055L^ 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Date Due 
 
 UAV fM^^ 
 
 flfr** 
 
 
 
 nIAi '^ri J. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 iWNrr 
 
 uSTtta 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 & 
 
 23Z33G 
 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 
 PR6039.O55L81921 
 
 London river. 
 
 3 1924 013 231 927 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013231927 
 
London River 
 
H. M. TOMLINSON 
 
 LONDON 
 RIVER 
 
 ^Rlt3 
 
 GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK 
 
 GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. 
 
 lu 
 
OOFTBIQHT, 1921, BY AIiTKlSD A. EKOPT, INC. 
 
 3 
 
 ICAirCTACTTIBED IN THS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
TO 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 AND TO THE MEMORY OF 
 
 MY FATHER 
 
Contents 
 
 I The Foreshore, ii 
 
 II A Midnight Voyage, 33 
 
 III A Shipping Parish, 43 
 
 IVi The "Heart's Desirei," 75 
 
 ■V: The Master, 95 
 
 VI The SHip-RtrwNERS, los 
 
 VII Not in the Almanac, 151 
 
 VIII The Illusion, 161 
 
 IX In a Coffee-Shop, 173 
 
 X Off-Shore, 187 
 
 XI An Old Lloyd's Register, 241 
 
I. The Foreshore 
 
 \ 
 
I. The Foreshore 
 
 IT begins on the north side of the City, at 
 Poverty Corner. It begins impercep- 
 tibly, 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 bjrways 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? Lon- 
 don 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 Bays- 
 water and Clapham as though deep water in- 
 tervened. In a sense deep water does; and 
 
 [II] 
 
London River 
 
 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 en- 
 terprise 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 evi- 
 dent 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 pic- 
 ture — and her master, and it is possible the 
 oldest of them remembers the clippers of that 
 fleet of which she alone now carries the em- 
 blem; 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 
 
 [12] 
 
The Foreshore 
 
 men to run a little river steamer, with a free- 
 board of six inches, out to Delagoa Bay, you 
 could engage them all at this corner, or at 
 the taverns just up the turning. The sugges- 
 tion 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 appear- 
 ance 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 be- 
 yond, 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 por- 
 trait 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 thoughtsy 
 which we try to make reasonable, betray that 
 accidental shape. It may be said that I looked 
 [13] 
 
London River 
 
 into this window while still soft. The conse- 
 quence, 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 naviga- 
 tors. And not only those things. There was 
 a section given to books, with classics like 
 Stevens on Stowage, and Node's Navigatioriy 
 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 bet- 
 ter are charts, especially when you cannot read 
 them except by guessing at their cryptic letter- 
 ing! 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 sea- 
 ward side to show at what distance mariners 
 pick up the real lights at night. Through 
 
 [14J 
 
The Foreshore 
 
 such windows, boys with bills of lading and 
 mates' receipts in their pockets, being on er- 
 rands 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 remem- 
 bered 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 lime- 
 stone and red granite offices, a massive arch- 
 way in its centre leading, it could be believed, 
 to. an enclosure of night left by the eighteenth 
 
 [ [15] 
 
London River 
 century, and forgotten. I never saw anybody 
 go into it, or come out. How could they? 
 It was of another time and place. The famil- 
 iar Tower, the Guildhall that we knew nearly 
 as well, the Cathedral which certainly ex- 
 isted, for it could often be seen in the distance, 
 and the Abbey that was little more than some- 
 thing 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 go- 
 ing east, bearing bales and cases, and the pack- 
 ages 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 
 cupboartis 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 him- 
 self was bound, through turning to follow with 
 [i6] 
 
The Foreshore 
 
 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 sea- 
 birds 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 
 [17] 
 
London River 
 
 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 som- 
 bre 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 be- 
 low, 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 en- 
 closing the Pool are spectral in a winter light, 
 and might be no more than the almost forgot- 
 ten memory of a dark past. Looking at them 
 intently, to give them a name, the wayfarer 
 on the bridge could imagine they were main- 
 tained 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 
 [1-8] 
 
The Foreshore 
 people on it are being drawn unresisting into 
 that lower world of shades. You release your- 
 self from this spell with an feflfort, 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 go- 
 ing. 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, re- 
 gret that we never ventured and made no dis- 
 covery, 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 high- 
 way 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 
 [19] 
 
London. River 
 — a cobbled forecourt, tame pigeons, cabs, a 
 brick front topped by a clock-face : Fenchurch 
 Street Station. Beyoiid 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; noth- 
 ing could live there. Smoke still pours from 
 it, as though it were volcanic, from number- 
 less 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 burilt 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 Dock- 
 land. 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 
 
 [20] 
 
The Foreshore 
 
 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 an- 
 swer. As by mocking chance the desert itself 
 almost instantly shows what possibilities are 
 hidden within it. The train roars unexpect- 
 edly 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 schoon- 
 er get into such an enclosure? Is freedom 
 nearer here than we thought? 
 
 The crust of roofs ends abruptly in a coun- 
 try which is a complexity of gasometers, ca- 
 nals, railway junctions, between which cab- 
 bage 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 
 
 [21] 
 
London River 
 
 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 un- 
 related ; those ships were phantom and mon- 
 strous. They seemed on too great a scale to be 
 within human control. We felt diminished 
 and a little fearful, as among the looming ur- 
 gencies 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 down- 
 stream — now she was exposed to a great ad- 
 venture — the tide rapid and noisy on her 
 plates, the reek from her funnel sinking over 
 
 [22] 
 
The Foreshore 
 
 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 Black- 
 wall 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 
 
 [23] 
 
London River 
 
 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 our- 
 selves 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 
 [24] 
 
The Foreshore 
 
 kind. There she was, her flush deck well be- 
 low 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 Eliz- 
 abethans, 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 sec- 
 onds, without speaking, the messenger above. 
 Then he talked business, and more than legit- 
 imate 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 
 
 [25] 
 
Eondon River 
 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 re-" 
 ticent 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 flut- 
 tering 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 alto- 
 gether, goes to Wapping Old Stairs. Prince 
 Rupert once went that way. The ketch Non- 
 such, Captain Zachary Gillam, was then lying 
 just off, about to make the voyage which estab- 
 lished the Hudson's Bay Company. 
 [26] 
 
The Foreshore 
 
 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 de- 
 scendants of those primitives went out of 
 London, when projecting the original enter- 
 prise 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 impos- 
 sible 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 Dept- 
 ford docks, and from Tower Hill along Wap-^ 
 ping 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. 
 
