London River Part 9

"There they are," breathed the skipper after a quick inspection through his gla.s.ses.

In half an hour we were in the midst of a fleet of fifty little steamers, just too late to take our place as carrier to them for London's daily market. As we steamed in, another carrier, which had left London after us, hoisted her signal pennant, and took over that job.

While still our ship was under way, boats put out from the surrounding trawlers, and converged on us for our outward cargo, the empty fish-trunks. That intense band of light which had first betrayed the smoke of the fleet eroded upwards into the low, slaty roof of nimbus till the gloom was dissolved to the zenith. The incubus vanished; the sun flooded us. At last only white feathers were left in the sky. I felt I had known and loved these trawlers for years. All round us were ships'

boats, riding those sweeping seas in a gyrating and delirious lunacy; and in each were two jovial fishermen, who shouted separate reasons to our skipper for "the week off" he had taken.

These boats came at us like a swarm of a.s.sailants, swooping downhill on us, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us again for a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivity of gla.s.s. A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on the snowy ridge of an upheaval, and vanish as the _Windhover_ canted away.

Then we rolled towards her, and there she was below us, in a smooth and transient hollow. Watching for their chances, s.n.a.t.c.hed out of luck by skill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties; the boxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was s.n.a.t.c.hed away, and then were swept off. The shouted jokes were broadened and strengthened to fit that riot and uproar. This sudden robust life, following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a mult.i.tude of masts and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the creative word had been spoken only five minutes before. We, and all this, had just come. I wanted to laugh and cheer.

8

There is, we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at a chart than from any impeccable modern map. Maps today are losing their attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy. Maps do not allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered governments up to the sh.o.r.es of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to tax, and to punish us, and that their police patrol the tropical forests.

But consider the legends on a chart even of the North Sea, of the world beneath the fathoms--the _Silver Pits_, the _Dowsing Ground_, the _Leman Bank_, the _Great Fisher Ground_, the _Horn Reef_, the _Witch Ground_, and the _Great Dogger Bank_! Strange, that indefinable implication of a word! I remember that, when a child, I was awake one night listening to a grandfather's clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, and a brother sat up in bed and whispered: "Look, the Star in the East." I turned, and one bright eye of the night was staring through the window.

Heaven knows into what profundity of ancestral darkness my brothers whisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, but an awe, or a fear, was wakened in me which was not mine, for I remember I could not explain it, even though, at the time, the anxious direct question was put to me. Nor can I now. It would puzzle a psycho-a.n.a.lyst most a.s.sured of the right system for indexing secret human motives to disengage one shadow from another in an ancestral darkness. That is why I merely put down here the names to be found on a chart of the North Sea, and say no more about it, being sure they will mean nothing except to those to whom they mean something. Those words, like certain moonbeams, which stir in us that not ourselves which makes for righteousness, or lunacy, combine only by chance. The combination which unlocks the secret cannot be stated, or it would not work. When there is a fortuitous coincidence of the magic factors, the result is as remarkable to us as it is to those who think they know us. When I used to stand on London's foresh.o.r.e, gazing to what was beyond our street lamps, the names on the chart had a meaning for me which is outside the usual methods of human communication. The Dogger Bank!

Here then it was, yet still to be seen only by faith. It was like Mrs.

Harris. I had the luck to discover that I should lose nothing through my visit; and every traveller knows how much he gains when the place he has wished to visit allows him to take away from it no less than what he brought with him. The Bank was twenty fathoms under us. We saw it proved at times when a little fine white sand came up, or fleshy yellow fingers, called sponge by the men, which showed we were over the pastures of the haddock. That was all we saw of a foundered region of prehistoric Europe, where once there was a ridge in the valley of that lost river to which the Rhine and Thames were tributaries. Our forefathers, prospecting that attractive and remunerative plateau of the Dogger, on their pilgrimage to begin making our England what it is, caught deer where we were netting cod. I almost shuddered at the thought, as though even then I felt the trawl of another race of men, who had strangely forgotten all our n.o.ble deeds and precious memories, catching in the ruin of St. Stephen's Tower, and the strangers, unaware of what august relic was beneath them, cursing that obstruction to their progress. Anyhow, we should have the laugh of them there; but these aeons of time are desperate waters into which to sink one's thought. It sinks out of sight. It goes down to dark nothing.

