was weaving about over our wake.  A derelict fish-trunk floated
+close to us, with a great black-backed gull perched on it.  He cocked up
+one eye at me when he drew level, crouched for flight, but perhaps saw on
+my face the reason why I prefer working tomorrow, and contemptuously
+stayed where he was.  Then I noticed the skipper looking back at the
+bird.  He nodded to it, and cried: "There goes a milestone.  The fleet is
+about somewhere."  I danced with caution along the treacherous deck,
+where one day that voyage a sea picked up two men and stranded them on
+top of the engine-room casing, and got up with the master.  He had just
+ordered the ship to be put over to a trawler in sight.  With the seas so
+swift and ponderous I completely forgot the cold wind in watching the two
+lively ships being manoeuvred till they were within earshot.  When the
+engines were stopped the steering had to be nicely calculated, or erratic
+waves brought them dangerously close, or else took them out of call.  Our
+new friend had not seen "our lot," but had left a fleet with an unknown
+house-flag ten miles astern.  We surged forward again.
+
+We steamed for two hours, and then the pattern of a trawler's smoke was
+seen ahead traced on a band of greenish brilliance which divided the sea
+from the sky.  Almost at once other faint tracings multiplied there.  In
+a few minutes we could make out plainly within that livid narrow outlet
+between the sea and the heavy clouds a concourse of midget ships.
+
+"There they are," breathed the skipper after a quick inspection through
+his 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 daily
+market.  As we steamed in, another carrier, which had left London after
+us, hoisted her signal pennant, and took over that job.
+
+While still our ship was under way, boats put out from the surrounding
+trawlers, and converged on us for our outward cargo, the empty
+fish-trunks.  That intense band of light which had first betrayed the
+smoke of the fleet eroded upwards into the low, slaty roof of nimbus till
+the gloom was dissolved to the zenith.  The incubus vanished; the sun
+flooded us.  At last only white feathers were left in the sky.  I felt I
+had known and loved these trawlers for years.  All round us were ships'
+boats, riding those sweeping seas in a gyrating and delirious lunacy; and
+in each were two jovial fishermen, who shouted separate reasons to our
+skipper for "the week off" he had taken.
+
+These boats came at us like a swarm of assailants, swooping downhill on
+us, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us again
+for a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivity
+of glass.  A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on the
+snowy 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 and
+transient hollow.  Watching for their chances, snatched out of luck by
+skill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties; the
+boxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was snatched away,
+and then were swept off.  The shouted jokes were broadened and
+strengthened to fit that riot and uproar.  This sudden robust life,
+following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and
+disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and
+mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts
+and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a
+triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling
+kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in
+that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the
+creative word had been spoken only five minutes before.  We, and all
+this, had just come.  I wanted to laugh and cheer.
+
+
+8
+
+There is, we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at a
+chart than from any impeccable modern map.  Maps today are losing their
+attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy.  Maps do not
+allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered
+governments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to
+tax, 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 world
+beneath the fathoms--the _Silver Pits_, the _Dowsing Ground_, the _Leman
+Bank_, the _Great Fisher Ground_, the _Horn Reef_, the _Witch Ground_,
+and the _Great Dogger Bank_!  Strange, that indefinable implication of a
+word!  I remember that, when a child, I was awake one night listening to
+a grandfather's clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, and a
+brother sat up in bed and whispered: "Look, the Star in the East."  I
+turned, and one bright eye of the night was staring through the window.
+Heaven knows into what profundity of ancestral darkness my brothers
+whisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, but an awe, or a fear, was
+wakened 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.  Nor
+can I now.  It would puzzle a psycho-analyst most assured of the right
+system for indexing secret human motives to disengage one shadow from
+another in an ancestral darkness.  That is why I merely put down here the
+names 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 mean
+something.  Those words, like certain moonbeams, which stir in us that
+not ourselves which makes for righteousness, or lunacy, combine only by
+chance.  The combination which unlocks the secret cannot be stated, or it
+would not work.  When there is a fortuitous coincidence of the magic
+factors, the result is as remarkable to us as it is to those who think
+they know us.  When I used to stand on London's foreshore, gazing to what
+was beyond our street lamps, the names on the chart had a meaning for me
+which is outside the usual methods of human communication.  The Dogger
+Bank!