 [27] 
 
London River 
 It could not get down. It is not easy to be- 
 lieve the River is near. It seldom shows. 
 You think at times you hear the distant call of 
 a ship. But what would that be? Some- 
 thing 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 pen- 
 dulous from the cable of a derrick. tBelow 
 him one of the horses of a van tosses its nose- 
 bag. There is no other movement. A car- 
 man leans against an iron post, and cuts bread 
 and cheese with a clasp-knife. It was curi- 
 ous 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 ware- 
 houses 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 
 [28] 
 
The Foreshore 
 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. 
 
 [29] 
 
II. A Midnight Voyage 
 
11. 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 un- 
 lighted and devious. Yet it was somewhere 
 near. This area of still and empty night 
 railed ofif 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 
 
 [33]. 
 
London River 
 
 they might get found out. Was this the 
 church? Three Chinamen were disputing 
 by its gate. Perhaps they were in disagree- 
 ment as to where the church would be in day- 
 light. 
 
 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 
 
 [34] 
 
A Midnight Voyage 
 
 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 foun- 
 der 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 dis- 
 tance and terror. The warning from an 
 unseen steamer going out was as if a soul, cross- 
 ing 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 Lime- 
 
 [35] 
 
London River 
 
 house 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 lei- 
 surely 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, 
 
 [36] 
 
A Midnight Voyage 
 
 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 Liz- 
 zie 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. 
 
 [37] 
 
London River 
 
 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. Per- 
 haps 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. Per- 
 haps 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 irrespon- 
 sible power. It was the same flood which 
 had sunk Knossos and Memphis. It was tran- 
 quil, 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. 
 
 IWe knew that place in another life. But 
 
 should Charon joke with us? We saw only 
 
 [38] 
 
A Midnight Voyage 
 
 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 con- 
 fidence that was fearful amid what was sight- 
 less 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 fur- 
 nace 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 re- 
 fined it as well as reduced it. We were nearly 
 round the loop the River makes about Mill- 
 wall, and this unknown region before us was 
 [39] 
 
London River 
 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 mo- 
 mentary form. It was as though, from the 
 place where it starts, the dawn had been re- 
 leased 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 
 ,uperior deck. She left us riotous in her wake, 
 £40] 
 
A Midnight Voyage 
 
 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 flames and dark- 
 ness 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 pro- 
 gress 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." 
 
 [41] 
 
III. A Shipping Parish 
 
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 al- 
 together expressionless mask, staring at noth- 
 ing. Anyhow, there must be very little to be 
 learned from it, for those bright young cul- 
 tured 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 any- 
 thing 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 
 [45] 
 
London River 
 
 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 dis- 
 illusioned 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 terrify- 
 ing, 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 
 [46] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 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 vas- 
 cular 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 instinc- 
 tively, 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 unremark- 
 able 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 
 
 [47]: 
 
London River 
 
 ships and brave affairs, and good men forgot- 
 ten, 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 inex- 
 orable 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, memo- 
 ries 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 pecu- 
 liarly 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 
 [48] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 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 vaga- 
 bondage hidden in what seemed so arid a 
 commonplace desert. These are of first im- 
 portance. 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 oflicial 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 popula- 
 tion 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. 
 
 [49] 
 
London River 
 
 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 Dock- 
 land, 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 sun- 
 rise 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 morn- 
 ing. 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 
 [50] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 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 out- 
 look. Several superior peaks rise out of the 
 wilderness, where the churches are; and be- 
 yond the puzzling middle distance, where 
 smoke dissolves all form, loom the dock ware- 
 houses, 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 en- 
 chanted 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, ani dissolve. The freak- 
 ish 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 
 
London River 
 
 in colours and form. I doubt whether the 
 people below are sensitive to this ironic dis- 
 play 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 direc- 
 tion, 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 thorough- 
 fare 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 — Mala- 
 bar 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. 
 [52] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 We have, still flourishing in a garden, John 
 Company's Chapel of St. Matthias, a frag- 
 ment of a time that was, where now the vigor- 
 ous 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 Com- 
 pany'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 car- 
 goes, 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 Step- 
 ney. 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 be- 
 gan to reshape Dockland. There came a 
 time when the Americans looked in a fair 
 
 [53] 
 
London River 
 
 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 Amer- 
 icans were actually making heroic efforts to 
 smother them with canvas. Mr. Green, of 
 Poplar, worried over those Boston craft, de- 
 clared 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, 
 [54] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 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 penny- 
 worth 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, per- 
 haps 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 remem- 
 
 [55] 
 
London River 
 
 ber 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 Christ- 
 mas, 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 
 [56] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 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 hav- 
 ing 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, look- 
 ing wonderfully young, as you may have no- 
 ticed 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 accord- 
 ing to their age, and became really my grand- 
 
 [57] 
 
London River 
 
 parents, 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 anti- 
 macassar 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 im- 
 mense 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 
 [58] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 
 ithe recollection of a strange odour which fell 
 from it when its door opened, as though some- 
 thing 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 after- 
 noon, 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 
 [59] 
 
London River 
 would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless 
 atoms swimming in it, slanting from a comer 
 of the window to brighten a patch of carpet 
 Two flies would be hovering under the ceil- 
 ing. 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 Aen, quiet and 
 still as it seemed, was actually rocking on the 
 flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, 
 sick with anxiety and bewilderment in guid- 
 ing his home in the years he did not under- 
 stand, which his experience had never charted, 
 was sinking nerveless at his helm. For he 
 heard, when his children did not, the pre- 
 monition of breakers in seas having no land- 
 mark 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 modem. 
 