Well, it happened to be the sun of my day just then, and our time for catching cod, with the reasonable hope, too, that we should find the city still under St. Stephen's Tower when we got back, as a place to sell our catch.

Our empty boxes were discharged. Led by the admiral, the _Windhover_--with the rest of the fleet--lowered her trawl, and went dipping slowly and quietly over the hills, towing her sunken net. The admiral of a fishing-fleet is a great man. All is in his hands. He chooses the grounds. Our admiral, it was whispered to me, was the wizard of the north. The abundant fish-pastures were revealed to him in his dreams. It was my last evening on the Bank. The day had been wonderfully fine for winter and a sea that is notoriously evil. At twilight the wind dropped, the heave of the waters decreased. The scattered fleet, gliding through the hush, carried red, green, and white planets. The ships which lay in the western glow were black and simple shapes. Those to the east of us were remarkable with a chromatic prominence, and you thought, while watching them, that till that moment you had not really seen them. Presently the moon cleared the edge of the sea, a segment of frozen light, and moored to our stern with a quivering, ghostly line.

Coloured rockets sailed upwards from the admiral when he changed his mind and his course, and then the city of mobile streets altered its plan, and rewove its constellation. At midnight white flares burned forward on all the boats. The trawls were to be hauled. Our steam-winch began to bang its cogs in the heavy work of lifting the net. All hands a.s.sembled to see what would be our luck. The light sent a silver lane through the night, and men broke through the black walls of that brilliant separation of the darkness, and vanished on the other side. Leaning overside, I could see the pocket of our trawl drawing near, still some fathoms deep, a phosph.o.r.escent and flashing cloud. It came inboard, and was suspended over the deck, a bulging ma.s.s, its bottom was unfastened, and out gushed our catch, slithering over the deck, convulsive in the scuppers. The ma.s.s of blubber and plasm pulsed with an elfish glow.

9

We were homeward bound. The flat sea was dazzling with reflected sunshine, and a shade had to be erected over the binnacle for the man at the wheel. It might have been June, yet we had but few days to Christmas. The noon ceiling was a frail blue, where gauze was suspended in motionless loops and folds. The track of the sun was incandescent silver. A few sailing vessels idled in the North Channel, their sails slack; but we could not see a steamer in what is one of the world's busiest fairways. We ran on a level keel, and there was no movement but the tremor of the engines. We should catch the tide at the Shipwash, and go up on it to Billingsgate and be home by midnight. How foolish it is to portion your future, at sea!

It was when I was arranging what I should do in the later hours of that day, when we were at Billingsgate, that the skipper, staring round the North Channel, said to me: "It looks as though London had been wiped out since we left it. Where's the ships?"

The Maplin watched us pa.s.s with its red eye. We raised all the lights true and clear. I went below, and we were talking of London, and the last trains, when the engine-room telegraph gave us a great shock. "Stop her!" we heard the watch cry below.

I don't know how we got on deck. There were too many on the companion ladder at the same time. While we were struggling upwards we heard that frantic bell ring often enough to drive the engine-room people distracted. I got to the ship's side in time to see a liner's bulk glide by. She would have been invisible but for her strata of lights. She was just beyond our touch. A figure on her, high over us, came to her rail, distinct in the blur of the light of a cabin behind him, and shouted at us. I remember very well what he said, but it is forbidden to put down such words here. The man at our wheel paid no attention to him, that danger being now past, and so of no importance. He continued to spin the spokes desperately, because, though we could not see the ships about us, we could hear everywhere the alarm of their bells. We had run at eleven knots into a bank of fog which seemed full of ships. The moon was looking now over the top of the wall of fog, yet the _Windhover_, which, with engines reversed, seemed to be going ahead with frightful velocity, drove into an opacity in which there was nothing but the warning sounds of a great fear of us. I imagined in the dark the loom of impending bodies, and straining overside in an effort to make them out, listening to the murmur of the stream, nervously fanned the fog with my hat in a ridiculous effort to clear it. Twice across our bows perilous shadows arose, sprinkled with stars, yet by some luck they drifted silently by us, and the impact we expected and were braced for was not felt.

