THE DOCKS
§ 1.
[Illustration: THE DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE CANNING GRAVING DOCK.]
As Liverpool lies deployed upon the South Lancashire landscape,
she falls into the shape of an all but fully unfurled fan. The
root bone-work of that fan, its unwebbed handle-part, is formed by
the commercial apparatus of the place, the municipal apparatus,
and--pleasantly conjoined to these hard masculine concerns--the more
feminine region of the great shops, the flowers, the carriages, the
shopping women. All this has been compactly tugged down towards its
central wharves by that inevitable arbiter the River; it forms the
area, busy but uninhabited, which the traveller enters the moment he
steps ashore. In it are the streets of offices, the banks, the various
Exchanges--Cotton, Corn, Produce, Stock--and occasional dense masses
of warehouses; all about these--a pattern of dull jewels, say, on the
grey essential framework--there lie the great official buildings--the
Town Hall, the Municipal Offices, St. George’s Hall, the Art Gallery,
and so forth--with here and there, more vigorously flashing, the glassy
bulbs that tip the railways; and there, finally--a series of decorative
flourishes--curve the bright ways of the emporia. Next, to right and
left of this clean-picked fabric, appear, like two swart brush-strokes,
the twin quags of the slums--their position, too, explicitly defined
by the River; and beyond these, again, drooping down V-wise towards
the handle in the centre, but for the rest holding consistently aloof,
spread the vast, indeterminate plumes of the suburbs, curving round
from the river-side at Seaforth, away through the open country, and so
back to the river-side at Garston.
Thus, the whole congeries splits up, it will be seen, rather more
automatically than is usual, into just those four great divisions which
every modern city is theoretically supposed to display. Here and there,
of course, a divergency appears: over at Linacre, for instance, a group
of industrial exploits--match-works, dye-works, a tannery--have lunged
out towards the open, have tended to create out there their own special
circle of suburb, their own little patch of slum. Over at Garston,
again, there is a somewhat similar happening; and across the River,
on the shores of the Wirral Peninsula, Birkenhead, with its Town Hall
and its Docks, makes an attempt to complete that tangential impulse
which the River has interrupted. But, for the most part, the two main
facts in Liverpool’s career--the precipitancy of her uprising and the
singleness of her purpose--have served to make her adherence to that
basic plan a singularly faithful one;[2] and I propose, therefore, to
take advantage of it in this book, dealing in the third chapter with
that central region of shops and offices and civic architecture, the
formal van of the army; in the fourth chapter with the plumes of the
fan, the skirmishing sweep of the suburbs; and in the fifth with those
dusky smears of the underworld.
[2] It is interesting to observe that in this, as in so many other
matters (the strength of her civic spirit, for instance; the nature of
her municipal exploits; the conspicuous attention she is giving to the
specifically urban problem of the Housing of the Poor; her constant
devotion to the specifically urban business of locomotion), the
abnormal circumstances of Liverpool’s growth have made her an unusually
faithful embodiment of certain of the most essential of modern urban
impulses. She is, as I have said, boldly different; and it is of the
body of that difference that she should be thus clearly representative:
there being nothing, in actuality, quite so exceptional as the typical.
On the one hand, that is to say, she is exceptional because she is
typical; on the other, she is typical because she is exceptional.
But before I approach even the first of these, there remains yet
another region, perhaps more memorable, certainly more remarkable,
than them all: that queer specialized region of the Docks, the most
extensive thing of its kind in the world, which runs all along
the littoral, from Dingle in the south to Seaforth in the north,
sustaining, both pictorially and essentially, practically the whole of
that great fan of masonry, making a kind of long entrenchment, behind
which the army of the City is drawn up: the elaborately forged handle,
really, which Liverpool has constructed in order that she may grip her
weapon more effectively.
§ 2.
It is a region, this seven-mile sequence of granite-lipped lagoons,
which is invested, as may be supposed, with some conspicuous properties
of romance; and yet its romance is never of just that quality which
one might perhaps expect. It is not here, certainly, in spite of
the coming and going of great ships, and the aching appeal of brine,
that the mind is moved to any deep sense of kinship with the folk
who wielded the river-weapon in old days. The place is as modern as
the town, as purged of traditions as the town, and the drama that
goes on here is one that has never been enacted in the world before.