 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 
 
 [60] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 Katherine is now. Beyond that, and only 
 marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and 
 a few other signs to mark recognizable coun- 
 try. 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 can- 
 not compare with a cathedral city; but an- 
 tiquity 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 experi- 
 [6i] 
 
London River 
 
 ence of Wapping, Poplar, Rotherhithe, Lime- 
 house, 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 grada- 
 [62] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 tions 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 for- 
 eign 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 Lon- 
 don, 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 grace- 
 ful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse 
 spars giving breadth and balance, and steady- 
 ing the unhindered lift skywards of main and 
 mizzen poles. The model of this Russian 
 ship was as memorable as a Greek statue. 
 
 [63] 
 
London River 
 
 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 tinc- 
 tured 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 Dock- 
 land, though now they come to us with less 
 frequency. If the skipper of the Oberon 
 could now look down the Dock Road from the 
 comer by North Street, what he would look 
 for first would be, not, I am sure, what com- 
 
 [64] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 pelled 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 ves- 
 sels 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 mer- 
 chandise. 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 
 
 [65] 
 
London River 
 
 of sug^ar crushed under foot, with its libations 
 of syrup poured from the plenty of the sunny 
 isles. Today the quays are bare and des- 
 erted, and grass rims the stones of the foot- 
 way, 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, be- 
 come absorbed in the dark. Night with- 
 draws their substance. What the solitary 
 wayfarer sees then is the incorporeal present- 
 ment of ships. Dockland expires. The 
 living and sounding day is elsewhere, light- 
 ing the new things on which the young are 
 working. Here is the past, deep in the ob- 
 scurity 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 line evenings, I find one of our ancients, 
 [66] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 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 ofif, 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, 
 
 [67] 
 
London River 
 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 pro- 
 gress, resembles it, especially when your work 
 is finished and you are only waiting and look- 
 ing 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, out- 
 ward 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 noth- 
 ing 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 move- 
 ment, 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 cogi- 
 [68] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 tating tobacco smoke. Let it go. We, watch- 
 ing quietly from our place on the pier-head, 
 are wiser than the moving world in one re- 
 spect. We know it does not know whence 
 it is moving, nor why. Well, perhaps its pre- 
 siding 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, be- 
 comes 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. 
 lYet the hum of the steam is too subdued a 
 [69] 
 
London River 
 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 com- 
 motion, we hear the voice again, and answer- 
 ing 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 occult- 
 ing 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 navi- 
 [70] 
 
A Shipping Parish 
 
 gator 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. 
 
 '[71] 
 
IV. The Heart's Desire 
 
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 indif- 
 ferent even to its defeat, and of waiting va- 
 cantly 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 mus- 
 lin 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 
 
 l7Sl 
 
London River 
 
 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 chil- 
 dren were a lively yet merely revolving eddy. 
 They could not get out. When I first vis- 
 ited Mr. Pascoe, as there was no window orna- 
 ment to distinguish his place from the others, 
 and his number was missing, I made a mis- 
 take, 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 en- 
 closed 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 obstruc- 
 tions. 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 un- 
 seen roof. What was faintly like the prow of 
 a boat shaped near. Then out from the lum- 
 [76] 
 
The Heart's Desire 
 
 ber and suggestions of things a gnome ap- 
 proached 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 bobbing 
 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 
 
 l77l 
 
London River 
 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 conse- 
 quence of his deformity, continuing his dis- 
 course, 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 no- 
 ticed. 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 non- 
 descript lumps were to be guessed at, like 
 fossils embedded in shadow. They had never 
 [78] 
 
The Heart's Desire 
 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. ^^ ^^^ 
 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 care- 
 ful 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 pic- 
 ture 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 apprehen- 
 sion. It would be difScult 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 Amer- 
 ica 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 
 
 [79] 
 
London River 
 
 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 Yuca- 
 tan — lost in the forest, temples and gods and 
 everything. Men and women there, once up- 
 on a time, thinking they were a fine people, 
 the only great people, with a king and prin- 
 cesses 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 ar^ 
 mour. 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. 
 [80] 
 
The Heart's Desire 
 
 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 sen- 
 sitive mind. But here he was, telling of In- 
 cas, 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 wilder- 
 ness, 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 bob- 
 bing foot before me, tore the shoe from it, 
 flung it contemptuously on the floor, and 
 [8i] 
 
London River 
 approached me with a flamboyant hammer, 
 And that evening I feared for a moment 
 that Pascoe was spoiled for me. He had ad- 
 mitted me to a close view of some secret 
 treasured charms of his memory, and believ- 
 ing 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 reputa- 
 tion, many of our contemporary master mar- 
 iners. 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 al- 
 most akin to alarm ; because in a man of Pas- 
 coe's years this fond insistence on the best fur- 
 niture for one's own little ship went beyond 
 [82]: 
 
The Heart's Desire 
 
 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 moor- 
 ings, 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 tar- 
 paulins. 
 
 "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 dis- 
 closed a vessel whose hull was nearing com- 
 pletion. I did not ask if it was Pascoe's 
 [83] 
 
London River 
 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 astonish- 
 ing 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 
 
 [84] 
 
iThe Heart's Desire 
 
 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 Satur- 
 day evening, when I called, his room was in 
 darkness. Striking a match, there was his 
 apron shrouding his bobbing 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, luxu- 
 riating in it, "and I've often wondered what 
 name he'd give her, and he done it this morn- 
 ing, 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 
 
 [8S] 
 
London River 
 
 '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 crip- 
 ples who took in young and innocent boots, 
 promising them all things, and then treach- 
 erously abandoned them, to do God knew 
 what; and so I left. 
 
