The old fellow spat into the sea with some contempt.
"As much ice as you could put down a woman's back. I remember 1887 well enough. The Thames was nigh froze, and there was a fringe of summat they called 'ice' right round by Herne Bay and all the way to Dover. But this here's more than a bucketful, gentlemen—by gosh! it is."
He jumped involuntarily as a floe, some yards wide, struck the steamer and set the metal reverberating. All on deck ran to the side and watched the dirty ice bobbing like a human thing in the vessel's wash, and then drifting upon the tide over toward Cape Grisnez. Hardly had it passed when the captain rang an order from the bridge, and the ship went to dead slow. Another floe had been sighted ahead, and it was large enough to provoke greater wonder; a mass of black ice as though coming down from a considerable field over yonder towards the land. The ship passed by this and began to swing round to make Dover Harbour. The cold seemed to be increasing with every knot they made. Such an experience upon the English shore was within the knowledge of no living man.
"I've been up to the ice-blink twice, and I was in Alaska three years ago," said Trevelle. "This beats anything I have seen, easily. What would you say the temperature was, Mr. Faber?—phenomenal without doubt."
"About as many degrees below zero as you can get into a common swear word. Look yonder on the shore. Is that ice or am I dreaming it?"
"It's ice right enough! Hi, my man, that's ice by the harbour wall, isn't it? Good God, what a sight! In the English Channel, too!"
The sailor enjoyed this spontaneous tribute to the eccentricities of nature. He thought he would catch them upon an exclamation sooner or later, and he did so triumphantly.
"The harbour's going to be froze," he said sardonically; "they'll be cutting of it with sardine-openers—at least they were a-talking about it. You could walk as far as the bathing machines gin'rilly git out. I dare say you'll see some of 'em a-doing it now if your eyes are good enough. They tell me it's the Gulf Stream what's responsible. Well, d——n the Gulf Stream! say I, and that's all about it."
His peculiarities produced no other effect than the sotto voce of a chaplain's lady, who thought that he was a very wicked man. The others were far too much interested in the unusual appearance of Dover Harbour and the environs to take any notice of such emphasis. Early as it was, groups of boys and lads sported with hard ice which ran right round the seawall, and even floated in great lumps in the mouths of the basins. Rills of waves ran, not upon a beach of shingle, but over the frozen waters, spreading as molten silver and often freezing as they ran. There were effects of the frost most bizarre—buoys covered with the hoar, ropes of ice where ladders stood, vast stalactites as of pure crystal from the roof of every walled bay into which the sea ran. The cold, still air breathed upon all as with the breath of the Arctic wastes. The town of Dover was frozen out from the heights of the Castle Hill to the very depths of its meanest streets.
They went ashore over a gangway dusted with sand that they might obtain a foothold upon it. They had thought that it would be warmer off the sea, but when the train moved away and they crossed the frozen fields of Kent, a new rigour penetrated the ill-warmed carriages and seemed to search their very bones. At Dover newsboys had cried the morning papers with the latest news of the phenomenal frost and of the rumours of a great strike of transport workers following upon it. It seemed to be the one topic of conversation in the train and out of it. Great experts in meteorology had been interviewed in London, in Vienna, in New York. They agreed that England was suffering this abnormal spell because of the reduced flow of her old friend, the Gulf Stream. There could be no other logical conclusion, and the best that could be said was that the severity of the visitation was the soundest argument for its speedy disappearance.