Its effectiveness, indeed (I do not now speak of its efficiency), is
a thing that aligns with no preconceived notions of effectiveness.
Neither of the land nor of the sea, but possessing almost in excess
both the stability of the one and the constant flux of the other--too
immense, too filled with the vastness of the outer, to carry any sense
of human handicraft--this strange territory of the Docks seems, indeed,
to form a kind of fifth element, a place charged with daemonic issues
and daemonic silences, where men move like puzzled slaves, fretting
under orders they cannot understand, fumbling with great forces that
have long passed out of their control....
[Illustration: DOCK BOARD OFFICES FROM THE ALBERT DOCK.]
That, certainly, is the first impression--an impression that has
nothing whatever to do with the romance of commerce or the ingenuity
of man, or anything of that kind, but that is simply the effect of
the unhuman spaciousness of it all, the strangely quiet, strangely
patient presence of great ships, the vast leaning shadows, the smooth
imprisoned waters, the slow white movements of a sea-bird gravely
dipping and curving, dipping and curving, between the shadow and the
sun, the sudden emergence in the midst of this solemnity of some great
fever of monstrous echoing activity. Afterwards, of course, as the
senses grow accustomed to the new order of things, to the frightening
spaciousness and the bursts of tangled effort, there ensues another
attitude. Names catch the eye: Naples, Hong-Kong, Para; and the
imagination gets its practised opportunity. The sudden activities,
too--the clustered, wrangling cranes, perched on their high roofs,
and pecking tirelessly; the bound, leaning carcass of the ship below
them, bleeding from a score of wounds, the cranes about her own masts
adding to the riot; the long sheds, ringing with echoes, dappled with
tiny figures delving in a long ruin of all the goods of the world--they
begin to affect the mind more intimately. You find yourself in the
shadow of some slab hill of cotton-bales, or peering up the slopes of
a swelling cone of grain, a sibilant alp of gold, and you begin to
envision the anæmic spinster who will one day wrap herself in some part
of that sodden mound, or the white hen, in some dreamful farmyard,
that will one day peck this grain.... Or you come down to the Docks
after nightfall, passing out of the greasy silence of the northern
streets, under the terrace of the Overhead Railway, and so through the
gates behind the Huskisson. The air is troubled with a soft sustained
groaning: the _Saxonia_ (let us say) is at her berth discharging. She
arrived from Boston on Thursday, she will sail again on Tuesday, and
every instant, day and night, that soft moaning will continue. And that
direful sound, and the torment of labour going forward, in a shower of
green light, beneath the vague riven masses of the liner, serve somehow
to drive you on to thoughts concerning Liverpool’s efficiency and
tirelessness, concerning the bigness of her interests.
§ 3.
And gradually, too, the system of the labyrinth begins to emerge.
That first period of bewilderment, of bewilderment that was almost
fear, when you crept along narrow shelves running between dead water
and warehouse wall, and watched the vistas unfolding, some gloomy,
some naked, some clotted with ships as a mill-dam is clotted with
drift-wood; when you crossed bridge after bridge, from granite islands
to granite mainland, and heard the wailful voices of men coming
desperately out of the distances, and decided with a sickening sense
of despair that the whole thing had swollen utterly out of hand,
that those ships would never be extricated, those giant forces never
recaptured--that bewilderment is followed by the certainty that
specific things will always be going on in specific places, and that
the whole litter of events is really made up of two or three constantly
recurring happenings. It becomes plain, for instance, that in one
branch of the Huskisson you will always find the brick-red and black
funnels of the Cunarders, and in another the cream and black of the
White Star. You learn, again, that in the Wellington one or other of
Glynn’s boats will always be unloading grain from the Danube, that
cotton from the Brazils and india-rubber from the Amazon will always be
found in the sheds beside the Queens, and grapes and wines from Spain
in the next dock to that, and rice from Calcutta over in the Toxteth.