 This became serious; for old Pascoe, with 
 his Hearts Desire, had vanished, like his Tol- 
 tecs. A week went by. The barge-builder, 
 for whom this had now ceased to be a joke, 
 was vastly troubled by the complete disappear- 
 ance 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 prom- 
 ising, 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- 
 [86] 
 
The Heart's Desire 
 
 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 occa- 
 sional 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 regard- 
 ing 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 en- 
 tered, 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 
 
 [87] 
 
London River 
 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 vola- 
 tility and omniscience. It was certainly not 
 his business to allow any place to keep its 
 secrets to itself; indeed, his reputation in- 
 cluding even a capacity for humour, the world 
 was frequently delighted with more than the 
 place itself knew even in secret. Other cor- 
 respondents from London were also in the 
 room. I saw them vaguely when Hopkins 
 indicated their positions widi 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. iWe 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 
 [88] 
 
The Heart's Desire 
 
 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 Lon- 
 don. "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 Hop- 
 kins, 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 Carib- 
 bees. I'll do it. She should take no more 
 than a fortnight to put right." 
 
 There was no need to argue with him. The 
 
 Hearfs Desire, a centre of attraction in the 
 
 place, answered any doubt I had as to Pascoe's 
 
 safety. But he was humoured. Hopkins hu- 
 
 [89] 
 
London River 
 
 moured him, even openly encouraged him. 
 The Heart's Desire was destined for a great 
 adventure. The world was kept in anticipa- 
 tion of the second departure for this strange 
 voyage to Guatemala. The Heart's Desire, 
 on the edge of a ship-repairer's yard, was tink- 
 ered, 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 un- 
 expected 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, 
 itheir faces still reflecting the brightness of 
 an excellent entertainment. Hopkins took 
 me aside. "I've made it right with old Pas- 
 coe. 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 
 [90] 
 
The Heart's Desire 
 
 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. 
 
 l9^1 
 
V. The Master 
 
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 ap- 
 prenticed 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 oc- 
 casion was quite simple, were absurdly in- 
 
 [95] 
 
London River 
 
 commensurate 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 un- 
 announced as his appearance, we could will- 
 ingly 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, andl! 
 placidly stays where it is, in its wooden man- 
 ner, 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 master's ticket. 
 After the first shock of surprise, caused by 
 the fact that this information was an unex- 
 pected 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 
 [96] 
 
The Master 
 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 charac- 
 ters gathered by chance from Tower Hill, 
 socialize them, and direct them successfully 
 in subduing the conflicting elements of a dif- 
 ficult enterprise. Not he. jBut 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 
 [97] 
 
London River 
 
 the alert for thieves and parasites. I think 
 he enjoyed his belief in their crafty omnipres- 
 ence 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 waysidd 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 par- 
 son would have stepped over without a sec- 
 ond 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 re- 
 ports in the Shipping Gazette. He made 
 point after point safely — St. Vincent, Gib- 
 raltar, 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 
 
 [9«] 
 
The Master 
 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 re- 
 member 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 neighbour- 
 hood. 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 
 
 [99] 
 
London River 
 
 that he could be the master of this huge com- 
 munity 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 rec- 
 ognized at once as a sailor's, approached us. 
 He was introduced as the chief officer. He 
 had a tale of woe: trouble with the dock- 
 master, 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 mo- 
 ment 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 py- 
 jamas, and there was hardly enough paper. 
 The respect of the mate was not lessened by 
 this. 
 
 The skipper went to gaze down a hatch- 
 way. He walked to the other side of the ship, 
 and inspected something there. Conned her 
 length, called up in a friendly but authorita- 
 
 [lOO] 
 
The Master 
 tive 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 bewil- 
 dering and unrelated lights about us. Per- 
 emptory 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. 
 
 [lOl] 
 
VI. The Ship-Runners 
 
VI. The Ship-Runners 
 
 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 Mac- 
 andrew, 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 for- 
 [105] 
 
London River 
 lorn, 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 prin- 
 cipal 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 por- 
 tico to the saloon bar; a Chinese animal, in 
 colour and mane resembling a lion whose 
 dignity has become sullenness through diminu- 
 tion. 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 
 [io6] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 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 he 
 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 confiden- 
 tially 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 
 [107] 
 
London River 
 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 e»^ 
 aggerated 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 uni- 
 form cap worn a little too carelessly, nodded to 
 the company, and went out with his compan- 
 ion. 
 
 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 
 
 [io8] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 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 spec- 
 tacles on his nose, and grinned. With that 
 grin, and his spectacles, he was as surprising 
 as a handsome gargoyle. His height com- 
 pelled him to lean forward and to grin down- 
 ward, 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 earn- 
 [109] 
 
London River 
 
 estly 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. "Go- 
 ing? 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 
 [no] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 you next on the list for Chief ? You're roman- 
 tic, 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. 
 iDo 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, 
 
 [III] 
 
London River 
 
 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? iBill 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. 
 
 [112] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 "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 re- 
 fused 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 enter- 
 prise. 
 
 "You mistake me. Chief," he said. "You 
 are only improving my reasons for going. 
 Not only is the ship crank, but so is her skip- 
 per. Now tell me . . ." 
 
 Macandrew frowned at his junior, and his 
 curiously pale eyes became distinctly inhuman. 
 
