"I sighted the steamer, right ahead, and we wondered whether the iron under us would wait till she come. We counted every roller that went over us. The other steamer was a slow ship all right. But she came up, and put out her boats. We had to lower the drunks into them. I left in the last boat with the old man. 'Jim,' he said, looking at her as we left her, 'she's got no more than five minutes now. I just felt her drop. Something's given way.' Before we got to the other ship we saw the Starlight's propeller in the air. Right on end. Yes. I never seen anything like that—and then she just went . . ."
The sailor made a grimace at me and nodded. From the shipwright's next door the steady, continuous hammering in the dry-dock was heard again, as though it had been waiting, and were now continuing the yarn.
X. Off-Shore
1
For weeks our London days had been handmade with gas and oil. It was a winter of the kind when the heaven of the capital is a brown obscurity not much above the highest reached by the churches, and a December more years before the War then it would be amusing to count. There was enough of the sun in that morning to light my way down Mark Lane, across Great Tower Street to Billingsgate. I was on my way to sea for the first time, but that fortune was as incredible to me as the daylight. And as to the daylight, the only certainty in it was its antiquity. It was a gloom that was not only because the year was exhausted, but because darkness was falling at the end of an epoch. It was not many years before the War, to be a little more precise, though then I was unaware of the reason of the darkness, except common fog.
Besides, why should a Londoner, and even an East-Ender whose familiar walls are topped by mastheads, believe in the nearness of the ocean? We think of the shipping no more than we do of the paving stones or of the warnings of the pious. It is an event of the first importance to go for a first voyage, though mine was to be only by steam-trawler to the Dogger Bank; yet, as the event had come to me so late, I had lost faith in the omens of London's foreshore, among which, at the bottom of Mark Lane, was an Italian baking chestnuts over a coke fire. The fog, and the slops, and the smell by Billingsgate, could have been tokens of no more than a twopenny journey to Shepherd's Bush. I had believed in the signs so little that I had left my bag at a railway station, miles away.
Three small steamers, the size of tugs, but with upstanding bows and a sheer suggesting speed and buoyancy, were lying off the fish market, and mine, the Windhover, had the outside berth. I climbed over to her. Blubber littered her iron deck, and slime drained along her gutters. Black grits showered from her stack. The smell from her galley, and the heat from her engine-room casing, were challenging to a stranger. It was no place for me. The men and porters tramping about their jobs knew that, and did not order me out of their way. This was Billingsgate, and there was a tide to be caught. They hustled me out of it. But the skipper had to be found, for I must know when I had to come aboard. A perpendicular iron ladder led to her saloon from a hatch, and through unintelligence and the dark I entered that saloon more precipitously than was a measure of my eagerness, picked myself up with a coolness which I can only hope met with the approval of some silent men, watching me, who sat at a table there, and offered my pass to the man nearest me.
It was the mate. He scrutinized the simple document at unnecessary length, and with a gravity that was embarrassing. He turned up slowly a large and weather-beaten sadness, with a grizzled moustache that curled tightly into his mouth from under a long, thin nose which pointed at me like a finger. His heavy eyes might have been melancholy or only tired, and they regarded me as if they sought on my face what they could not find on my document. I thought he was searching me for the proof of my sanity. Presently he spoke: "Have you got to come?" he said, and in a gentle voice that was disconcerting from a figure so masculine. While I was wondering what was hidden in this question, the ship's master entered the saloon briskly. He was plump and light. His face was a smooth round of unctuous red, without a beard, and was mounted upon many folds of brown woollen scarf, like an attractive pudding on a platter. He looked at me with amusement, as I have no doubt those lively eyes, with their brows of arched interest, looked at everything; and his thick grey hair was curved upwards in a confusion of interrogation marks.
He chuckled. "This is not a passenger ship," he said. "That will have to be your berth." He pointed to a part of the saloon settee which was about six feet forward and above the propeller. "A sou'-wester washed out our only spare cabin, comin' in. There you are." He began to climb the ladder out of it again, but stopped, and put his rosy face under the lintel of the door. "You've got twenty minutes now. Get your luggage aboard."
My bag was where it could not be reached in twenty minutes. Roughing it may have its humours, but to suffer through it, as I was aware I must, if I stayed, would more than outweigh the legitimate interest of a first voyage, except for heroic youth with its gift of eternal life. Simple ignorance, as usual, made me heroic. I went on deck, and found the steward sitting on a box, with a bucket of sprats before him, tearing off their heads, and then throwing the bodies contemptuously into another bucket. The ends of his fingers and thumbs were pink and bright, and were separated from the remainder of his dark hands by margins of glittering scales. He compared to me, as he beheaded the fish, the girls of Hull and London. But what I knew of the girls of but one city was so meagre in comparison that I could only listen to his particulars in silent surprise. It was notable that a man like that, who pulled the heads and guts of fish like that, should have acquired a knowledge so peculiar, so personal, of the girls of two cities. While considering whether what at first looked like the mystery of this problem might not be in reality its clue, I became aware of another listener. Its lean and dismal length was disproportionate to that small ship. It had on but dungarees and a singlet, and the singlet, because of the length of the figure, was concave at the stomach, where, having nothing to rest upon, it was corrugated through the weight of a head made brooding by a heavy black beard. Hairy wrists were thrust deeply into the pockets to hold up the trousers. The dome of its head was as bald and polished as yellow metal. The steward introduced me to the Chief Engineer. "Yon's a dirty steward," returned the Chief simply.