§ 2.
It is a region, this seven-mile sequence of granite-lipped lagoons, which is invested, as may be supposed, with some conspicuous properties of romance; and yet its romance is never of just that quality which one might perhaps expect. It is not here, certainly, in spite of the coming and going of great ships, and the aching appeal of brine, that the mind is moved to any deep sense of kinship with the folk who wielded the river-weapon in old days. The place is as modern as the town, as purged of traditions as the town, and the drama that goes on here is one that has never been enacted in the world before. Its effectiveness, indeed (I do not now speak of its efficiency), is a thing that aligns with no preconceived notions of effectiveness. Neither of the land nor of the sea, but possessing almost in excess both the stability of the one and the constant flux of the other—too immense, too filled with the vastness of the outer, to carry any sense of human handicraft—this strange territory of the Docks seems, indeed, to form a kind of fifth element, a place charged with daemonic issues and daemonic silences, where men move like puzzled slaves, fretting under orders they cannot understand, fumbling with great forces that have long passed out of their control....
DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE ALBERT DOCK.
That, certainly, is the first impression—an impression that has nothing whatever to do with the romance of commerce or the ingenuity of man, or anything of that kind, but that is simply the effect of the unhuman spaciousness of it all, the strangely quiet, strangely patient presence of great ships, the vast leaning shadows, the smooth imprisoned waters, the slow white movements of a sea-bird gravely dipping and curving, dipping and curving, between the shadow and the sun, the sudden emergence in the midst of this solemnity of some great fever of monstrous echoing activity. Afterwards, of course, as the senses grow accustomed to the new order of things, to the frightening spaciousness and the bursts of tangled effort, there ensues another attitude. Names catch the eye: Naples, Hong-Kong, Para; and the imagination gets its practised opportunity. The sudden activities, too—the clustered, wrangling cranes, perched on their high roofs, and pecking tirelessly; the bound, leaning carcass of the ship below them, bleeding from a score of wounds, the cranes about her own masts adding to the riot; the long sheds, ringing with echoes, dappled with tiny figures delving in a long ruin of all the goods of the world—they begin to affect the mind more intimately. You find yourself in the shadow of some slab hill of cotton-bales, or peering up the slopes of a swelling cone of grain, a sibilant alp of gold, and you begin to envision the anæmic spinster who will one day wrap herself in some part of that sodden mound, or the white hen, in some dreamful farmyard, that will one day peck this grain.... Or you come down to the Docks after nightfall, passing out of the greasy silence of the northern streets, under the terrace of the Overhead Railway, and so through the gates behind the Huskisson. The air is troubled with a soft sustained groaning: the Saxonia (let us say) is at her berth discharging. She arrived from Boston on Thursday, she will sail again on Tuesday, and every instant, day and night, that soft moaning will continue. And that direful sound, and the torment of labour going forward, in a shower of green light, beneath the vague riven masses of the liner, serve somehow to drive you on to thoughts concerning Liverpool’s efficiency and tirelessness, concerning the bigness of her interests.
§ 3.
And gradually, too, the system of the labyrinth begins to emerge. That first period of bewilderment, of bewilderment that was almost fear, when you crept along narrow shelves running between dead water and warehouse wall, and watched the vistas unfolding, some gloomy, some naked, some clotted with ships as a mill-dam is clotted with drift-wood; when you crossed bridge after bridge, from granite islands to granite mainland, and heard the wailful voices of men coming desperately out of the distances, and decided with a sickening sense of despair that the whole thing had swollen utterly out of hand, that those ships would never be extricated, those giant forces never recaptured—that bewilderment is followed by the certainty that specific things will always be going on in specific places, and that the whole litter of events is really made up of two or three constantly recurring happenings. It becomes plain, for instance, that in one branch of the Huskisson you will always find the brick-red and black funnels of the Cunarders, and in another the cream and black of the White Star. You learn, again, that in the Wellington one or other of Glynn’s boats will always be unloading grain from the Danube, that cotton from the Brazils and india-rubber from the Amazon will always be found in the sheds beside the Queens, and grapes and wines from Spain in the next dock to that, and rice from Calcutta over in the Toxteth. An austere elevator in the Coburg insists on the constant attendance of grain-barges; a mustard-coloured stain on the rim of the Harrington stands for cotton-seed meal from Galveston; silver-hulled coasters, their spars and rigging hanging in tender meshes against the blue, fill the quiet reaches of the Salthouse; and in the cloisters surrounding the sunless quadrangle of the Waterloo, men are always moving, as Mr. Hay has painted them, in a deep warm tumult of golden dusk. One-seventh of all the ships in the world, it is true, laden with fabulous loot, are driven along these intricate waterways, are penned in these monstrous interwoven cells; and one-third of all the goods the Kingdom receives, one-fourth of all the goods she sends away, pass through these great sheds and cumber these endless quays. But those vast herds, charging so wonderfully across the plains of the Seven Seas, hold here for the end of their flight a space that is measured by inches; and you may, therefore, in spite of its enormity, map out the whole labyrinth in your mind either chromatically or topographically, either by the names of companies or in terms of grapes and silks and dyes and precious ores, just as your temperament inclines.
CUSTOM HOUSE FROM THE SALTHOUSE DOCK.