What face this shipping parish shows to a stranger I do not know. I
was never a stranger to it. I should suppose it to be a face almost
vacant, perhaps a little conventionally picturesque, for it is grey and
seamed. It might be even an altogether expressionless mask, staring at
nothing. Anyhow, there must be very little to be learned from it, for
those bright young cultured strangers, admirable in their eagerness for
social service, who come and live with us for a time, so that they may
understand the life of the poor, never seem to have made anything of
us. They say they have; they speak even with some amount of assurance,
at places where the problem which is us is examined aloud by confident
politicians and churchfolk. But I think they know well enough that
they always failed to get anywhere near what mind we have. There is a
reason for it, of course. Think of honest and sociable Mary Ann, of
Pottles Rents, E., having been alarmed by the behaviour of good
society, as it is betrayed in the popular picture Press, making odd
calls in Belgravia (the bells for visitors, too), to bring souls to God.
My parish, to strangers, must be opaque with its indifference. It
stares beyond the interested visitor, in the way the sad and
disillusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger would not
understand if he were told. He has reason, therefore, to say we are
dull. And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be an
amorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would be
distressing to a sensitive stranger, and even a little terrifying, as
all that is alive but inexplicable must be. No more conscious purpose
shows in our existence than is seen in the coral polyp. We just go on
increasing and forming more cells. Overlooking our wilderness of tiles
in the rain--we get more than a fair share of rain, or else the sad
quality of wet weather is more noticeable in such a place as ours--it
seems a dismal affair to present for the intelligent labours of mankind
for generations. Could nothing better have been done than that? What
have we been busy about?
Well, what are people busy about anywhere? Human purpose here has been
as blind and sporadic as it is at Westminster, unrelated to any fixed
star, lucky to fill the need of the day, building without any distant
design, flowing in bulk through the lowest channels that offered. As
elsewhere, it is obstructed by the unrecognized mistakes of its past.
Our part of London, like Kensington or Islington, is but the formless
accretion of countless swarms of life which had no common endeavour;
and so here we are, Time's latest deposit, the vascular stratum of this
area of the earth's rind, a sensitive surface flourishing during its
day on the piled strata of the dead. Yet this is the reef to which I
am connected by tissue and bone. Cut the kind of life you find in
Poplar and I must bleed. I cannot detach myself, and write of it.
Like any other atom, I would show the local dirt, if examined. My hand
moves, not loyally so much as instinctively, to impulses which come
from beneath and so out of a stranger's knowledge; out of my own, too,
largely.
Is that all? Not quite. Where you, if you came to us, would see but
an unremarkable level of East-Enders, much like other Londoners, with
no past worth recording, and no future likely to be worth a book of
gold, I see, looking to the past, a spectral show of fine ships and
brave affairs, and good men forgotten, or almost forgotten, and moving
among the plainer shades of its foreground some ghosts well known to
me. I think they were what are called failures in life. And turning
from those shades, and their work which went the way of all forgotten
stuff before the inexorable tide of affairs, I look forward from
Poplar, unreasonably hopeful (for so we are made), though this time
into the utter dark, for the morning that shall show us the more
enduring towers of the city of our dreams, the heart of the commune,
the radiant spires of the city that shall be lovelier than that dear
city of Cecrops.
But for those whose place it is not, memories and dreams can do nothing
to transform it. Dockland would seem to others as any alien town would
seem to me. There is something, though, you must grant us, a heritage
peculiarly ours. Amid our packed tenements, into the dark mass where
poorer London huddles as my shipping parish, are set our docks.
Embayed in the obscurity are those areas of captured day, reservoirs of
light brimmed daily by the tides of the sun, silver mirrors through
which one may leave the dark floor of Poplar for radiant other worlds.
We have our ships and docks, and the River at Blackwall when night and
the flood come together, and walls and roofs which topmasts and funnels
surmount, suggestions of a vagabondage hidden in what seemed so arid a
commonplace desert. These are of first importance. They are our ways
of escape. We are not kept within a division of the map. And Orion,
he strides over our roofs on bright winter nights. We have the
immortals. At the most, your official map sets us only lateral bounds.
