CHAPTER XVIII
A callous-looking grey morning was breaking in the Mersey. Now and then, when a bell-buoy heaved, the bell tolled. It was just like that—tolling, tolling them home. Another steamer, swathed in mist, surged along, behind and a little to the side, but rapidly drawing level. Captain Williamson, coming to the bridge and gazing astern at that steamer that was but half vapour, turned away with some agility after his scrutiny, for she was another cattleboat, and he wanted to be berthed first. Those members of the "Push," the morning's feeding being over, who strolled as far forward as to the bridge, heard him speaking down the tube to the engine room. Sounds of energetic shovelling came up from the stoke-hole; the Glory put on the pace a little more as the other ship came level. The Glory led again. Captain Williamson, pacing the bridge, stirring up the morning haze, looked pleased. Again the other ship forged level, and he was heard chanting: "Shake her up! Shake her up!" The cattlemen took up the refrain, and addressed the deck on which they walked and double-shuffled, with "Shake her up! Shake her up!"
"Again the cattleships forged level."
"Oho!" shouted Cockney. "'Ere we are! Two stinks comin' 'ome!"
Michael leant on the rail and gazed at the rival ship with one eye, raised the shade slightly from the other and looked, to see if it improved.
"Iberian!" he said. "Iberian!" reading her name upon the bows.
"Hiberian," said Cockney.
"No, you're thinking of the Hibernian," replied Michael, still holding the shade up and peering, like a man testing new eye-glasses.
Cockney humped his shoulders and shot his face forward, then noticed Michael lifting that lid over his eye, and his mouth gave a twist of something like shame, and he turned away.
"It's the S dropped off," said the Inquisitive One. "I came over on her once—Siberian."
"Nothing of the kind!" said somebody else.
"Oh, gee!" said Mike. "You fellers are always scrapping."
"Well, what is it, then?" they asked him "What is her name?"
"Can't you rade?" asked Mike.
"Yes. But what is her name?"
"It's the S dropped off," Charlie repeated.
Mike shook his shoulders and that baffled look was on his forehead as he turned from them.
"Oh, indade," he said. "Nobody knows anything about it; and everybody's talking. You think you know all about it; maybe I think I know a hell of a lot; but we all know damn-all. If you want to know, keep your mouth shut till we get ashore. They'll be paid off along of us likely, and you'll hear what the man at the Board of Trade Office calls them. She's another ould ship the same as us, and that's enough to be goin' on with."
"Well, we're forgin a'ead, any'ow," said Cockney.
Suddenly their feet tingled and the sound of the siren came. They looked round and up. The haze had not thickened again-it was not for that she whistled.
"She's whistling for the cattle-sheds," somebody said. One of the others explained that in a race like this the steamer that passed a certain point first was the first to be unloaded, and the Glory was whistling to let them know ashore that she had done it. Some of the youngsters asked the older men if this was so, but they shook their heads; they did not know. They had often made the trip, but rules change. "Wait and see," was all that anybody could say.
A radiance began to come down into the haze, and the particles of moisture sparkled. A glory, a splendour, but ever so tenuous, ever so frail, was on the river-mist, a mist that waned fainter and fainter. The men lay along the rail and looked into the mist as though they sought to make sure of that evanescent radiance in it, to make sure that it was there, was not a trick of their eyes. The other steamer had now the air of giving up, fell behind, foot by foot, content to be second. One of the young men plucked Mike's elbow; he had been in a knot looking the other way.
"Is that right, Mike?" he asked, pointing to the long melancholy promenade that showed up ashore. "Is that where the toffs go to pick up the flash molls?"
"Oh, indade, I don't know," said Mike.
The Inquisitive One fell to chatting with Scholar, but asking questions in a way wholly different from that of the two catechists whom Scholar had desired to keep at arm's length—the Cardiff man, and the man from Fife in Scotland.
"Mike!" he said, suddenly. "Mike, Scholar has a mother!"
"Well, what about it?" asked Mike. "I expect ye had wan yersilf."
The Inquisitive One looked far off briefly, then a new thought came again to him.
"Got a father?" he asked, turning back to Scholar.