I don't know how long it was before the _Windhover_ lost way, but we anch.o.r.ed at last, and our own bell began to ring. When our unseen neighbours heard the humming of our exhaust, their frantic appeal subsided, and only now and then they gave their bells a shaking, perhaps to find whether we answered from the same place. There was an absolute silence at last, as though all had crept stealthily away, having left us, lost and solitary, in the fog. We felt confident there would be a clearance soon, so but shrouded our navigation lights. But the rampart of fog grew higher, veiled the moon, blotted it out, expunged the last and highest star. We were imprisoned. We lay till morning, and there was only the fog, and ourselves, and a bell-buoy somewhere which tolled dolefully.

And morning was but a weak infiltration into our prison. A steadfast inspection was necessary to mark even the dead water overside. The River was the same colour as the fog. For a fortnight we had been without rest. We had become used to a little home which was unstable, and sometimes delirious, and a sky that was always falling, and an earth that rose to meet the collapse. Here we were on a dead level, still and silent, with the men whispering, and one felt inclined to reel with giddiness. We were fixed to a dumb, unseen river of a world that was blind.

There was one movement. It was that of the leisurely motes of the fog.

We watched them--there was nothing else to do--for a change of wind. A change did not seem likely, for the rigging was h.o.a.r with frost, and ice glazed our deck.

Sometimes the fog would seem to rise a few feet. It was a cruel deception to play on the impatient. A mere cork, a tiny dark object like that, drifting along some distance out, would make a focal point in the fog, and would give the illusion of a clearance. Once, parading the deck as the man on watch, giving an occasional shake to the bell, I went suddenly happy with the certainty that I was now to be the harbinger of good tidings to those below playing cards. A vague elevated line appeared to starboard. I watched it grow into definition, a coast showing through a haze that was now dissolving. Up they all tumbled at my shout. They stared at the wonder hopefully and silently. The coast became higher and darker, and the skipper was turning to give orders--and then our hope turned into a wide path on the ebbing River made by cinders moving out on the tide. The cinders pa.s.sed. We re-entered our silent tomb. There had been no sign of our many neighbours of the night before, but suddenly we heard some dreadful moans, the tentative efforts of a body surprised by pain, and these sounds shaped, hilariously lachrymose, into a steam hooter playing "Auld Lang Syne," and then "Home, Sweet Home." There followed an astonishing amount of laughter from a hidden audience. The prisoners in the neighbouring cells were there after all, and were even jolly. The day thereafter was mute, the yellow walls at evening deepened to ochre, to umber, and became black, except where our riding lights made luminous circles. Each miserable watcher who came down to the saloon that night, m.u.f.fled and sparkling with frost, to get a drink of hot coffee, just drank it, and went on deck again without a word.

The motes next morning went drifting leisurely on the same light air, interminable. Our prison appeared even narrower. Then once again a clearance was imagined. Our skipper thought he saw a lane along the River, and up-anch.o.r.ed. The noise of our cable awoke a tumult of startled bells.

Ours was a perishable cargo. We were much overdue. Our skipper was willing to take any risk--what a good master mariner would call a reasonable risk--to get home; and so, when a deck hand, on the third morning, with the thawing fog dripping from his moustache, appeared in the saloon with the news that it was clearing a little, the master decided he would go.

I then saw, from the deck of the _Windhover_, so strange a vision that it could not be related to this lower sphere of ours. It could be thought that dawn's bluish twilight radiated from the _Windhover_. We were the luminary, and our faint aura revealed, through the melting veil, an outer world that had no sky, no plane, no bounds. It was void. There was no River, except that small oval of gla.s.s on which rested our ship, like a model.

The universe, which that morning had only begun to form in the void, was grouped about us. This was the original of mornings. We were its gravitational point. It was inert and voiceless. It was pregnant with unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms.

Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity of the dawn, were beyond remembrance and recognition. The _Windhover_ alone was substantial and definite. But placed about us, suspended in a night that was growing translucent, were the shadows of what might once have been ships, perhaps were ships to be, but were then steamers and sailers without substance, waiting some creative word, shrouded spectres that had left the wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyages finished, and were waiting to begin a new existence, having been raised to our level in a new world boundless and serene, with unplumbed deeps beneath them.

There, on our level, we maintained them in their poise with our superior gravity and our certain body, giving them light, being what sun there was in this new system in another sky. Above them there was nothing, and around them was blind distance, and below them the abyss of s.p.a.ce. Their lights gathered to our centre, an incoming of delicate and shining mooring lines.

It was all so silent, too. But our incoming cable shattered the spell, and when our siren warned them that we were moving, a wild pealing commenced which accompanied us on the long drift up to Gravesend. There were eight miles of ships: barges, colliers, liners, clippers, cargo steamers, ghost after ghost took form ahead, and then went astern. More than once the fog thickened again, but the skipper never took way off her while he could make out a ship ahead of us. We drifted stern first on the flood, with half-turns of the propeller for steering purchase, till a boatman, whom we hailed, cried that we were off Gravesend. And was there any one for the sh.o.r.e?

There was. I took no more risks. I had been looking for that life-boat.

And what a thing it was to have solid paving-stones under one's feet again. There were naphtha flares in the fog, dingy folk in muddy ways, and houses that kept to one place. There was a public-house, too.

Outside that place I remembered the taste of everlasting fried fish, and condensed milk in weak tea; and so entered, and corrected the recollection with a gla.s.s of port--several gla.s.ses, to make sure of it--and that great hunk of plum-cake which I had occasionally seen in a dream. Besides, this was Christmas Eve.

XI. An Old Lloyd's Register

With the sensation that I had survived into a strange and a hostile era that had nothing to do with me, for its affairs were not mine, I was inside a submarine, during the War, talking to her commander. He was unravelling for me the shining complexity of his "box of tricks," as he called his ship. He was sardonic (there was no doubt he was master of the brute he so lightly villified), and he was blithe, and he ill.u.s.trated his scientific monologue with stories of his own experiences in the Heligoland Bight. These, to me, were like the bedevilments of those dreams from which we groan to awake, but cannot.

The curious doings of this new age, I thought as I listened to him, would have just the same interest for me as the relics of an extinct race of men, except for the urgent remembrance that one of the monstrous accidents this child knows of might happen now. That made an acute difference. This was not nightmare, nor ridiculous romance, but actuality. And as I looked at this mocking youngster, I saw he was like the men of that group on the _Queen Mary_ who were similarly mocking, for my benefit, but a few weeks before, their expert share in forwarding the work we had given them in this new age; and then where were they? Ships I knew, but not such ships as these, nor such work.

Another officer joined us, an older man, and said this to him was strange navigation. He was a merchant seaman. He had served his time in sailing ships. I asked him to name some of them, having the feeling that I could get back to the time I knew if I could but hail the ghost, with another survivor from the past, of one of those forgotten ships.

"Well," he replied, "there was the _Cutty Sark_."

If he had said the _Golden Hind_ I should not have been more astonished. In a sense, it was the same thing. The _Cutty Sark_ was in the direct line with the Elizabethan ships, but at the end. That era, though it closed so recently, was already as far as a vague memory. The new sea engines had come, and here we were with them, puzzled and embarra.s.sed, having lost our reasonable friends. I told him I had known the _Cutty Sark_, and had seen that master of hers--a character who went about Poplar in a Glengarry cap--who gave one of her masts (the mizzen, I think) a golden rooster, after he had driven her from Sydney Heads to the Channel to break the record--Captain Woodget.

His men said it was like living in a gla.s.s house.

I recalled to him that once, when my business was concerned with bills of lading and freight accounts, I was advised to ship four hundred cases to Sydney, New South Wales; and one-half of that consignment, my instructions ran, was to arrive a month before the other. The first lot went in a modern steel barque, the _Cairnbulg_. ("I have seen her," said this submarine officer). More than a fortnight later, being too young to remember that the little _Cutty Sark_ had been one of the China tea clippers, I shipped the last half of the consignment in her.