The heavens here are as high as elsewhere. Our horizon is beyond our
own limits. In this faithful chronicle of our parish I must tell of
our boundaries as I know them. They are not so narrow as you might
think. Maps cannot be so carefully planned, nor walls built high
enough nor streets confined and strict enough, to hold within limits
our lusty and growing population of thoughts. There is no census you
can take which will give you forewarning of what is growing here, of
the way we increase and expand. Take care. Some day, when we discover
the time has come for it, we shall tell our numbers, and be sure you
will then learn the result. Travelling through our part of the
country, you see but our appearance. You go, and report us casually to
your friends, and forget us. But when you feel the ground moving under
your feet, that will be us.
From my high window in central Dockland, as from a watch tower, I look
out over a tumbled waste of roofs and chimneys, a volcanic desert,
inhabited only by sparrows and pigeons. Humanity burrows in swarms
below that surface of crags, but only faint cries tell me that the
rocks are caverned and inhabited, that life flows there unseen through
subterranean galleries. Often, when the sunrise over the roofs is
certainly the coming of Aurora, as though then the first illumination
of the sky heralded the veritable dayspring for which we look, and the
gods were nearly here, I have watched for that crust beneath, which
seals the sleepers under, to heave and roll, to burst, and for released
humanity to pour through fractures, from the lower dark, to be renewed
in the fires of the morning. Nothing has happened yet. But I am
confident it would repay society to appoint another watcher when I am
gone, to keep an eye on the place.
Right below my window there are two ridges running in parallel jags of
chimneys, with a crevasse between them to which I can see no bottom.
But a roadway is there. From an acute angle of the window a cornice
overhangs a sheer fall of cliff. That is as near the ground as can be
got from my outlook. Several superior peaks rise out of the
wilderness, where the churches are; and beyond the puzzling middle
distance, where smoke dissolves all form, loom the dock warehouses, a
continuous range of far dark heights. I have thoughts of a venturesome
and lonely journey by moonlight, in and out of the chimney stacks, and
all the way to the distant mountains. It looks inviting, and possible,
by moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window,
Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country
of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and
protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the
shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in
surprise, become thin and vague, either phantoms or smoke, and
dissolve. The freakish light shows in little what happens in the long
run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till
change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see
that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I
doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ironic display on
their roofs.
My eyes more frequently go to one place in that high country. In that
distant line of warehouses is a break, and there occasionally I see the
masts and spars of a tall ship, and I remember that beyond my dark
horizon of warehouses is the path down which she has come from the
Indies to Blackwall. I said we were not inland. Cassiopeia is in that
direction, and China over there.
For my outlook is more than the centre of Dockland. I call it the
centre of the world. Our high road is part of the main thoroughfare
from Kensington to Valparaiso. Every wanderer must come this way at
least once in his life. We are the hub whence all roads go to the
circumference. A ship does not go down but we hear the cry of
distress, and the house of a neighbour rocks on the flood and is lost,
casting its people adrift on the blind tides.
Think of some of our street names--Malabar Street, Amoy Place, Nankin
Street, Pekin Street, Canton Street. And John Company has left its
marks. You pick up hints of the sea here as you pick old shells out of
dunes. We have, still nourishing in a garden, John Company's Chapel of
St. Matthias, a fragment of a time that was, where now the vigorous
commercial life of the Company shows no evidence whatever of its
previous urgent importance. Founded in the time of the Commonwealth as
a symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked up
from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a
reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel
has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered
the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for
antiquaries. So little do men really change. They always leave their
temples, whether they lived in Poplar or Nineveh. Only the names of
their gods change. The Chapel at Poplar it was then, when this
shipping parish had no docks, and the nearest church was over the
fields to Stepney. Our vessels then lay in the river. We got our
first dock, that of the West India Merchants, at the beginning of last
century. A little later the East India Dock was built by John Company.
Then another phase began to reshape Dockland. There came a time when
the Americans looked in a fair way, sailing ahead fast with the
wonderful clippers Donald McKay was building at Boston, to show us a
tow rope. The best sailers ever launched were those Yankee ships, and
the Thames building yards were working to create the ideal clipper
which should beat them. This really was the last effort of sails, for
steamers were on the seas, and the Americans were actually making
heroic efforts to smother them with canvas. Mr. Green, of Poplar,
worried over those Boston craft, declared we must be first again, and
first we were. But both Boston and Poplar, in their efforts to perfect
an old idea, did not see a crude but conquering notion taking form to
magnify and hasten both commerce and war.