+
+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 my
+visit; and every traveller knows how much he gains when the place he has
+wished to visit allows him to take away from it no less than what he
+brought with him.  The Bank was twenty fathoms under us.  We saw it
+proved at times when a little fine white sand came up, or fleshy yellow
+fingers, called sponge by the men, which showed we were over the pastures
+of the haddock.  That was all we saw of a foundered region of prehistoric
+Europe, where once there was a ridge in the valley of that lost river to
+which the Rhine and Thames were tributaries.  Our forefathers,
+prospecting that attractive and remunerative plateau of the Dogger, on
+their pilgrimage to begin making our England what it is, caught deer
+where we were netting cod.  I almost shuddered at the thought, as though
+even then I felt the trawl of another race of men, who had strangely
+forgotten all our noble deeds and precious memories, catching in the ruin
+of St. Stephen's Tower, and the strangers, unaware of what august relic
+was beneath them, cursing that obstruction to their progress.  Anyhow, we
+should have the laugh of them there; but these aeons of time are
+desperate waters into which to sink one's thought.  It sinks out of
+sight.  It goes down to dark nothing.
+
+Well, it happened to be the sun of my day just then, and our time for
+catching cod, with the reasonable hope, too, that we should find the city
+still under St. Stephen's Tower when we got back, as a place to sell our
+catch.
+
+Our empty boxes were discharged.  Led by the admiral, the
+_Windhover_--with the  rest of the fleet--lowered her trawl, and went
+dipping slowly and quietly over the hills, towing her sunken net.  The
+admiral of a fishing-fleet is a great man.  All is in his hands.  He
+chooses the grounds.  Our admiral, it was whispered to me, was the wizard
+of the north.  The abundant fish-pastures were revealed to him in his
+dreams.  It was my last evening on the Bank.  The day had been
+wonderfully fine for winter and a sea that is notoriously evil.  At
+twilight the wind dropped, the heave of the waters decreased.  The
+scattered fleet, gliding through the hush, carried red, green, and white
+planets.  The ships which lay in the western glow were black and simple
+shapes.  Those to the east of us were remarkable with a chromatic
+prominence, and you thought, while watching them, that till that moment
+you had not really seen them.  Presently the moon cleared the edge of the
+sea, 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 mind
+and his course, and then the city of mobile streets altered its plan, and
+rewove its constellation.  At midnight white flares burned forward on all
+the boats.  The trawls were to be hauled.  Our steam-winch began to bang
+its cogs in the heavy work of lifting the net.  All hands assembled to
+see what would be our luck.  The light sent a silver lane through the
+night, and men broke through the black walls of that brilliant separation
+of the darkness, and vanished on the other side.  Leaning overside, I
+could see the pocket of our trawl drawing near, still some fathoms deep,
+a phosphorescent and flashing cloud.  It came inboard, and was suspended
+over the deck, a bulging mass, its bottom was unfastened, and out gushed
+our catch, slithering over the deck, convulsive in the scuppers.  The
+mass of blubber and plasm pulsed with an elfish glow.
+
+
+9
+
+We were homeward bound.  The flat sea was dazzling with reflected
+sunshine, and a shade had to be erected over the binnacle for the man at
+the wheel.  It might have been June, yet we had but few days to
+Christmas.  The noon ceiling was a frail blue, where gauze was suspended
+in motionless loops and folds.  The track of the sun was incandescent
+silver.  A few sailing vessels idled in the North Channel, their sails
+slack; but we could not see a steamer in what is one of the world's
+busiest fairways.  We ran on a level keel, and there was no movement but
+the tremor of the engines.  We should catch the tide at the Shipwash, and
+go up on it to Billingsgate and be home by midnight.  How foolish it is
+to portion your future, at sea!