There was a look in Scholar's eyes that seemed somehow akin with that baffled look that showed in Mike's. He nodded. The Inquisitive One stood back, hands in pockets, and examined him with great interest.
"You're going home?" he said, accentuating the word. "You have a home?"
Mike turned away slightly. The Inquisitive One waggled his head sidewise as a sign that he wanted to draw Scholar aside again. Nobody who heard had jeered; some had pretended not to hear; only the chumming Welshman and the man from Dysart in Fife, standing together and apart, looked scorn, hate, contempt at these other two. Scholar was amazed to see that there were tears in the eyes of the Inquisitive One as he said:
"I often wonder what it's like going home. I've never had a father, and I've never had a mother. Straight! Will you be coming back on the ship?"—this suddenly, eagerly.
"I don't know. I think so."
"Tell me all about it when you come back, will yer? I would like to know."
But they were now being warped into the land, through channels between dock walls into docks, round the dock walls, sailors coming running along to hang over rope-fenders. The cattlemen kept quiet. There seemed to be no end to it. Men on shore caught ropes and ran, clattering and yelling. It was as if they were dragging for a corpse. Scholar felt a horror of the land, even as he had felt a horror of putting out to sea in that safe full of madmen, madmen that he felt now he would like to know more of—not probing like the Welshman, or the man from Fife, not even perhaps questioning personally like the Inquisitive One, but just sailing the seas with them after they had got over their cups. Suddenly they found that the ship was still. There was a rope ladder hanging over the other side. A broad-beamed little steamer lay there. The unruly members of the "Push," the shirk-works, were piling over the side and down the rope ladder.
"Come on, Mike!" someone called. "Ashore!"
"They're going to lave us to run the cattle ashore!" said Mike, disgusted, and he swung his legs over. Over they all went, one after the other, down the rope ladder, and jumped thence on to the bluff little steamer, where a man in a jersey stood looking at them curiously, staring; and another, a custom-house man, sat on the further bulwark watching the descent on the grin. The Man with the Hat came down, his wrist through the handles of his valise.
"Carry your bag?" jeered the younger men among the cattlemen below. "Carry your bag, mister?"
But cause for greater amusement was beheld higher up. There was Four Eyes, wrestling with a small trunk, round which he had made a rope fast, trying to lower it over the side. They whooped and cheered, they rocked with delight. "Lower away there!" they shouted. "All clear below! Drop it in the dock!" They advised him to make fast to the capstan. As he struggled with the box they suggested that he should "hail them two fellers on the bridge," and ask them to give him a hand—namely the pilot and the skipper. The face of Rafferty appeared over the rail; he gnashed his teeth, he yelped at them.
"It ain't our place to run the cattle ashore," they called back. Others looked a little forward, turning their heads, for a sharp whistle had sounded thence. Candlass, standing on the top of a sheep-pen, raised thumb and forefinger, and beckoned gently with the finger—then, with his head, gave an inclination inboard.
"Come on youse, then," said Mike. "I knew youse was wrong."
The man in the jersey, who had been standing like a squat effigy, moved to a rope by which this little craft was moored alongside, pressed feet to the bulwark, hung on to the rope so that the great hull of the Glory (she looked a massive thing again) loomed close and they could stretch out to the rope ladder. Rafferty above hauled in Four Eyes' trunk with great vehemence, that "poor feller" standing by like a great child watching the rough-handling of a toy. They swarmed on deck again. Candlass came aft and stood beside them.
"Stand by, men," he said. "Just wait till we get alongside here."
The ship began to move on again, towards a sound of lowing of cattle and shouting of men, and Candlass walked forward, left them, and stood chatting amidships with Rafferty. There appeared suddenly, running into their midst, swarming on deck like rats, several grimy stokers, looking for friends, it would appear, among the cattlemen. Mike eyed the little knots that drew aside.
"If you want your razor, Scholar," he said quietly, "keep your eye on these fellows. Whoever's got it up here will very likely slip it to one of his friends in the black hole, for fear of you putting a copper on them."
The Inquisitive One, standing by, heard the word "copper" and flinched.
"What you say about a copper?" he asked anxiously.