But they were worth doing, those clippers, and worth remembering. They
sail clear into our day as imperishable memories. They still live, for
they did far more than carry merchandise. When an old mariner speaks
of the days of studding sails it is not the precious freight, the real
purpose of his ships, which animates his face. What we always remember
afterwards is not the thing we did, or tried to do, but the friends who
were about us at the time. But our stately ships themselves, with our
River their home, which gave Poplar's name, wherever they went, a ring
on the counter like a sound guinea, at the most they are now but planks
bearded with sea grass, lost in ocean currents, sighted only by the
albatross.
Long ago nearly every home in Dockland treasured a lithographic
portrait of one of the beauties, framed and hung where visitors could
see it as soon as they entered the door. Each of us knew one of them,
her runs and her records, the skipper and his fads, the owner and his
prejudice about the last pennyworth of tar. She was not a transporter
to us, an earner of freights, something to which was attached a profit
and loss account and an insurance policy. She had a name. She was a
sentient being, perhaps noble, perhaps wilful; she might have any
quality of character, even malice. I have seen hands laid on her with
affection in dock, when those who knew her were telling me of her ways.
To few of the newer homes among the later streets of Dockland is that
beautiful lady's portrait known. Here and there it survives, part of
the flotsam which has drifted through the years with grandmother's
sandalwood chest, the last of the rush-bottomed chairs, and the
lacquered tea-caddy. I well remember a room from which such survivals
were saved when the household ship ran on a coffin, and foundered. It
was a front parlour in one of the streets with an Oriental name; which,
I cannot be expected to remember, for when last I was in that room I
was lifted to sit on one of its horsehair chairs, its seat like a
hedgehog, and I was cautioned to sit still. It was rather a long drop
to the floor from a chair for me in those days, and though sitting
still was hard, sliding part of the way would have been much worse.
That was a room for holy days, too, a place for good behaviour, and
boots profaned it. Its door was nearly always shut and locked, and
only the chance formal visit of respect-worthy strangers brought down
its key from the top shelf of the kitchen dresser. That key was seldom
used for relatives, except at Christmas, or when one was dead. The
room was always sombre. Light filtered into it through curtains of
wire gauze, fixed in the window by mahogany frames. Over the door by
which you entered was the picture of an uncle, too young and jolly for
that serious position, I thought then, with his careless neckcloth, and
his cap pulled down over one eye. The gilt moulding was gone from a
corner of the picture--the only flaw in the prim apartment--for once
that portrait fell to the floor, and on the very day, it was guessed,
that his ship must have foundered.
A round table set on a central thick leg having a three-clawed foot was
in that chamber, covered with a cloth on which was worked a picture
from the story of Ruth. But only puzzling bits of the latter were to
be seen, for on the circumference of the table-cover were books, placed
at precise distances apart, and in the centre was a huge Bible, with a
brass clasp. With many others my name was in the Bible, and my
birthday, and a space left blank for the day of my death. Reflected in
the pier-glass which doubled the room were the portraits in oils of my
grandparents, looking wonderfully young, as you may have noticed is
often the case in people belonging to ancient history, as though,
strangely enough, people were the same in those remote days, except
that they wore different clothes.
I have often sat on the chair, and when patience had inured me to the
spines of the area I occupied, looked at the reflections in the mirror
of those portraits, for they seemed more distant so, and in a
perspective according to their age, and became really my grandparents,
in a room, properly, of another world, which could be seen, but was
not. A room no one could enter any more. I remember a black sofa,
which smelt of dust, an antimacassar over its head. That sofa would
wake to squeak tales if I stood on it to inspect the model of a ship in
yellow ivory, resting on a wall-bracket above. There were many old
shells in the polished brass fender, some with thick orange lips and
spotted backs; others were spirals of mother-o'-pearl, which took
different colours for every way you held them. You could get the only
sound in the room by putting the shells to your ear. Like the people
of the portraits, it was impossible to believe the shells had ever
lived. The inside of the grate was filled with white paper, and the
trickles of fine black dust which rested in its crevices would start
and run stealthily when people walked in the next room. Over the
looking-glass there hung a pair of immense buffalo horns, with a piece
of curly black hair dividing them which looked like the skin of our
retriever dog. Above the horns was the picture of "The Famous Tea
Clipper _Oberon_, setting her Studding Sails off the Lizard"; but so
high was the print, and so faint--for the picture, too, was old--that
some one grown up had to tell me all about it.