 [113] 
 
London River 
 
 I believe he thought his counsel was being 
 laughed at. But the door opened, and he 
 touched Hanson's arm. A little man of mid- 
 dle 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 Han- 
 son, 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 mo- 
 mentary survey, made to shake hands with 
 Hanson, but hesitated, and did so only because 
 Hanson put out his own great fist with de- 
 cision. 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 
 
 [114] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 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." 
 
 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 out- 
 side open-armed and oscillating, looked across 
 to the men lounging against the shipping- 
 office railings, and the idlers stared across at 
 
 [115] 
 
London River 
 
 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 dis- 
 covered 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 
 [ii6] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 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 
 [117] 
 
London River 
 
 him when he is in a difRculty. He raised his 
 eyes. , 
 
 "Anyhow," he despaired to me with irrel- 
 evance, "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 fail- 
 ure, 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 re- 
 member 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 
 
 [ii8] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 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 spec- 
 tacles, when a movement near the door 
 checked him. His hands remained at his 
 glasses, as if aiding his sight to certify the un- 
 believable. 
 
 [119] 
 
London River 
 "What's this?" he murmured. "Here's 
 Purdy. Isn't that the Negro Boy's barmaid 
 with him ... is she with him?" He con- 
 tinued to watch, apparently for some sign that 
 this coincidence of his captain and a barmaid 
 in a public ofSce 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, ap- 
 proached, 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 
 [120] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 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 im- 
 itation of indifference. 
 
 The Medea and the Cygnet, and the other 
 ships I knew which carried those whose for- 
 tunes were some concern of mine, might have 
 sailed over the edge of the world. My only 
 communication was with an occasional fam- 
 iliar 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 dry- 
 dock. 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 
 
 [121] 
 
London River 
 scrap-heap, but the ship had to be ready for 
 sea in ten days. Once he had worked thirty- 
 two hours on e»d. 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 mon- 
 ocle 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 
 [122] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 we had together — the old Siwalik—l 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 ex- 
 pression was one of undisguised boredom, or 
 only his show of conventional politeness. I 
 [123] 
 
London River 
 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 Rirer . . . 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 roman- 
 tic 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 
 [124] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 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 Na- 
 ture 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 1 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 &o?* 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. . . ." 
 
 [125] 
 
London River 
 
 Several cabs, on their way to a ship outward 
 bound, made an increasing noise in the night, 
 rattled by on the cobbles outside, their occu- 
 pants roaring a sentimental chorus, and 
 drowned what the doctor was saying. 
 
 ". . . folly. Worse than folly." He was 
 holding his gloves now, and was lightly flick- 
 ing 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 mon- 
 ocle, and I felt I was only a curious example 
 [126] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 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 complex- 
 ions 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 
 [127] 
 
London River 
 
 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 after- 
 wards 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. 
 [128] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 " *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.' 
 [129] 
 
London River 
 
 "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 penalcies. Good- 
 bye!' 
 
 "I must say she made me feel that if the 
 skipper of that ship had been of dififerent 
 [130] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 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? What- 
 ever 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 fix- 
 edly 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. 
 
 Ferguson, who had just come into port with 
 a damaged propeller shaft, was telling us how 
 it was. This was his first expansive experi- 
 
 [131] 
 
London River 
 ence, 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 thcway he solved his problem. 
 He was sitting at a table of the Negro Boy, 
 drawing a diagram on it, and thev 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 
 [132] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 salvation. They all escaped, and the Torring- 
 ton 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. 
 
 [133] 
 
London River 
 
 "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." 
 
 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 
 
 [134] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 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 forgot- 
 ten 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 resolu- 
 tion at a public meeting which had been 
 passed even by the women present. She was 
 severe and decisive, and without rec- 
 ognition 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 
 
 [135] 
 
London River 
 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 Asl^mng hope. The grin, 
 evidently knowing its power, was maintained 
 till I saw it indubitably as Hanson's. He 
 made a remembered gesture with his specta- 
 cles. "I was just about sick of this place," 
 he said. "I've waited here for an hour hop- 
 ing somebody would turn up. Where's Mac- 
 andrew 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?" 
 [136] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 "I'm running between Liverpool and Balti- 
 more now, in the Planets. They're comfort- 
 able 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 re- 
 mark 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, 
 
 [137] 
 
London River 
 
 "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 ofher 
 fellow." He beamed with the very remem- 
 brance 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 
 w<hat 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?" 
 [138] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 "Romance — romance be damned I 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°. 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." 
 [139] 
 
London River 
 
 "Did she look ill?" 
 
 "Jessie? Oh, I don't know. She looked 
 as if she might have been having a merrier 
 time. iWell, 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 im- 
 portant 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. 
 uThe 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 in- 
 tend 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 
 [140] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 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 destina- 
 tion 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 sup- 
 pose 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-shorels 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, think- 
 ing to bring Hanson to something I wanted 
 to hear, "what happened to your company. 
 
 [141] 
 
London River 
 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, won- 
 dering 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 
 [142] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 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 
 
 [143] 
 
London River 
 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. iWe'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 dra- 
 matic 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 
 [144] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 laughed at, wihen 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 ex- 
 pect much from him after a funeral." 
 
 Hanson bent over the table, and began tap- 
 ping it with a finger, and spoke slowly through 
 a surprise he still felt. "Old Purdy came to 
 [145] 
 
London River 
 
 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 fel- 
 low. In two days he was back. He had 
 found an outpost, four miles above, but no- 
 body 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 com- 
 pany's territory above the falls. 'You can 
 see for yourself,' Purdy said to me pathetic- 
 ally, '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 pack- 
 ages of mining gear, which only an expert 
 could understand, in a place where nothing 
 [146] 
 
The Ship-Runners 
 
 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, in- 
 cluding 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 desti- 
 nation 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 
 
 [147] 
 
London River 
 laughed fiercely, and kept looking at Purdy 
 in triumph. 'Him?' he shouted, when he 
 had got enough fun out of it, 'him? 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." 
 
