A callous-looking grey morning was breaking in the Mersey. Now and
then, when a bell-buoy heaved, the bell tolled. It was just like
that--tolling, tolling them home. Another steamer, swathed in mist,
surged along, behind and a little to the side, but rapidly drawing
level. Captain Williamson, coming to the bridge and gazing astern at
that steamer that was but half vapour, turned away with some agility
after his scrutiny, for she was another cattleboat, and he wanted to be
berthed first. Those members of the "Push," the morning's feeding
being over, who strolled as far forward as to the bridge, heard him
speaking down the tube to the engine room. Sounds of energetic
shovelling came up from the stoke-hole; the _Glory_ put on the pace a
little more as the other ship came level. The _Glory_ led again.
Captain Williamson, pacing the bridge, stirring up the morning haze,
looked pleased. Again the other ship forged level, and he was heard
chanting: "Shake her up! Shake her up!" The cattlemen took up the
refrain, and addressed the deck on which they walked and
double-shuffled, with "Shake her up! Shake her up!"
[Illustration: "Again the cattleships forged level."]
"Oho!" shouted Cockney. "'Ere we are! Two stinks comin' 'ome!"
Michael leant on the rail and gazed at the rival ship with one eye,
raised the shade slightly from the other and looked, to see if it
improved.
"Iberian!" he said. "Iberian!" reading her name upon the bows.
"Hiberian," said Cockney.
"No, you're thinking of the Hibernian," replied Michael, still holding
the shade up and peering, like a man testing new eye-glasses.
Cockney humped his shoulders and shot his face forward, then noticed
Michael lifting that lid over his eye, and his mouth gave a twist of
something like shame, and he turned away.
"It's the S dropped off," said the Inquisitive One. "I came over on
her once--Siberian."
"Nothing of the kind!" said somebody else.
"Oh, gee!" said Mike. "You fellers are always scrapping."
"Well, what is it, then?" they asked him "What is her name?"
"Can't you rade?" asked Mike.
"Yes. But what _is_ her name?"
"It's the S dropped off," Charlie repeated.
Mike shook his shoulders and that baffled look was on his forehead as
he turned from them.
"Oh, indade," he said. "Nobody knows anything about it; and
everybody's talking. You think you know all about it; maybe I think I
know a hell of a lot; but we all know damn-all. If you want to know,
keep your mouth shut till we get ashore. They'll be paid off along of
us likely, and you'll hear what the man at the Board of Trade Office
calls them. She's another ould ship the same as us, and that's enough
to be goin' on with."
"Well, we're forgin a'ead, any'ow," said Cockney.
Suddenly their feet tingled and the sound of the siren came. They
looked round and up. The haze had not thickened again-it was not for
that she whistled.
"She's whistling for the cattle-sheds," somebody said. One of the
others explained that in a race like this the steamer that passed a
certain point first was the first to be unloaded, and the _Glory_ was
whistling to let them know ashore that she had done it. Some of the
youngsters asked the older men if this was so, but they shook their
heads; they did not know. They had often made the trip, but rules
change. "Wait and see," was all that anybody could say.
A radiance began to come down into the haze, and the particles of
moisture sparkled. A glory, a splendour, but ever so tenuous, ever so
frail, was on the river-mist, a mist that waned fainter and fainter.
The men lay along the rail and looked into the mist as though they
sought to make sure of that evanescent radiance in it, to make sure
that it was there, was not a trick of their eyes. The other steamer
had now the air of giving up, fell behind, foot by foot, content to be
second. One of the young men plucked Mike's elbow; he had been in a
knot looking the other way.
"Is that right, Mike?" he asked, pointing to the long melancholy
promenade that showed up ashore. "Is that where the toffs go to pick
up the flash molls?"
"Oh, indade, I don't know," said Mike.
The Inquisitive One fell to chatting with Scholar, but asking questions
in a way wholly different from that of the two catechists whom Scholar
had desired to keep at arm's length--the Cardiff man, and the man from
Fife in Scotland.
"Mike!" he said, suddenly. "Mike, Scholar has a mother!"
"Well, what about it?" asked Mike. "I expect ye had wan yersilf."
The Inquisitive One looked far off briefly, then a new thought came
again to him.
"Got a father?" he asked, turning back to Scholar.