"Now then, some of you fellows," cried Candlass.
"Come on, you fellows," shouted Rafferty.
The willing ones followed them; the shirkers remained, and were not worried. Indeed all were not required—they would be in each other's way. They only went below now to knock out the divisions between the pens with a crow-bar or two, or the back of an axe, or whatever implement came handy; and as they were so employed the shore-push thrust in their gangways and swarmed up them.
A couple of men that Mike called "them toffs" were speaking to Candlass at the top of the gangway that stretched to the main deck. They paid no heed to the men who had brought the cattle across, or at least little heed. One of them, once, while talking, roved his eyes from Candlass along the deck, looked at this cattleman, looked at that, half absently; saw Scholar, seemed for a moment to be more interested in him than in the threesome chat; looked then at Mike, up and down, appeared to measure him as if he thought: "Jove! There's a big fellow!" nodded "Yes, yes," to Candlass, looked at Mike's face again with an expression faintly reminiscent of that which had showed on Smithers' face now and then when he stood beside the wicket of the little movable office in the back of the shed at Montreal as the Hard Cases trooped up to sign on. Mike bent down, lifted a board, and stepped forward to a great steer that thrust its head, and its great long horns, over the front barricade. The "toff" looked at him, alert, frowning; but all the movements of these Hard Cases seemed belligerent to strangers, and Mike might not be going to rough-handle the brute. So he merely watched, intent. Mike took the end of the board and scrubbed the steer under its chin as it raised its great head, like a cat wanting to be scratched; it turned its head round and over slowly, to have the office well done all round.
"Well, bejabbers, this is your last scratch! You're a fine looking baste. You might have had a worse trip!" Mike addressed the steer, that baffled look on his face, and his eyes kindly.
When they did find themselves, anon, rightly upon the shore, they clustered there, masterless men. Jack asked: "What are we waiting here for?" His partner said: "I don't know," and swore. Somebody moved away, saying: "Come on, come on—what are we waiting here for?" and a few followed him.
"Where are you going?" he was asked.
He admitted that he did not know. A long, thin, grey-faced man drew nigh and stood beside the knot. Somebody took him into the conversation, half turning to him, but not looking at him, unaware that a stranger had joined them, and he answered, but not eagerly, quite casually. Thus he dropped into the talk: what kind of a trip had they had? what were they hanging around for? They didn't know. One of them asked if he was So-and-So, of Such-and-Such a boarding house? He admitted he was. Was he there still? He merely nodded—it was all very casual, but it seemed settled soon, seemed to be in the air somehow that they had arranged that they might as well bunk at his boarding house as anywhere else.
Then Candlass appeared on the wharf, wearing a white collar instead of the blue-and-white striped rubber one of the trip. Some of the men approached him, and he turned in his walk as a housemaster, one somewhat feared as a rule but respected, turns to hear what some boys would say to him, who have the air of wondering if they should approach at all on the day before breakup. He answered gently, easily, seemed to suggest by his manner that he would see them through as well as possible, but that even he was in the clutch of circumstance. It was with the hint of a shrug and with a little toss of the head and a half smile that he left them. The crowd formed afresh around those who had spoken to him.
"What does he say? What does he say?"
"Well," said Mike, sticking a hand under his belt, "we may as well drift up that way, then." "That way" was the Board of Trade Office.
"See you later on," said the boarding house man.
"Are you going away?" asked somebody, who perhaps felt homeless.
"Oh, I'll be back—I'll meet you up there."
"What does he say? What does he say?" He had drifted away.
"Who the hell is he?" asked one with a mania for trying to make others quarrelsome, and then backing out. The older hands filed off; the others followed. The Inquisitive One saw their resemblance to a procession as they drew aside to let a traction engine go past, a rattling, smoking, devil-waggon, pulling a string of lorries laden with swaying beer kegs. He took out his mouth organ. Rattling and deafening the engine and drays quivered by, the men shouting: "Oh, beer!" or: "How would you like to get all them inside you?" The procession went on, the irresponsible tail-end of it cake-walking, and the mouth organ, with full tremolo, in full blast, made music for it with the air of a bottle-song of the halls.