 [148I 
 
VII. Not in the Almanac 
 
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 mat- 
 tresses, 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 be- 
 cause 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 
 
 [151] 
 
London River 
 "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 aeri- 
 als of wireless, and with science and an offi- 
 cial certificate of competency even in the gal- 
 ley! 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 supersti- 
 tions was on my table, some weeks later, and a 
 sailor, who gave up trading to the East to pa- 
 trol mine-fields for three years, and who has 
 never been known to lose any time when in 
 doubt through wasting it on a secret propitia- 
 tory gesture, picked up the book, smiling a lit- 
 tle superciliously, lost his Smile when ex- 
 amining it, and then asked if he might bor- 
 row 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 
 [152] 
 
Not in the Almanac 
 
 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 curi- 
 ous 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, 
 iand 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 
 
 [153] 
 
London River 
 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 tp 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 Liz- 
 ard 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 pal- 
 lor 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 
 
 [154] 
 
Not in the Almanac 
 
 that was invisible, but threatening. Then I 
 heard the skipper's 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 un- 
 related, 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 indubit- 
 able 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 Finislerre 
 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, 
 
 [IS5] 
 
London River 
 
 on the same course as himself, evidently 
 having calculated to pass Ushant in the morn- 
 ing; his own calculation. He would be off 
 Ushant later, for his speed was less than theirs. 
 iThere 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 ex- 
 perience 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 steam- 
 ers 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. 
 lYet I wish to add that later, my friend, when 
 [156] 
 
Not in the Almanac 
 
 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 cer- 
 tain passage, in some peculiar circumstances, 
 was what a wise man would not lightly under- 
 take. 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 eter 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 
 
 [157] 
 
London River 
 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 abun- 
 dant 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. 
 
 IisSJ 
 
VIII. The Illusion 
 
VIII. The Illusion 
 
 WHEN I came to the house in Mal- 
 abar 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 foun- 
 dering 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, 
 [i6i] 
 
London River 
 
 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 wa} 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 pave- 
 ments, as though briefly exalted with an un- 
 expected revelation. The radiance died. 
 Night came, and it was as if the twilight 
 native to the street clouded from its walls and 
 [162] 
 
The Illusion 
 
 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 Num- 
 ber 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 re- 
 membering why it was empty. But young 
 life would make it bright. 
 
 "People say things only change, but I like 
 [163] 
 
London River 
 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 foi' 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. 
 [164] 
 
The Illusion 
 The pair would hare 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, hair- 
 less, 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 ofif. 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 comer of the 
 
 table, stooped, and in one handful abruptly 
 
 hauled the cat off the ^-ug, laying its unresisting 
 
 body across his knees, and rubbing its ribs 
 
 [165] 
 
London River 
 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. Extraordin- 
 ary 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 noth- 
 ing to dream about." 
 
 [i66] 
 
The Illusion 
 
 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 clip- 
 per, the Oberon — it was central over the man- 
 tel-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, an<i 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. 
 [167] 
 
London River 
 
 "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 narra- 
 tive 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 I" 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 
 [16B] 
 
The Illusion 
 the next astern deeper beneath the horizon, 
 and to keep them there till he was off Black- 
 wall 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. OBut 
 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 pre- 
 destined 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 em- 
 phasize 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[ 
 [169] 
 
London River 
 
 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 ^6 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. 
 
 [170] 
 
IX. In a CoflFee-Shop 
 
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 de- 
 
London River 
 
 cision, 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 sup- 
 posed, 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 rec- 
 
 [174] 
 
In a Coffee-Shop 
 
 ognized 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 posses- 
 sion of the only proof of his identity. Then 
 he left the shipping office, and met some 
 friends. 
 
 Those friends 1 "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 
 
 [175] 
 
London River 
 
 oi 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 ex- 
 posed 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 
 [176] 
 
In a Coffee-Shop 
 
 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. 
 
 iWe 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 
 
London River 
 
 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 cal- 
 endar punctuated with dead flies, and a picture 
 in the dark by the side of the door of Lord 
 iBeaconsfield, 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 dis- 
 reputable 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 out- 
 side might have been any dismal neighbour- 
 hood of London. Its character had gone. 
 [178] 
 
In a Coffee-Shop 
 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? Pop- 
 
 [179] 
 
London River 
 lar's all right. We went over to Rotterdam 
 for something or other, bat 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 ap- 
 peared to be a little drowsy with food. "Ever 
 crossed the Western ocean in winter? Some- 
 times 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, watch- 
 ing 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, 
 [i8o] 
 
In a Coffee-Shop 
 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 ou|. 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 
 ithe 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. 
 [i8i] 
 
London River 
 
 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 
 [182] 
 
In a Coffee-Shop 
 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 nod- 
 ded. From the shipwright's next door the 
 steady, continuous hammering in the dry-dock 
 was heard again, as though it had been wait- 
 ing, and were now continuing the yarn. 
 
 [183] 
 
X. Off-Shore 
 
X. OflF-Shore 
 
 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. 
 
 [187] 
 
London River 
 
 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. Blub- 
 ber 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 chal- 
 lenging to a stranger. It was no place for me. 
 [i88] 
 
Off-Shore 
 i.rhe 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 perpen- 
 dicular 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, watch- 
 ing 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 docu- 
 ment. 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 
 [189] 
 
London River 
 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 
 [190] 
 
Off-Shore 
 
 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 
 
 [191] 
 
London River 
 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, "ayel" 
 
 "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 can- 
 na' look at that man's hands and argue reason- 
 able. 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 
 [192I 
 
Off-Shore 
 which gave it the appearance of improvisa- 
 tion, 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 signif- 
 icant 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 de- 
 parture 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 voy- 
 age 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, 
 [193], 
 
London River 
 
 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 
 
 [194] 
 
Off-Shore 
 
 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. 
 