There was a look in Scholar's eyes that seemed somehow akin with that
baffled look that showed in Mike's. He nodded. The Inquisitive One
stood back, hands in pockets, and examined him with great interest.
"You're going _home_?" he said, accentuating the word. "You have a
home?"
Mike turned away slightly. The Inquisitive One waggled his head
sidewise as a sign that he wanted to draw Scholar aside again. Nobody
who heard had jeered; some had pretended not to hear; only the chumming
Welshman and the man from Dysart in Fife, standing together and apart,
looked scorn, hate, contempt at these other two. Scholar was amazed to
see that there were tears in the eyes of the Inquisitive One as he said:
"I often wonder what it's like going home. I've never had a father,
and I've never had a mother. Straight! Will you be coming back on the
ship?"--this suddenly, eagerly.
"I don't know. I think so."
"Tell me all about it when you come back, will yer? I would like to
know."
But they were now being warped into the land, through channels between
dock walls into docks, round the dock walls, sailors coming running
along to hang over rope-fenders. The cattlemen kept quiet. There
seemed to be no end to it. Men on shore caught ropes and ran,
clattering and yelling. It was as if they were dragging for a corpse.
Scholar felt a horror of the land, even as he had felt a horror of
putting out to sea in that safe full of madmen, madmen that he felt now
he would like to know more of--not probing like the Welshman, or the
man from Fife, not even perhaps questioning personally like the
Inquisitive One, but just sailing the seas with them after they had got
over their cups. Suddenly they found that the ship was still. There
was a rope ladder hanging over the other side. A broad-beamed little
steamer lay there. The unruly members of the "Push," the shirk-works,
were piling over the side and down the rope ladder.
"Come on, Mike!" someone called. "Ashore!"
"They're going to lave us to run the cattle ashore!" said Mike,
disgusted, and he swung his legs over. Over they all went, one after
the other, down the rope ladder, and jumped thence on to the bluff
little steamer, where a man in a jersey stood looking at them
curiously, staring; and another, a custom-house man, sat on the further
bulwark watching the descent on the grin. The Man with the Hat came
down, his wrist through the handles of his valise.
"Carry your bag?" jeered the younger men among the cattlemen below.
"Carry your bag, mister?"
But cause for greater amusement was beheld higher up. There was Four
Eyes, wrestling with a small trunk, round which he had made a rope
fast, trying to lower it over the side. They whooped and cheered, they
rocked with delight. "Lower away there!" they shouted. "All clear
below! Drop it in the dock!" They advised him to make fast to the
capstan. As he struggled with the box they suggested that he should
"hail them two fellers on the bridge," and ask them to give him a
hand--namely the pilot and the skipper. The face of Rafferty appeared
over the rail; he gnashed his teeth, he yelped at them.
"It ain't our place to run the cattle ashore," they called back.
Others looked a little forward, turning their heads, for a sharp
whistle had sounded thence. Candlass, standing on the top of a
sheep-pen, raised thumb and forefinger, and beckoned gently with the
finger--then, with his head, gave an inclination inboard.
"Come on youse, then," said Mike. "I knew youse was wrong."
The man in the jersey, who had been standing like a squat effigy, moved
to a rope by which this little craft was moored alongside, pressed feet
to the bulwark, hung on to the rope so that the great hull of the
_Glory_ (she looked a massive thing again) loomed close and they could
stretch out to the rope ladder. Rafferty above hauled in Four Eyes'
trunk with great vehemence, that "poor feller" standing by like a great
child watching the rough-handling of a toy. They swarmed on deck
again. Candlass came aft and stood beside them.
"Stand by, men," he said. "Just wait till we get alongside here."
The ship began to move on again, towards a sound of lowing of cattle
and shouting of men, and Candlass walked forward, left them, and stood
chatting amidships with Rafferty. There appeared suddenly, running
into their midst, swarming on deck like rats, several grimy stokers,
looking for friends, it would appear, among the cattlemen. Mike eyed
the little knots that drew aside.
"If you want your razor, Scholar," he said quietly, "keep your eye on
these fellows. Whoever's got it up here will very likely slip it to
one of his friends in the black hole, for fear of you putting a copper
on them."
The Inquisitive One, standing by, heard the word "copper" and flinched.
"What you say about a copper?" he asked anxiously.