But she disordered all the careful plans of the consignees. She got in a fortnight ahead of the _Cairnbulg_.

The effect of that casual recollection on the submarine officer was distinctly unwarlike. This memory, and not his present work, might have been the real thing. He knew Woodget, the man in the Glengarry.

He wanted to know more; ever so much more. He mentioned other ships and masters, to induce me. I got the idea that he would let his mind, at least, escape into that time, if only I would help him to let it go.

But there was that potent and silent enigma about us. . . .

No such escape for him. We have fashioned other ships, and must use them. What we have conjured up compels us to live with it. But when you do not go to sea you may have what ships you like. There is some but not much interest in the reappearance in the newspapers of the sailing lists; a few of the old names appear again, though new ships bear them. But late at night, when a westerly wind with rain turns for me a neighbouring yew tree into an invisible surge, then it is the fortune of one who remembers such as the _Cutty Sark_ to choose different ships and other times. Why not choose them? They were comely ships, and now their time seems fair. Who would care to remember the power and grey threat of a modern warship, or the exotic luxury of a liner of this new era? n.o.body who remembers the graciousness of the clippers, nor the pride and content of the seamen who worked them. To aid the illusion of the yew, I have one of those books which are not books, a _Lloyd's Register of Shipping_ for 1880, that by some unknown circuitous route found its way from its first owner in Madras to my suburb. It goes very well with the surge of yew, when westerly weather comes to unite them.

I should like to know how that book got to London. Somewhere in it is the name of the ship which carried it. Anyhow, I think I can make out in it the houseflag of that ship. It, was, I believe, one of J. H.

Allan's teak-built craft, a forgotten line--the _Rajah of Cochin_, the _Copenhagen_, the _Lincelles_,--though only just before the War, in the South-West India Dock, I met a stranger, a seaman looking for work, who regretted its disappearance, and the new company-owned steamers; for he said they were good ships, "but more than that," he told me, "Allan was an old gentleman who knew his own ships, and knew his men." This stranger said you forget a ship now as soon as you are paid off, "and glad to," and "you don't ever know who owns her, even if there's a strike. Parsons and old maids and Cardiff sharks, I reckon."

Very likely. But what sharks once were in it have all disappeared from my Register. It belongs to those days when, if you went to New Zealand, you had to go by sailer; when the East India Dock had an arcade of jib-booms and bowsprits, with sometimes a varnished shark's tail terminal--the _Euterpe_, _Jessie Readman_, _w.a.n.ganui_, _Wazmea_, _Waimate_, _Opawa_, _Margaret Galbraith_, _Helen Denny_, _Lutterworth_, and _Hermione_. There were others. What is in these names? But how can we tell? There were personal figureheads, there were shapely forms, each with its own narrative of adventure, there was the undiscovered sea, and there was youth; and these have gone.

It is all very well to say that the names and mere words in this old Register have no more meaning today than a railway time-table of the same date. Hardly to be distinguished in the shadows in some corners of St. Paul's Cathedral from which night never quite goes, there are certain friendless regimental colours. Few of us know now who bore them, and where, and why; but imagine the deserved fate of one who would allow a brutal word to disturb their dust! They mean nothing, except that men, in a world where it is easy to lose faith, treasure the few tokens of faithfulness, courage, and enterprise proved in their fellows; and so those old staffs, to which cling faded and dusty rags, in a real sense support the Cathedral. Poplar once was a parish whose name was more familiar in Eastern seas and on the coasts of the Americans, and stood for something greater and of more value, than the names of some veritable capital cities. That vista down the East India Dock Road from North Street, past the plane trees which support on a cloud the cupola of Green's Chapel, to the gateway of the dock which was built for John Company, was what many would remember as essential London who would pa.s.s the Mansion House as though it were a dingy and nameless tavern. At the back of that road today, and opposite a church which was a chapel-of-ease to save the crews of the East Indiamen lying off Blackwall the long walk to Stebonhythe Church, is the public library; and within that building are stored, as are the regimental colours in the Cathedral, the houseflags of those very ships my Register helps me to remember--the tokens of fidelity and courage, of a service that was native, and a skill in that service which was traditional to the parish. Tokens that now are dusty and in their night, understood only by the few who also belong to the past.