 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 lugu- 
 brious by white lines which sweat had chan- 
 nelled 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 morn- 
 ing. We had been under way an hour. He 
 had got sixty revolutions now. He then 
 receded into the gloom beyond ; but material- 
 ized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of 
 
 [195] 
 
London River 
 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, an^un- 
 challenged escape. The shores unfolded in a 
 panorama without form. Once we spun past 
 an anchored ship, or what had been a ship be- 
 fore 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 
 [1963 
 
Ofif-Shore 
 
 '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 Bur- 
 rows Shoal the masts projected awry of the 
 wreck of a three-masted schooner, and they 
 could have been the fingers of the droAvned 
 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 sup- 
 pose, 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 
 
 [197] 
 
London. River 
 
 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 be- 
 came 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 
 [198] 
 
Off-shore 
 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 illumin- 
 ated 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 get- 
 ting 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, 
 
 [199] 
 
London River 
 
 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 illumin- 
 ation in the wheel-house but the restricted 
 glow from the binnacle, this silent comment of 
 mine on man and his fate caused the helms- 
 man no amusement. "I hope you are bring- 
 ing 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; 
 [200] 
 
Ofjf-Shore 
 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, ac- 
 [201] 
 
London River 
 
 companied by some sea-boots I met under the 
 table. As I was slowly and carefully climb- 
 ing 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 mo- 
 ments 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. To- 
 wards daybreak the skipper appeared in shin- 
 ing oilskins, tapped the barometer, glanced at 
 me, and laughed because my pillow — ^which 
 [202] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 up- 
 turned 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 con- 
 dition 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 frus- 
 [203] 
 
London River 
 trated 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 explain- 
 ed. "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 appoint- 
 ment at Charing Cross. He then backed into 
 the hatch and went below. The big mate ap- 
 peared, 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 for- 
 ward 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 great- 
 er pace, dragging rain over the waters. Our 
 fleet might have been half a mile away, and we 
 [204] 
 
Off-Shore 
 
 could have gone on, still looking for it. The 
 day early surrendered its light, a dismal sub- 
 mission 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 stand- 
 ing 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 skip- 
 per began to shout through his hands at her. 
 She was poised askew, in that arrested instant, 
 on ^ glassy slope of water, with its crest foam- 
 ing 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 fun- 
 nel was pointing at us. Her men bawled to 
 us. They said the Susie had sighted nothing. 
 Our engine-bell rang for us to part com- 
 pany. 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. 
 
 [20Sl 
 
London River 
 
 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 an- 
 other. "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 for- 
 ward 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 
 [206] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 saffrbn 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 after- 
 wards 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 sap- 
 phires, it is no longer possible for me to avoid 
 the saloon, the thought of which, for an ob- 
 scure reason, my mind loathed. 
 
 And our saloon, compared with the meas- 
 ure 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 
 [207] 
 
London River 
 
 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. 
 [208] 
 
Off-Shore 
 The heat of the room mounte3. The move- 
 ments 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 sum- 
 moned my scientific mind, which is not con- 
 nected 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 doubt- 
 ful innocence. "Well, I wish singing would 
 [209] 
 
London River 
 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 
 [210] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 rollick- 
 ing 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- 
 
 [211] 
 
London River 
 
 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 chan- 
 nels. 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 speed- 
 ing below like ghosts. The stars jolted back 
 and forth in wide arcs. There were explo- 
 sions 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. 
 iWe were ofif the Tail of the Dogger, and it 
 [212] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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." 
 
 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 com- 
 panions, I believe, regretted I had not been 
 omitted. I tried, therefore, to be inconspic- 
 uous, and went up to seclude myself at the 
 [213] 
 
London River 
 back of the boat on the poop, there to under- 
 study a dog which is sorry it did it. Not 
 adverse fate itself could show a more mis- 
 anthropic 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 look- 
 out 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 
 [214] 
 
Ofif-Shore 
 margin for error. So if they felt doubtful 
 they got a plummet, greased it, and dipped it 
 overboard. When it was hauled up they in- 
 spected whatever might be sticking to the tal- 
 low, 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 indiffer- 
 ence, 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 in- 
 nocent 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 
 
London River 
 
 singing. This gave my first trip an appear- 
 ance 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 ex- 
 pectant 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 
 ^hen 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 re- 
 sumed his silent parade of the bridge. The 
 helmsman grinned at the mate. By then the 
 wind had fallen, the seas were more deliber- 
 [216] 
 
Off-shore 
 ate; 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 break- 
 ing waves. 
 
 There is nothing to be done with an adven- 
 ture 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 num- 
 erous 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 unsatis- 
 factory process, and was then cutting up cake 
 tobacco with the rapture of an acolyte pre- 
 paring the incense. If this was what was 
 meant by getting lost on the Dogger, then the 
 method, if only its magic could be formulated, 
 [217] 
 
London River 
 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, im- 
 mense, 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, contem- 
 plative of us, finger on cheek, smiling with 
 approval of the scene below — ^melancholy ap- 
 proval, 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 think- 
 ing 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 achieve- 
 ments as is joy of death. The wind and sea 
 were chanting. The riding of the ship kept 
 time to that measure. The vault was tur- 
 quoise, and the moving floor was cobalt. The 
 white islands of the Olympians were in the 
 sky. 
 
 [218] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 sub- 
 merged body. She passed silently, a shining 
 [219] 
 
London River 
 phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms do. 
 