"Now then, some of you fellows," cried Candlass.
"Come on, you fellows," shouted Rafferty.
The willing ones followed them; the shirkers remained, and were not
worried. Indeed all were not required--they would be in each other's
way. They only went below now to knock out the divisions between the
pens with a crow-bar or two, or the back of an axe, or whatever
implement came handy; and as they were so employed the shore-push
thrust in their gangways and swarmed up them.
A couple of men that Mike called "them toffs" were speaking to Candlass
at the top of the gangway that stretched to the main deck. They paid
no heed to the men who had brought the cattle across, or at least
little heed. One of them, once, while talking, roved his eyes from
Candlass along the deck, looked at this cattleman, looked at that, half
absently; saw Scholar, seemed for a moment to be more interested in him
than in the threesome chat; looked then at Mike, up and down, appeared
to measure him as if he thought: "Jove! There's a big fellow!" nodded
"Yes, yes," to Candlass, looked at Mike's face again with an expression
faintly reminiscent of that which had showed on Smithers' face now and
then when he stood beside the wicket of the little movable office in
the back of the shed at Montreal as the Hard Cases trooped up to sign
on. Mike bent down, lifted a board, and stepped forward to a great
steer that thrust its head, and its great long horns, over the front
barricade. The "toff" looked at him, alert, frowning; but all the
movements of these Hard Cases seemed belligerent to strangers, and Mike
might not be going to rough-handle the brute. So he merely watched,
intent. Mike took the end of the board and scrubbed the steer under
its chin as it raised its great head, like a cat wanting to be
scratched; it turned its head round and over slowly, to have the office
well done all round.
"Well, bejabbers, this is your last scratch! You're a fine looking
baste. You might have had a worse trip!" Mike addressed the steer,
that baffled look on his face, and his eyes kindly.
When they did find themselves, anon, rightly upon the shore, they
clustered there, masterless men. Jack asked: "What are we waiting here
for?" His partner said: "I don't know," and swore. Somebody moved
away, saying: "Come on, come on--what are we waiting here for?" and a
few followed him.
"Where are you going?" he was asked.
He admitted that he did not know. A long, thin, grey-faced man drew
nigh and stood beside the knot. Somebody took him into the
conversation, half turning to him, but not looking at him, unaware that
a stranger had joined them, and he answered, but not eagerly, quite
casually. Thus he dropped into the talk: what kind of a trip had they
had? what were they hanging around for? They didn't know. One of them
asked if he was So-and-So, of Such-and-Such a boarding house? He
admitted he was. Was he there still? He merely nodded--it was all
very casual, but it seemed settled soon, seemed to be in the air
somehow that they had arranged that they might as well bunk at his
boarding house as anywhere else.
Then Candlass appeared on the wharf, wearing a white collar instead of
the blue-and-white striped rubber one of the trip. Some of the men
approached him, and he turned in his walk as a housemaster, one
somewhat feared as a rule but respected, turns to hear what some boys
would say to him, who have the air of wondering if they should approach
at all on the day before breakup. He answered gently, easily, seemed
to suggest by his manner that he would see them through as well as
possible, but that even he was in the clutch of circumstance. It was
with the hint of a shrug and with a little toss of the head and a half
smile that he left them. The crowd formed afresh around those who had
spoken to him.
"What does he say? What does he say?"
"Well," said Mike, sticking a hand under his belt, "we may as well
drift up that way, then." "That way" was the Board of Trade Office.
"See you later on," said the boarding house man.
"Are you going away?" asked somebody, who perhaps felt homeless.
"Oh, I'll be back--I'll meet you up there."
"What does he say? What does he say?" He had drifted away.
"Who the hell is he?" asked one with a mania for trying to make others
quarrelsome, and then backing out. The older hands filed off; the
others followed. The Inquisitive One saw their resemblance to a
procession as they drew aside to let a traction engine go past, a
rattling, smoking, devil-waggon, pulling a string of lorries laden with
swaying beer kegs. He took out his mouth organ. Rattling and
deafening the engine and drays quivered by, the men shouting: "Oh,
beer!" or: "How would you like to get all them inside you?" The
procession went on, the irresponsible tail-end of it cake-walking, and
the mouth organ, with full tremolo, in full blast, made music for it
with the air of a bottle-song of the halls.