+
+It was when I was arranging what I should do in the later hours of that
+day, when we were at Billingsgate, that the skipper, staring round the
+North Channel, said to me: "It looks as though London had been wiped out
+since we left it.  Where's the ships?"
+
+The Maplin watched us pass with its red eye.  We raised all the lights
+true and clear.  I went below, and we were talking of London, and the
+last trains, when the engine-room telegraph gave us a great shock.  "Stop
+her!" we heard the watch cry below.
+
+I don't know how we got on deck.  There were too many on the companion
+ladder at the same time.  While we were struggling upwards we heard that
+frantic bell ring often enough to drive the engine-room people
+distracted.  I got to the ship's side in time to see a liner's bulk glide
+by.  She would have been invisible but for her strata of lights.  She was
+just 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 at
+us.  I remember very well what he said, but it is forbidden to put down
+such words here.  The man at our wheel paid no attention to him, that
+danger being now past, and so of no importance.  He continued to spin the
+spokes desperately, because, though we could not see the ships about us,
+we could hear everywhere the alarm of their bells.  We had run at eleven
+knots into a bank of fog which seemed full of ships.  The moon was
+looking 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 sounds
+of a great fear of us.  I imagined in the dark the loom of impending
+bodies, and straining overside in an effort to make them out, listening
+to the murmur of the stream, nervously fanned the fog with my hat in a
+ridiculous effort to clear it.  Twice across our bows perilous shadows
+arose, sprinkled with stars, yet by some luck they drifted silently by
+us, 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 we
+anchored at last, and our own bell began to ring.  When our unseen
+neighbours heard the humming of our exhaust, their frantic appeal
+subsided, and only now and then they gave their bells a shaking, perhaps
+to find whether we answered from the same place.  There was an absolute
+silence at last, as though all had crept stealthily away, having left us,
+lost and solitary, in the fog.  We felt confident there would be a
+clearance soon, so but shrouded our navigation lights.  But the rampart
+of fog grew higher, veiled the moon, blotted it out, expunged the last
+and highest star.  We were imprisoned.  We lay till morning, and there
+was only the fog, and ourselves, and a bell-buoy somewhere which tolled
+dolefully.
+
+And morning was but a weak infiltration into our prison.  A steadfast
+inspection was necessary to mark even the dead water overside.  The River
+was the same colour as the fog.  For a fortnight we had been without
+rest.  We had become used to a little home which was unstable, and
+sometimes delirious, and a sky that was always falling, and an earth that
+rose to meet the collapse.  Here we were on a dead level, still and
+silent, with the men whispering, and one felt inclined to reel with
+giddiness.  We were fixed to a dumb, unseen river of a world that was
+blind.
+
+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.  A
+change did not seem likely, for the rigging was hoar with frost, and ice
+glazed our deck.
+
+Sometimes the fog would seem to rise a few feet.  It was a cruel
+deception to play on the impatient.  A mere cork, a tiny dark object like
+that, drifting along some distance out, would make a focal point in the
+fog, and would give the illusion of a clearance.  Once, parading the deck
+as the man on watch, giving an occasional shake to the bell, I went
+suddenly happy with the certainty that I was now to be the harbinger of
+good tidings to those below playing cards.  A vague elevated line
+appeared to starboard.  I watched it grow into definition, a coast
+showing through a haze that was now dissolving.  Up they all tumbled at
+my shout.  They stared at the wonder hopefully and silently.  The coast
+became higher and darker, and the skipper was turning to give orders--and
+then our hope turned into a wide path on the ebbing River made by cinders
+moving out on the tide.  The cinders passed.  We re-entered our silent
+tomb.  There had been no sign of our many neighbours of the night before,
+but suddenly we heard some dreadful moans, the tentative efforts of a
+body surprised by pain, and these sounds shaped, hilariously lachrymose,
+into a steam hooter playing "Auld Lang Syne," and then "Home, Sweet
+Home."  There followed an astonishing amount of laughter from a hidden
+audience.  The prisoners in the neighbouring cells were there after all,
+and were even jolly.  The day thereafter was mute, the yellow walls at
+evening deepened to ochre, to umber, and became black, except where our
+riding lights made luminous circles.  Each miserable watcher who came
+down to the saloon that night, muffled and sparkling with frost, to get a
+drink 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 a
+clearance was imagined.  Our skipper thought he saw a lane along the
+River, and up-anchored.  The noise of our cable awoke a tumult of
+startled bells.