An austere elevator in the Coburg insists on the constant attendance
of grain-barges; a mustard-coloured stain on the rim of the Harrington
stands for cotton-seed meal from Galveston; silver-hulled coasters,
their spars and rigging hanging in tender meshes against the blue, fill
the quiet reaches of the Salthouse; and in the cloisters surrounding
the sunless quadrangle of the Waterloo, men are always moving, as Mr.
Hay has painted them, in a deep warm tumult of golden dusk. One-seventh
of all the ships in the world, it is true, laden with fabulous loot,
are driven along these intricate waterways, are penned in these
monstrous interwoven cells; and one-third of all the goods the Kingdom
receives, one-fourth of all the goods she sends away, pass through
these great sheds and cumber these endless quays. But those vast herds,
charging so wonderfully across the plains of the Seven Seas, hold here
for the end of their flight a space that is measured by inches;
and you may, therefore, in spite of its enormity, map out the whole
labyrinth in your mind either chromatically or topographically, either
by the names of companies or in terms of grapes and silks and dyes and
precious ores, just as your temperament inclines.
[Illustration: CUSTOM HOUSE FROM THE SALTHOUSE DOCK.]
§ 4.
But however neatly familiarity may thus label the place and tie it up
into little packages of effort, that first sense of the superhumanity
of the drama going on here never for an instant lightens. The actors
employed, whether the liners themselves, or the gaunt roof-cranes,
or the dire monsters that effect the coaling, or the deliberate jaws
of the dock-gates, are designed on so immensely loftier a scale than
the rather draggled humans who run to and fro in their shadows,
watched by the great silences, that they inevitably upraise the
expectations to their own gigantic measure. Only in one brief corner
of this seven-mile harbourage is it possible to return once more to
the intimate human romance, the traditional drama, of harbours and
sea-traffickings. It is a little basin between the Coburg Dock and the
Brunswick Half Tide, and there, for a little while longer, beneath an
old-world quay, brown sails dip softly in a quiet haven. Fishermen
sit and smoke above them, nets hang in the sun, low buildings with
broken, domestic roofs run round a cobbled square; and in one corner a
pier-master’s cottage has its ivy, its curtains, its canary in a wicker
cage. It is a relic that serves only to italicize the change. A pace to
the right of it, a pace to the left, the new world of draggled humans
and unhuman gestures is awaiting one: a world where the blues of those
jerseys, the warm browns of those sails, have faded into the sad blues
and yellows of mechanics’ overalls. From the cyclopean platform of
granite, frowned upon by a cirque of raw cliff, and patterned with the
shaggy heads and shoulders of half-embedded liners, which lies at one
end of the chain, through all the rigid convolutions of honey-coloured
water which lead to the interminable clangour of the Atlantic berths
at the other, it is a place, invariably, where a new relation has
been established between man and the outer seas. It is in hieroglyphs
of granite and water, in monstrous shapes and silences, that the
bare-handed individual and the naked element make their communications;
and in the face of this terrible script it is not strange that the
writer should be forgotten. The efficiency of Liverpool, yes; but
never, quite, the efficiency of the people of Liverpool.
§ 5.
I went down the other evening, for instance, to see the _Baltic_
and the _Campania_ come in to their berths. They had both arrived
that morning from New York, they had landed their passengers and
their mails at the Stage, and all afternoon they had been lying in
mid-stream, two steep-shored islands, with the ferry-boats passing
beneath them and silver clouds of gulls ranging about their coasts. And
now, the tide being at the full, they had awakened wonderfully to life,
and were moving processionally down the flood. A brace of tugs marched
at the head of each, one a little to starboard, one to port, and in the
wake of each another tug nodded and dipped.
It was a grey evening; a cold wind pressed upon the tide, slats of rain
broke upon the surface. But the sight of that pageant out there in
the stillness warmed the grey as with fire. It stirred the heart like
music; it was as elemental in appeal as music. It fingered a new range
of emotions, untouched by the doings of men. It was a progress as brave
and unhuman as the progress of clouds across the sky.
