“Want to mind where you’re steppin’ to-night, Cap’n,” the watchman hailed him as he passed the dock gates; “it’s thick, an’ no mistake—thick as ever I see it!”
Thick wasn’t the word for it! Once away from the fights and noise of the road, the darkness seemed like something you could feel—a solid mass of clammy, clinging moisture, catching at the throat like a cold hand, getting into the backs of your eyes and making them ache and smart. You couldn’t see your hand before your face.
Broughton groped his way along the narrow, slimy causeway which lay between the stacks of piled-up lumber, exuding their sharp, damp, resinous fragrance, and the intense darkness, broken occasionally by a vague tremulous reflection where some ship’s lights contrived to pierce it, which brooded over the unseen waters of the dock. Lights showed forlornly here and there at the openings of the lanes which led away between the piled deals—abysses of blackness as dark as the Magellanic nebulæ. Ship’s portholes gleamed round and watchful as the eyes of huge monsters of the slime. Bollards started up suddenly out of the fog like menacing figures, and cranes straddled the path like black Apollyons in some marine Pilgrim’s Progress. Once Broughton pulled himself up only just in time to save himself from stepping over the edge of a yawning pit of nothingness in which the water lipped unseen against the slimy piles. The thought involuntarily crossed his mind that perhaps he might have done worse; but he put it from him resolutely. His code, a simple one, did not admit suicide as a permissible solution of the problems of life.
All work was long since over, and the docks were as silent and deserted as the grave—nothing to be heard but the steady drip-drip of the rain, once the distant tinkle of a banjo on board some vessel out in the dock, and now and again the melancholy wail of a steamer groping her way up river. The “Maid of Athens” lay right at the far end of one of the older basins; she was all still and dark but for the oil lamp that burned smokily at the head of the gangway, and a faint glow from the galley which showed where the old shipkeeper sat alone with his pipe and his memories.
Old Mike came hobbling out at the sound of Broughton’s step on the plank.
“’Strewth, Cap’n,” he exclaimed in astonishment, “you’ve chose a grand night to come down an’ no fatal error! Will I make a bit o’ fire in the cabin an’ brew ye a cup o’ tea? Sure you’re wet to the skin!”
“Poor old chap!” Broughton thought, as he watched him busying himself about his fire-lighting with the gnarled and shaking hands that had hauled on so many a tackle-fall in their day. It would be a hard blow for him when he knew that ship was to be sold. He had served in Featherstone’s ships many years as A.B. and latterly as bos’n, until a fall from aloft put an end to his seagoing days; and this little job of shipkeeping was one of the very few planks between him and the workhouse.
The world was none too kind to old men who had outlived their usefulness. What was it that old flintstone had said: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”? Well, that was true enough, anyway!
He called to mind an incident that had happened in Sydney his last voyage there. An old man had come up to him begging for a job. He didn’t care what—night watchman, anything; and he had opened his coat to show that he had neither waistcoat nor shirt beneath it.
“You don’t remember me, Broughton,” the old fellow had said; and, looking closer, he had recognized in that incredibly seedy wreck one of his own old skippers—before whose almost godlike aloofness and majesty he had once trembled in mingled fear and awe. It was a pitiful tale he had to tell. He had been thrown out of a berth at sixty-five, through his ship being lost by no fault of his own, and couldn’t get in anywhere. That proud, arrogant old man, full of small vanities!... Broughton had had little enough cause in the past to think of him over kindly; but the memory of the encounter had remained with him for weeks at the time, and returned to trouble him now with an added significance.