The clipper _Oberon_ long since sailed to the Isle-of-No-Land-at-All,
and the room in which her picture hung has gone also, like old
Dockland, and is now no more than something remembered. The clipper's
picture went with the wreckage, when the room was strewn, and I expect
in that house today there is a photograph of a steamer with two funnels.
Nothing conjures back that room so well as the recollection of a
strange odour which fell from it when its door opened, as though
something bodiless passed as we entered. There was never anything in
the room which alone could account for the smell, for it had in it
something of the sofa, which was old and black, and of the lacquered
tea-caddy, within the lid of which was the faint ghost of a principle
indefinably ancient and rare; and there was in it, too, something of
the shells. But you could never find where the smell really came from.
I have tried, and know. A recollection of that strange dusky fragrance
brings back the old room on a summer afternoon, so sombre that the
mahogany sideboard had its own reddish light, so quiet that the clock
could be heard ticking in the next room; time, you could hear, going
leisurely. There would be a long lath of sunlight, numberless atoms
swimming in it, slanting from a corner of the window to brighten a
patch of carpet. Two flies would be hovering under the ceiling.
Sometimes they would dart at a tangent to hover in another place. I
used to wonder what they lived on. You felt secure there, knowing it
was old, but seeing things did not alter, as though the world were
established and content, desiring no new thing. I did not know that
the old house, even then, quiet and still as it seemed, was actually
rocking on the flood of mutable affairs; that its navigator, sick with
anxiety and bewilderment in guiding his home in the years he did not
understand, which his experience had never charted, was sinking
nerveless at his helm. For he heard, when his children did not, the
premonition of breakers in seas having no landmark that he knew; felt
the trend and push of new and inimical forces, and currents that
carried him helpless, whither he would not go, but must, heartbroken,
into the uproar and welter of the modern.
I have been told that London east of the Tower has no history worth
mentioning, and it is true that sixteenth-century prints show the town
to finish just where the Dock of St. Katherine is now. Beyond that,
and only marshes show, with Stebonhithe Church and a few other signs to
mark recognizable country. On the south side the marshes were very
extensive, stretching from the River inland for a considerable
distance. The north shore was fen also, but a little above the tides
was a low eminence, a clay and gravel cliff, that sea-wall which now
begins below the Albert Dock and continues round the East Anglian
seaboard. Once it serpentined as far as the upper Pool, disappearing
as the wharves and docks were built to accommodate London's increasing
commerce. There is no doubt, then, that the Lower Thames parishes are
really young; but, when we are reminded that they have no history worth
mentioning, it may be understood that the historian is simply not
interested enough to mention it.
So far as age goes my shipping parish cannot compare with a cathedral
city; but antiquity is not the same as richness of experience. One
remembers the historic and venerable tortoise. He is old enough,
compared with us. But he has had nothing so varied and lively as the
least of us can show. Most of his reputed three hundred years is
sleep, no doubt, and the rest vegetables. In the experience of
Wapping, Poplar, Rotherhithe, Limehouse, and Deptford, when they really
came to life, there was precious little sleep, and no vegetables worth
mentioning. They were quick and lusty. There they stood, long
knee-deep and busy among their fleets, sometimes rising to cheer when a
greater adventure was sailing or returning, some expedition that was
off to find further avenues through the Orient or the Americas, or else
a broken craft bringing back tragedy from the Arctic; ship after ship;
great captain after great captain. No history worth mentioning! There
are Londoners who cannot taste the salt. Yet, no doubt, it is
difficult for younger London to get the ocean within its horizon. The
memory of the _Oberon_, that famous ship, is significant to me, for she
has gone, with all her fleet, and some say she took Poplar's best with
her. Once we were a famous shipping parish. Now we are but part of
the East End of London. The steamers have changed us. The tides do
not rise high enough today, and our shallow waters cannot make home for
the new keels.