+
+Ours was a perishable cargo.  We were much overdue.  Our skipper was
+willing to take any risk--what a good master mariner would call a
+reasonable risk--to get home; and so, when a deck hand, on the third
+morning, with the thawing fog dripping from his moustache, appeared in
+the saloon with the news that it was clearing a little, the master
+decided he would go.
+
+I then saw, from the deck of the _Windhover_, so strange a vision that it
+could not be related to this lower sphere of ours.  It could be thought
+that dawn's bluish twilight radiated from the _Windhover_.  We were the
+luminary, and our faint aura revealed, through the melting veil, an outer
+world that had no sky, no plane, no bounds.  It was void.  There was no
+River, except that small oval of glass on which rested our ship, like a
+model.
+
+The universe, which that morning had only begun to form in the void, was
+grouped about us.  This was the original of mornings.  We were its
+gravitational point.  It was inert and voiceless.  It was pregnant with
+unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms.
+Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another
+life.  Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of the
+dawn, were beyond remembrance and recognition.  The _Windhover_ alone was
+substantial and definite.  But placed about us, suspended in a night that
+was growing translucent, were the shadows of what might once have been
+ships, perhaps were ships to be, but were then steamers and sailers
+without substance, waiting some creative word, shrouded spectres that had
+left the wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyages finished, and
+were waiting to begin a new existence, having been raised to our level in
+a new world boundless and serene, with unplumbed deeps beneath them.
+There, on our level, we maintained them in their poise with our superior
+gravity and our certain body, giving them light, being what sun there was
+in this new system in another sky.  Above them there was nothing, and
+around them was blind distance, and below them the abyss of space.  Their
+lights gathered to our centre, an incoming of delicate and shining
+mooring 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 pealing
+commenced which accompanied us on the long drift up to Gravesend.  There
+were eight miles of ships: barges, colliers, liners, clippers, cargo
+steamers, ghost after ghost took form ahead, and then went astern.  More
+than once the fog thickened again, but the skipper never took way off her
+while he could make out a ship ahead of us.  We drifted stern first on
+the flood, with half-turns of the propeller for steering purchase, till a
+boatman, whom we hailed, cried that we were off Gravesend.  And was there
+any 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 feet
+again.  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, and
+condensed milk in weak tea; and so entered, and corrected the
+recollection with a glass of port--several glasses, to make sure of
+it--and that great hunk of plum-cake which I had occasionally seen in a
+dream.  Besides, this was Christmas Eve.
+
+
+
+
+XI. An Old Lloyd's Register
+
+With the sensation that I had survived into a strange and a hostile era
+that had nothing to do with me, for its affairs were not mine, I was
+inside a submarine, during the War, talking to her commander.  He was
+unravelling for me the shining complexity of his "box of tricks," as he
+called his ship.  He was sardonic (there was no doubt he was master of
+the brute he so lightly villified), and he was blithe, and he
+illustrated his scientific monologue with stories of his own
+experiences in the Heligoland Bight.  These, to me, were like the
+bedevilments 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 extinct
+race of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of the
+monstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now.  That made an
+acute difference.  This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, but
+actuality.  And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he was
+like the men of that group on the _Queen Mary_ who were similarly
+mocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks before, their expert share in
+forwarding the work we had given them in this new age; and then where
+were 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 was
+strange navigation.  He was a merchant seaman.  He had served his time
+in sailing ships.  I asked him to name some of them, having the feeling
+that 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 more
+astonished.  In a sense, it was the same thing.  The _Cutty Sark_ was
+in the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, but at the end.  That
+era, though it closed so recently, was already as far as a vague
+memory.  The new sea engines had come, and here we were with them,
+puzzled and embarrassed, having lost our reasonable friends.  I told
+him I had known the _Cutty Sark_, and had seen that master of hers--a
+character who went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap--who gave one of her
+masts (the mizzen, I think) a golden rooster, after he had driven her
+from 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 bills
+of lading and freight accounts, I was advised to ship four hundred
+cases to Sydney, New South Wales; and one-half of that consignment, my
+instructions ran, was to arrive a month before the other.  The first
+lot went in a modern steel barque, the _Cairnbulg_.  ("I have seen
+her," said this submarine officer).  More than a fortnight later, being
+too young to remember that the little _Cutty Sark_ had been one of the
+China tea clippers, I shipped the last half of the consignment in her.