 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 over'tumed the fire- 
 shovel, 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 for- 
 gotten 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 mo- 
 ments in a life afloat when the kennel and 
 [220] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 sto- 
 ker was going forward off duty, in his shirt and 
 trousers, indifferent to the cruel wind which 
 bulged and quivered his thin rags. The skip- 
 per was on the bridge, his hands in the pock- 
 ets 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 to- 
 morrow, 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 voy- 
 age 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. 
 [221] 
 
London River 
 
 With the seas so swift and ponderous I com- 
 pletely 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 calcula- 
 ted, or erratic waves brought them danger- 
 ously 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 
 [222] 
 
Off-Shore 
 
 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 separ- 
 ate 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, swerv- 
 ing, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly 
 above us again for a charge, and then career- 
 ing at us with abandon on the next declivity 
 of glass. A boat would hesitate above us, 
 poised and rocking on the snoAvy 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; 
 [223] 
 
London River 
 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, follow- 
 ing 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. 
 
 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 
 [224] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 
 FisherjGround, 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 pro- 
 fundity of ancestral darkness my brother's 
 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 
 [225] 
 
London River 
 
 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 for- 
 tuitous 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 
 [226] 
 
Ofif-Shore 
 
 all we saw of a foundered region of prehis- 
 toric 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, catch- 
 ing 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 dip- 
 [227] 
 
London River 
 
 ping 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 wonder- 
 fully fine for winter and a sea that is notor- 
 iously evil. At twilight the wind dropped, 
 the heave of the waters decreased. The scat- 
 tered 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 promin- 
 ence, 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. 
 [228] 
 
Off-Shore 
 
 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 over- 
 side, I could see the pocket of our trawl 
 drawing near, still some fathoms deep, a phos- 
 phorescent and flashing cloud. It came in- 
 board, 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. 
 
 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 
 [229] 
 
London River 
 
 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 dis- 
 tracted. 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 
 [230] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 re- 
 versed, seemed to be going ahead with fright- 
 ful 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, listen- 
 ing 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. 
 
 [231] 
 
London River 
 
 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 stealth- 
 ily 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 over- 
 side. 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, witfi 
 [232] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 ap- 
 peared 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 turn- 
 ing to give orders — ^and then our hope turned 
 into a wide path on the ebbing River made 
 [233I 
 
London River 
 
 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 
 w'ith frost, to get a drink of hot coflfee, 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. 
 
 [234J 
 
Off-shore 
 
 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 morn- 
 ing, 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. iWe were the luminary, 
 and our faint aura revealed, through the melt- 
 ing 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 sugges- 
 tions of forms. Those near to us more nearly 
 approached the shapes we knew in another 
 life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting 
 
 [235] 
 
London River 
 
 in the obscurity of the dawn, were beyond re- 
 membrance and recognition. The Wind- 
 hover 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 crea- 
 tive 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 un- 
 plumbed 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 
 [236] 
 
Off-Shore 
 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 re- 
 membered the taste of everlasting fried fish, 
 and condensed milk in weak tea; and so en- 
 tered, 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. 
 
 [237] 
 
XL An Old Lloyd's Register 
 
XL 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 sub- 
 marine, during the War, talking to her com- 
 mander. 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 bedevil- 
 ments 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 ur- 
 gent remembrance that one of the monstrous 
 accidents this child knows of might happen 
 now. That made an acute difference. This 
 >vas not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, 
 [241] 
 
London River 
 
 but actuality. And as I looked at this mock- 
 ing 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 forward- 
 ing 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 mem- 
 ory. 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 Gutty Sark, and had 
 [242] 
 
An Old Lloyd's Register 
 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 busi- 
 ness 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 instruc- 
 tions 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 disor- 
 dered all the careful plans of the consignees. 
 She got in a formight 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 Wood- 
 get, the man in the Glengarry. He wanted to 
 know more; ever so much more. He men- 
 [243] 
 
London River 
 
 tioned 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 po- 
 tent and silent enigma about us. . . . 
 
 No such escape for him. We have fash- 
 ioned 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 reappear- 
 ance 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 gracious- 
 ness 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 
 
 [244] 
 
An Old Lloyd's Register 
 
 Shipping for 1880, that by some unknown cir- 
 cuitous 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 look- 
 ing 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 gentle- 
 man 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 Cardifif 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 
 
 [245] 
 
London River 
 
 the East India Dock had an arcade of jib- 
 booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a var- 
 nished shark's tail terminal — the Euterpe, 
 Jessie Readman, Wanganui, Waimea, Wat- 
 mate, Opawa, Margaret Galbraith, Helen 
 Denny, Lutterworth, and Hermione. There 
 were others. What is in these names? But 
 how can we tell ? There were personal figure- 
 heads, 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, ex- 
 cept that men, in a world where it is easy to 
 lose faith, treasure the few tokens of faithful- 
 ness, courage, and enterprise proved in their 
 fellows ; and so those old staffs, to which cling 
 faded and dusty rags, in a real sense support 
 [246] 
 
An Old Lloyd's Register 
 
 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 oflf Blackwall the 
 long walk to Stebonhythe Church, is the pub- 
 lic 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 to- 
 kens 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, 
 
 [247] 
 
London River 
 Coldstream — but one must be careful, and 
 refuse to allow these names to carry one away. 
 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 cata- 
 logue. 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 mov- 
 ing as a lyric? Is there in London River 
 today a ship as beautiful as the old Ther- 
 mopylce? 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. 
 
 [248] 
 
An Old Lloyd's Register 
 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 Black- 
 wall when its shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers, 
 
 [249]: 
 
London River 
 
 and caulkers were men of renown and sub- 
 stance, and who can recall, not Only Richard 
 Green, but that dog of his, for it Jtnew 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 rep- 
 resented, 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 tradi- 
 tion, it would not be easy to say. Its author- 
 ity 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 cliflfs 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. Up- 
 river, the small craft were uncertain, moving 
 like phantoms over a pit of bottomless fire. 
 [250] 
 
An Old Lloyd's Register 
 
 6ut downstream every ship was as salient as 
 though lighted with the rays of a great lan- 
 tern. 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 air- 
 ily 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. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [251]