But to the old home now the last of the sailing fleet is loyal. We
have enough still to show what once was there; the soft gradations of a
ship's entrance, rising into bows and bowsprit, like the form of a
comber at its limit, just before it leaps forward in collapse. The
mounting spars, alive and braced. The swoop and lift of the sheer, the
rich and audacious colours, the strange flags and foreign names. South
Sea schooner, whaling barque from Hudson's Bay, the mahogany ship from
Honduras, the fine ships and barques that still load for the antipodes
and 'Frisco. Every season they diminish, but some are still with us.
At Tilbury, where the modern liners are, you get wall sides mounting
like great hotels with tier on tier of decks, and funnels soaring high
to dominate the day. There the prospect of masts is a line of derrick
poles. But still in the upper docks is what will soon have gone for
ever from London, a dark haze of spars and rigging, with sometimes a
white sail floating in it like a cloud. We had a Russian barquentine
there yesterday. I think a barquentine is the most beautiful of ships,
the most aerial and graceful of rigs, the foremast with its transverse
spars giving breadth and balance, and steadying the unhindered lift
skywards of main and mizzen poles. The model of this Russian ship was
as memorable as a Greek statue. It is a ship's sheer which gives
loveliness to her model, like the waist of a lissom woman, finely
poised, sure of herself, in profile. She was so slight a body, so tall
and slender, but standing alert and illustriously posed, there was
implied in her slenderness a rare strength and swiftness. And to her
beauty of line there went a richness of colour which made our dull
parish a notable place. She was of wood, painted white. Her masts
were of pine, veined with amber. Her white hull, with the drenchings
of the seas, had become shot with ultramarine shadows, as though
tinctured with the virtue of the ocean. The verdigris of her sheathing
was vivid as green light; and the languid dock water, the colour of
jade, glinting round her hull, was lambent with hues not its own. You
could believe there was a soft radiation from that ship's sides which
fired the water about her, but faded when far from her sides, a
delicate and faery light which soon expired.
Such are our distinguished visitors in Dockland, though now they come
to us with less frequency. If the skipper of the _Oberon_ could now
look down the Dock Road from the corner by North Street, what he would
look for first would be, not, I am sure, what compelled the electric
trams, but for the entrance of the East Dock and its familiar tangle of
spars. He would not find it. The old dock is there, but a lagoon
asleep, and but few vessels sleeping with it. The quays are vacant,
except for the discarded lumber of ships, sun-dried boats, rusted
cables and anchors, and a pile of broken davits. The older dock of the
West India Merchants is almost the same. Yet even I have seen the
bowsprits and jib-booms of the Australian packets diminish down the
quays of the East Dock as an arcade; and of that West Dock there is a
boy who well remembers its quays buried under the largess of the
tropics and the Spanish Main, where now, through the colonnades of its
warehouse supports, the vistas are empty. Once you had to squeeze
sideways through the stacked merchandise. There were huge hogsheads of
sugar and hillocks of coconuts. Molasses and honey escaped to spread a
viscid carpet which held your feet. The casual prodigality of it
expanded the mind. Certainly this earth must be a big and cheerful
place if it could spread its treasures thus wide and deep in a public
place under the sky. It corrected the impression got from the retail
shops for any penniless youngster, with that pungent odour of sugar
crushed under foot, with its libations of syrup poured from the plenty
of the sunny isles. Today the quays are bare and deserted, and grass
rims the stones of the footway, as verdure does the neglected stone
covers in a churchyard. In the dusk of a winter evening the high and
silent warehouses which enclose the mirrors of water enclose too an
accentuation of the dusk. The water might be evaporating in shadows.
The hulls of the few ships, moored beside the walls, become absorbed in
the dark. Night withdraws their substance. What the solitary wayfarer
sees then is the incorporeal presentment of ships. Dockland expires.
The living and sounding day is elsewhere, lighting the new things on
which the young are working. Here is the past, deep in the obscurity
from which time has taken the sun, where only memory can go, and sees
but the ineffaceable impression of what once was there.