The great moment came when they curved slowly about in the dusk, and
began to move imperturbably across the flood to where the head-light
of our pier upheld a cold gleam against the grey. The wind beat about
them as they advanced, flurries of rain beset them, but neither the
wind nor the rain, nor the racing tide, nor the narrowness of the
granite-guarded opening they had to enter, seemed in the least to
trouble that impassive progress. And then they were upon the gap, and
the sheer walls were crushing about their flanks, and a vague tumult
of sounds drifted down the air, and so they passed through, with a
kind of contemptuous precision, into the dead reaches beyond. One
admired, one marvelled, but it was never the admiration one gives to
human things. That vague drift of sound, the dim peering faces away up
there on the bridge, the little group of men running with a rope along
the quay--they all seemed quite irrelevant--little happenings to which
the lordly shapes remained profoundly indifferent. It was to them, to
those lordly shapes, that the homage went out; theirs was the courage
and the beauty and the wise strength. And when one lighted porthole,
and then another, revealed rooms filled with living people, it became
scarcely possible to resist a cry. The monster, after all, beneath
this impassivity, was really crammed and feverish with some dreadful
parasitic life.... It is a sensation not dissimilar to that which one
gets when, standing in Hyde Park on some clear spring morning, one
surveys the far landscape rising and falling away in the east, and
then suddenly realizes with a stound that all that palely gleaming
country-side is riddled with caverns enclosing living men.
§ 6.
After the starkness and rigour of the Docks, the Landing Stage itself,
the half-mile raft, moored to the City’s gates, which forms their
centre-piece, presents a somewhat dilettante appearance, almost,
indeed, a sentimental. It certainly makes amends, at any rate, for the
absence of the human note in the theatre that stretches away at either
end of it. Half of Liverpool uses it as a matter of business, the other
half as a matter of health and pleasure, and it presents all day long
the appearance of a democratic promenade. It is, in fact, the finest
of Liverpool’s parks, furnished with its sheet of water, provided
with its cafés, its bookstalls, its seats. Merchants and clerks from
the contiguous bone-part of the fan slip down here at lunch-time,
mothers bring their children from the recesses of the suburban plume.
The actual people of Liverpool are here at last to be seen in vital
conjunction with the weapon they employ. All that is vivid in the
movements of great waters is made into a bright piece of their lives,
a familiar picture on the walls of their living-room. A breeze is
blowing, maybe, and all the wide surface is curded and laced with
foam. The foam makes a silver lattice up which the golden roses of the
morning climb and burn. The scent of their blooming has coloured the
dreams of the ages.
Nor is even the utilitarian, the northern, end of the Stage, where the
great liners, the _Baltics_ and _Campanias_, discharge and accept their
passengers and mails, altogether free from that effect of festival.
The mass of the steamer blots out the sky, indeed, and it is thus in
a cistern of shade that the actual leave-takings are effected and the
baggage plucked aboard. But there is always so much of briskness,
of white-handed briskness, of silks and uniforms and an active
sociability, that the gloom becomes a positive aid to the drawing-room
sparkle of it all. Deep amongst those monstrous shapes and silences
at the Docks all the real effort has gone forward--the loading, the
coaling, even the embarkation of the emigrants--and having suffered
that in secret, the liner simply plays the part of stolid protector
of intimacies. The human drama is never very obvious: there are more
tears and tension at any of the great railway-stations; and although
the actual severance of the ship from its moorings--breaking away, as
it seems from a distance, like a solid lump of the land--does make some
restoration of that unhuman drama of elemental quantities, the massed,
fluttering handkerchiefs, the lines of upturned faces by the water’s
edge, keep the moment intimate and gallant.
[Illustration: THE LUCANIA.]
More of the real emotion of distance, of destinies astonishingly
contravened, belongs to the instant of the steamer’s arrival. The naked
fact of the departure is always somewhat misted, and the last severance
gradually prepared for, by the way the process extends: the steamer
protects the Stage for an hour or so, the nerves are habituated. But
the incoming of the liner is a different matter. It is a smear in the
sky, it is a neatly pencilled apparition, it is a towering event in
the River, it is a vast door barring out the west, all in the briefest
space of time: from start to climax the event leaps up through a swift
crescendo of incident, and the little figures trooping an instant
later over the high gangways that are really bridges from New York to
London have a fine aura of adventure. To see all this accomplished in
some evening of amber and emerald, with the lights unfolding like pale
flowers on the far-drawn violet shores, is to get another vision of the
world’s possibilities of beauty and romance.