+But she disordered all the careful plans of the consignees.  She got in
+a fortnight ahead of the _Cairnbulg_.
+
+The effect of that casual recollection on the submarine officer was
+distinctly unwarlike.  This memory, and not his present work, might
+have been the real thing.  He knew Woodget, the man in the Glengarry.
+He wanted to know more; ever so much more.  He mentioned other ships
+and 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 use
+them.  What we have conjured up compels us to live with it.  But when
+you do not go to sea you may have what ships you like.  There is some
+but not much interest in the reappearance in the newspapers of the
+sailing lists; a few of the old names appear again, though new ships
+bear them.  But late at night, when a westerly wind with rain turns for
+me a neighbouring yew tree into an invisible surge, then it is the
+fortune of one who remembers such as the _Cutty Sark_ to choose
+different ships and other times.  Why not choose them?  They were
+comely ships, and now their time seems fair.  Who would care to
+remember the power and grey threat of a modern warship, or the exotic
+luxury of a liner of this new era?  Nobody who remembers the
+graciousness of the clippers, nor the pride and content of the seamen
+who worked them.  To aid the illusion of the yew, I have one of those
+books which are not books, a _Lloyd's Register of Shipping_ for 1880,
+that by some unknown circuitous route found its way from its first
+owner 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 is
+the name of the ship which carried it.  Anyhow, I think I can make out
+in 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 the
+South-West India Dock, I met a stranger, a seaman looking for work, who
+regretted its disappearance, and the new company-owned steamers; for he
+said they were good ships, "but more than that," he told me, "Allan was
+an old gentleman who knew his own ships, and knew his men."  This
+stranger said you forget a ship now as soon as you are paid off, "and
+glad to," and "you don't ever know who owns her, even if there's a
+strike.  Parsons and old maids and Cardiff sharks, I reckon."
+
+Very likely.  But what sharks once were in it have all disappeared from
+my Register.  It belongs to those days when, if you went to New
+Zealand, you had to go by sailer; when the East India Dock had an
+arcade of jib-booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a varnished shark's
+tail 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 how
+can we tell?  There were personal figureheads, there were shapely
+forms, each with its own narrative of adventure, there was the
+undiscovered sea, and there was youth; and these have gone.
+
+It is all very well to say that the names and mere words in this old
+Register have no more meaning today than a railway time-table of the
+same date.  Hardly to be distinguished in the shadows in some corners
+of St. Paul's Cathedral from which night never quite goes, there are
+certain friendless regimental colours.  Few of us know now who bore
+them, and where, and why; but imagine the deserved fate of one who
+would allow a brutal word to disturb their dust!  They mean nothing,
+except that men, in a world where it is easy to lose faith, treasure
+the few tokens of faithfulness, courage, and enterprise proved in their
+fellows; and so those old staffs, to which cling faded and dusty rags,
+in a real sense support the Cathedral.  Poplar once was a parish whose
+name was more familiar in Eastern seas and on the coasts of the
+Americans, and stood for something greater and of more value, than the
+names of some veritable capital cities.  That vista down the East India
+Dock Road from North Street, past the plane trees which support on a
+cloud the cupola of Green's Chapel, to the gateway of the dock which
+was built for John Company, was what many would remember as essential
+London who would pass the Mansion House as though it were a dingy and
+nameless tavern.  At the back of that road today, and opposite a church
+which was a chapel-of-ease to save the crews of the East Indiamen lying
+off Blackwall the long walk to Stebonhythe Church, is the public
+library; and within that building are stored, as are the regimental
+colours in the Cathedral, the houseflags of those very ships my
+Register helps me to remember--the tokens of fidelity and courage, of a
+service that was native, and a skill in that service which was
+traditional to the parish.  Tokens that now are dusty and in their
+night, 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, and
+refuse to allow these names to carry one-way.  There are so many of
+them.  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's
+catalogue.  They call to be written down, to be sung aloud, to be
+shared with a friend.  But I know the quick jealousy of some old
+sailor, his pride wounded here by an unjustifiable omission of the ship
+that was the one above all others for him, is bound to be moved by
+anything less than a complete reprint here of the Register.  How, for
+example, could I give every name in the fleet of the White Star of
+Aberdeen?  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 as
+beautiful as the old _Thermopylae_?  There is not.  It is impossible.