There is the houseflag of the _Cutty Sark_, and her sister ships the _Dharwar_, _Blackadder_, _Coldstream_--but one must be careful, and refuse to allow these names to carry one-way. There are so many of them. They are all good. Each can conjure up a picture and a memory.

They are like those names one reads in spring in a seed-merchant's catalogue. They call to be written down, to be sung aloud, to be shared with a friend. But I know the quick jealousy of some old sailor, his pride wounded here by an unjustifiable omission of the ship that was the one above all others for him, is bound to be moved by anything less than a complete reprint here of the Register. How, for example, could I give every name in the fleet of the White Star of Aberdeen? Yet was not each ship, with her green hull and white spars, as moving as a lyric? Is there in London River today a ship as beautiful as the old _Thermopylae_? There is not. It is impossible.

There was the _Samuel Plimsoll_ of that line--now a coal hulk at Gibraltar--which must be named, for she was Captain Simpson's ship (he was commodore afterwards), the "merry blue-eyed skipper" of Froude's _Oceana_, but much more than that, a sage and masterful Scot whose talk was worth a long journey to hear.

The houseflag of Messrs. R. and H. Green, in any reference to the ships of Blackwall, should have been mentioned first. There is a sense in which it is right to say that the founder of that firm, at a time when American craft like the Boston clippers of Donald McKay were in a fair way to leave the Red Ensign far astern, declared that Blackwall had to beat those American flyers, and did it. But that was long before the eighties, and when steam was still ridiculed by those who could not see it equalling clippers that had logged fourteen knots, or made a day's run of over three hundred miles. Yet some of Green's ships came down to the end of the era, like the _Highflyer_ and the _Melbourne_. The latter was renamed the _Macquarie_, and was one of the last of the clippers to come home to Poplar, and for that reason, and because of her n.o.ble proportions, her picture is kept, as a reminder, by many who wish to think of ships and the sea as they were. It is likely that most who live in Poplar now, and see next to its railway station the curious statue of a man and a dog, wonder who on earth Richard Green, Esq., used to be; though there are a few oldsters left still who remember Blackwall when its shipwrights, riggers, sailmakers, and caulkers were men of renown and substance, and who can recall, not only Richard Green, but that dog of his, for it knew the road to the dock probably better than most of those who use it today. Poplar was the nursery of the Clyde. The flags which Poplar knew well would puzzle London now--Devitt and Moore's, Money Wigram's, Duthie's, Willis's, Carmichael's, Duncan Dunbar's, Scrutton's, and Elder's. But when lately our merchant seamen surprised us with a mastery of their craft and a fort.i.tude which most of us had forgotten were ever ours, what those flags represented, a regard for a tradition as ancient and as rigorous as that of any royal port, was beneath it all.

But if it were asked what was this tradition, it would not be easy to say. Its authority is voiceless, but it is understood. Then what is it one knows of it? I remember, on a day just before the War, the flood beginning to move the shipping of the Pool. Eastward the black cliffs lowered till they sank under the white tower of Limehouse Church; and the church, looking to the sunset, seemed baseless, shining with a lunar radiance. Upriver, the small craft were uncertain, moving like phantoms over a pit of bottomless fire. But downstream every ship was as salient as though lighted with the rays of a great lantern. And there in that light was a laden barque, outward bound, waiting at the buoys. She headed downstream. Her row of white ports diminished along the length of her green hull. The lines of her bulwarks, her sheer, fell to her waist, then airily rose again, came up and round to merge in one fine line at the jibboom. The lines sweeping down and airily rising again were light as the swoop of a swallow. The symmetry of her laden hull set in a plane of dancing sun-points, and her soaring amber masts, cross-sparred, caught in a mesh of delicate cordage, and shining till they almost vanished where they rose above the buildings and stood against the sky, made her seem as n.o.ble and haughty as a burst of great music. One of ours, that ship. Part of our parish.