CHAPTER VII
In Which Bagg, Imported From the Gutters of London, Lands At Ruddy Cove From the Mail-Boat, Makes the Acquaintance of Jimmie Grimm and Billy Topsail, and Tells Them ’E Wants to Go ’Ome. In Which, Also, the Way to Catastrophe Is Pointed
The mail-boat comes to Ruddy Cove in the night, when the shadows are black and wet, and the wind, blowing in from the sea, is charged with a clammy mist. The lights in the cottages are blurred by the fog. They form a broken line of yellow splotches rounding the harbour’s edge. Beyond is deep night and a wilderness into which the wind drives. In the morning the fog still clings to the coast. Within the cloudy wall it is all glum and dripping wet. When a veering wind sweeps the fog away, there lies disclosed a world of rock and forest and fuming sea, stretching from the end of the earth to the summits of the inland hills––a place of ruggedness and hazy distances; of silence and a vast, forbidding loneliness. 70
It was on such a morning that Bagg, the London gutter-snipe, having been landed at Ruddy Cove from the mail-boat the night before––this being in the fall before Donald North played ferryman between the standing edge and the floe––it was on such a foggy morning, I say, that Bagg made the acquaintance of Billy Topsail and Jimmie Grimm.
“Hello!” said Billy Topsail.
“Hello!” Jimmie Grimm echoed.
“You blokes live ’ere?” Bagg whined.
“Uh-huh,” said Billy Topsail.
“This yer ’ome?” pursued Bagg.