+There was the _Samuel Plimsoll_ of that line--now a coal hulk at
+Gibraltar--which must be named, for she was Captain Simpson's ship (he
+was commodore afterwards), the "merry blue-eyed skipper" of Froude's
+_Oceana_, but much more than that, a sage and masterful Scot whose talk
+was worth a long journey to hear.
+
+The houseflag of Messrs. R. and H. Green, in any reference to the ships
+of Blackwall, should have been mentioned first.  There is a sense in
+which it is right to say that the founder of that firm, at a time when
+American craft like the Boston clippers of Donald McKay were in a fair
+way to leave the Red Ensign far astern, declared that Blackwall had to
+beat those American flyers, and did it.  But that was long before the
+eighties, and when steam was still ridiculed by those who could not see
+it equalling clippers that had logged fourteen knots, or made a day's
+run of over three hundred miles.  Yet some of Green's ships came down
+to the end of the era, like the _Highflyer_ and the _Melbourne_.  The
+latter was renamed the _Macquarie_, and was one of the last of the
+clippers to come home to Poplar, and for that reason, and because of
+her noble proportions, her picture is kept, as a reminder, by many who
+wish to think of ships and the sea as they were.  It is likely that
+most who live in Poplar now, and see next to its railway station the
+curious 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 who
+remember Blackwall when its shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers, and
+caulkers were men of renown and substance, and who can recall, not only
+Richard Green, but that dog of his, for it knew the road to the dock
+probably better than most of those who use it today.  Poplar was the
+nursery of the Clyde.  The flags which Poplar knew well would puzzle
+London now--Devitt and Moore's, Money Wigram's, Duthie's, Willis's,
+Carmichael's, Duncan Dunbar's, Scrutton's, and Elder's.  But when
+lately our merchant seamen surprised us with a mastery of their craft
+and a fortitude which most of us had forgotten were ever ours, what
+those flags represented, a regard for a tradition as ancient and as
+rigorous as that of any royal port, was beneath it all.
+
+But if it were asked what was this tradition, it would not be easy to
+say.  Its authority is voiceless, but it is understood.  Then what is
+it one knows of it?  I remember, on a day just before the War, the
+flood beginning to move the shipping of the Pool.  Eastward the black
+cliffs lowered till they sank under the white tower of Limehouse
+Church; and the church, looking to the sunset, seemed baseless, shining
+with a lunar radiance.  Upriver, the small craft were uncertain, moving
+like phantoms over a pit of bottomless fire.  But downstream every ship
+was as salient as though lighted with the rays of a great lantern.  And
+there in that light was a laden barque, outward bound, waiting at the
+buoys.  She headed downstream.  Her row of white ports diminished along
+the 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 merge
+in one fine line at the jibboom.  The lines sweeping down and airily
+rising again were light as the swoop of a swallow.  The symmetry of her
+laden hull set in a plane of dancing sun-points, and her soaring amber
+masts, cross-sparred, caught in a mesh of delicate cordage, and shining
+till they almost vanished where they rose above the buildings and stood
+against the sky, made her seem as noble and haughty as a burst of great
+music.  One of ours, that ship.  Part of our parish.
+
+
+
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