There is a notable building in our Dock Road, the Board of Trade
offices, retired a little way from the traffic behind a screen of plane
trees. Not much more than its parapet appears behind the foliage. By
those offices, on fine evenings, I find one of our ancients, Captain
Tom Bowline. Why he favours the road there I do not know. It would be
a reasonable reason, but occult. The electric trams and motor buses
annoy him. And not one of the young stokers and deck-hands just ashore
and paid off, or else waiting at a likely corner for news of a ship,
could possibly know the skipper and his honourable records. They do
not know that once, in that office, Tom was a famous and respected
figure. There he stands at times, outside the place which knew him
well, but has forgotten him, wearing his immemorial reefer jacket, his
notorious tall white hat and his humorous trousers--short, round,
substantial columns--with a broad line of braid down each leg.
His face is weather-stained still, and though his hair is white, it has
the form of its early black and abundant vitality. As long ago as 1885
he landed from his last ship, and has been with us since, watching the
landmarks go. "The sea," he said to me once, "the sea has gone. When
I look down this road and see it so empty--(the simple truth is it was
noisy with traffic)--I feel I've overstayed my time allowance. My
ships are firewood and wreckage, my owners are only funny portraits in
offices that run ten-thousand-ton steamers, and the boys are bones.
Poplar? This isn't Poplar. I feel like Robinson Crusoe--only I can't
find a footprint in the place."
It is for the young to remember there is no decay, though change,
sometimes called progress, resembles it, especially when your work is
finished and you are only waiting and looking on. When Captain Tom is
in that mood we go to smoke a pipe at a dockhead. It will be high tide
if we are in luck, and the sun will be going down to give our River
majesty, and a steamer will be backing into the stream, outward bound.
The quiet of a fine evening for Tom, and the great business of ships
and the sea for me. We see the steamer's captain and its pilot leaning
over the bridge, looking aft towards the River. I think the size of
their vessel is a little awful to Tom. He never had to guide so many
thousand tons of steel and cargo into a crowded waterway. But those
two young fellows above know nothing of the change; they came with it.
They are under their spell, thinking their world, as once Tom did his,
established and permanent. They are keeping easy pace with the
movement, and so do not know of it. Tom, now at rest, sitting on a
pierhead bollard, sees the world leaving him, going ahead past his
cogitating tobacco smoke. Let it go. We, watching quietly from our
place on the pier-head, are wiser than the moving world in one respect.
We know it does not know whence it is moving, nor why. Well, perhaps
its presiding god, who is determined the world shall go round, would be
foolish to tell us.
The sun has dropped behind the black serration of the western city.
Now the River with all the lower world loses substance, becomes
vaporous and unreal. Moving so fast then? But the definite sky
remains, a hard dome of glowing saffron based on thin girders of iron
clouds. The heaven alone is trite and plain. The wharves, the
factories, the ships, the docks, all the material evidence of hope and
industry, merge into a dim spectral show in which a few lights burn,
fumbling with ineffectual beams in dissolution. Out on the River a
dark body moves past; it has bright eyes, and hoots dismally as it goes.
There is a hush, as though at sunset the world had really resolved, and
had stopped moving. But from the waiting steamer looming over us, a
gigantic and portentous bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe,
and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith. Yet the hum of the steam
is too subdued a sound in the palpable and oppressive dusk to be
significant. Then a boatswain's pipe rends the heavy dark like the
gleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from the
steamer's bridge. There is a sudden commotion, we hear the voice
again, and answering cries, and by us, towards the black chasm of the
River in which hover groups of moving planets, the mass of the steamer
glides, its pale funnel mounting over us like a column. Out she goes,
turning broadside on, a shadow sprinkled with stars, then makes slow
way down stream, a travelling constellation occulting one after another
all the fixed lights.
Captain Tom knocks out his pipe on the heel of his boot, his eyes still
on the lights of the steamer. "Well," says Tom, "they can still do it.
They don't want any help old Tom could give aboard her. A good man
there. Where's she bound for, I wonder?"
Now who could tell him that? What a question to ask me. Did Tom ever
know his real destination? Not he! And have I not watched Dockland
itself in movement under the sun, easily mobile, from my window in its
midst? Whither was it bound? Why should the old master mariner expect
the young to answer that? He is a lucky navigator who always finds his
sky quite clear, and can set his course by the signs of unclouded
heavenly bodies, and so is sure of the port to which his steering will
take him.