“Yes.” said Cornish, turning and looking at his burly interlocutor. “Yes, I do not suppose they eat much.”
The purser shrugged his shoulders, and turned his attention to other affairs, thoughtfully. The little, beacon at the head of the pier had suddenly loomed out of the fog not fifty yards away—a very needle in a pottle of hay, which the cunning of the pilot had found.
“Who are they, at any rate—these hundred and twenty ghosts of men?” asked the sailor, abruptly.
“They are malgamite workers,” answered Cornish, cheerily. “And I am going to make men of them—not ghosts.”
The purser looked at him, laughed in rather a puzzled way, and quitted the bridge. Cornish remained there, taking a quick, intelligent interest in the manoeuvres by which the great steamer was being brought alongside the quay. He seemed to have already forgotten the hundred and twenty men in the second-class cabin. His touch was indeed hopelessly light. He understood how it was that the steamer was made to obey, but he could not himself have brought her alongside. Cornish was a true son of a generation which understands much of many things, but not quite sufficient of any one.
He stood at the upper end of the gangway as the malgamite workers filed off—a sorry crew, narrow-chested, hollow-eyed, with that half-hopeless, half-reckless air that tells of a close familiarity with disease and death. He nodded to them airily as they passed him. Some of them took the trouble to answer his salutation, others seemed indifferent. A few glanced at him with a sort of dull wonder. And indeed this man was not of the material of which great philanthropists are made. He was cheerful and heedless, shallow and superficial.
“Get 'em into the train,” he said to an official at his side; and then, seeing that he had not been understood, gave the order glibly enough in another language.
The ill-clad travellers shuffled up the gangway and through the custom-house. Few seemed to take an interest in their surroundings. They exchanged no comments, but walked side by side in silence—dumb and driven animals. Some of them bore signs of disease. A few stumbled as they went. One or two were half blind, with groping hands. That they were of different nationalities was plain enough. Here a Jew from Vienna, with the fear of the Judenhetze in his eyes, followed on the heels of a tow-headed giant from Stockholm. A cunning cockney touched his hat as he passed, and rather ostentatiously turned to help a white-haired little Italian over the inequalities of the gangway. One thing only they had in common—their deadly industry. One shadow lay over them all—the shadow of death. A momentary gravity passed across Cornish's face. These men were as far removed from him as the crawling beetle is from the butterfly. Who shall say, however, that the butterfly sees nothing but the flowers?
As they passed him, some of them edged away with a dull humility for fear their poor garments should touch his fur coat. One, carrying a bird-cage, half paused, with a sort of pride, that Cornish might obtain a fuller view of a depressed canary. The malgamite workers of this winter's morning on the pier of Hoek were not the interesting industrials of Lady Ferriby's drawing-room. There their lives had been spoken of as short and merry. Here the merriment was scarcely perceptible. The mystery of the dangerous industries is one of those mysteries of human nature which cannot be explained by even the youngest of novelists. That dangerous industries exist we all know and deplore. That the supply of men and women ready to take employment in such industries is practically inexhaustible is a fact worth at least a moment's attention.
Cornish made the necessary arrangements with the railway officials, and carefully counted his charges, who were already seated in the carriages reserved for them. He must at all events be allowed the virtues of a generation which is eminently practical and capable of overcoming the small difficulties of everyday life. He was quick to decide and prompt to act.