XXXI.
The Nore sand remains covered at low-water, and never seen by human
eye; but the Nore is a name to conjure with visions of historical
events, of battles, of fleets, of mutinies, of watch and ward kept
upon the great throbbing heart of the State. This ideal point of
the estuary, this centre of memories, is marked upon the steely
gray expanse of the waters by a lightship painted red that, from a
couple of miles off, looks like a cheap and bizarre little toy. I
remember how, on coming up the river for the first time, I was
surprised at the smallness of that vivid object--a tiny warm speck
of crimson lost in an immensity of gray tones. I was startled, as
if of necessity the principal beacon in the water-way of the
greatest town on earth should have presented imposing proportions.
And, behold! the brown sprit-sail of a barge hid it entirely from
my view.
Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the lightship
marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral
(the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and
the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of
the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war
moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with
its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon
a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown
clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a
pond. On the imposing expanse of the great estuary the traffic of
the port where so much of the world's work and the world's thinking
is being done becomes insignificant, scattered, streaming away in
thin lines of ships stringing themselves out into the eastern
quarter through the various navigable channels of which the Nore
lightship marks the divergence. The coasting traffic inclines to
the north; the deep-water ships steer east with a southern
inclination, on through the Downs, to the most remote ends of the
world. In the widening of the shores sinking low in the gray,
smoky distances the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile
fleet of good ships that London sends out upon the turn of every
tide. They follow each other, going very close by the Essex shore.
Such as the beads of a rosary told by business-like shipowners for
the greater profit of the world they slip one by one into the open:
while in the offing the inward-bound ships come up singly and in
bunches from under the sea horizon closing the mouth of the river
between Orfordness and North Foreland. They all converge upon the
Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with
the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat,
like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames
is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem
very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is
Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum
ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks,
low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the
fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated
in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level
marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land
rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in
the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.
Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of
factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above
the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking
quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset,
they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work,
manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of
distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of
tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with
an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from
the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore
ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the
various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen
distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the
serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men's houses.
But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and
desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a
slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the
bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for
miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all
to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West
Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined
with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a
stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying
the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-
gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges
of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock,
the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.
Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick
pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp
of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which
had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at
the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone
out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening
free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters
of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys
laid along the face of the town; but the sea-freedom stops short
there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, the artifices, the
contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates,
waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London
Bridge, and the hum of men's work fills the river with a menacing,
muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The water-
way, so fair above and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and
mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty
iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws,
overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by
walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke
and dust.
This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks
is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be
to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a
jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the
buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose,
but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. Like the
matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of
an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London's
infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life. In other river ports
it is not so. They lie open to their stream, with quays like broad
clearings, with streets like avenues cut through thick timber for
the convenience of trade. I am thinking now of river ports I have
seen--of Antwerp, for instance; of Nantes or Bordeaux, or even old
Rouen, where the night-watchmen of ships, elbows on rail, gaze at
shop-windows and brilliant cafes, and see the audience go in and
come out of the opera-house. But London, the oldest and greatest
of river ports, does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open
quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like
the face of a forest, is the London waterside. It is the waterside
of watersides, where only one aspect of the world's life can be
seen, and only one kind of men toils on the edge of the stream.
The lightless walls seem to spring from the very mud upon which the
stranded barges lie; and the narrow lanes coming down to the
foreshore resemble the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth
where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical streams.
Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London
spread out unsuspected, smooth, and placid, lost amongst the
buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie
concealed in the intricate growth of houses with a few stalks of
mastheads here and there overtopping the roof of some four-story
warehouse.
It is a strange conjunction this of roofs and mastheads, of walls
and yard-arms. I remember once having the incongruity of the
relation brought home to me in a practical way. I was the chief
officer of a fine ship, just docked with a cargo of wool from
Sydney, after a ninety days' passage. In fact, we had not been in
more than half an hour and I was still busy making her fast to the
stone posts of a very narrow quay in front of a lofty warehouse.
An old man with a gray whisker under the chin and brass buttons on
his pilot-cloth jacket, hurried up along the quay hailing my ship
by name. He was one of those officials called berthing-masters--
not the one who had berthed us, but another, who, apparently, had
been busy securing a steamer at the other end of the dock. I could
see from afar his hard blue eyes staring at us, as if fascinated,
with a queer sort of absorption. I wondered what that worthy sea-
dog had found to criticise in my ship's rigging. And I, too,
glanced aloft anxiously. I could see nothing wrong there. But
perhaps that superannuated fellow-craftsman was simply admiring the
ship's perfect order aloft, I thought, with some secret pride; for
the chief officer is responsible for his ship's appearance, and as
to her outward condition, he is the man open to praise or blame.
Meantime the old salt ("ex-coasting skipper" was writ large all
over his person) had hobbled up alongside in his bumpy, shiny
boots, and, waving an arm, short and thick like the flipper of a
seal, terminated by a paw red as an uncooked beef-steak, addressed
the poop in a muffled, faint, roaring voice, as if a sample of
every North-Sea fog of his life had been permanently lodged in his
throat: "Haul 'em round, Mr. Mate!" were his words. "If you don't
look sharp, you'll have your topgallant yards through the windows
of that 'ere warehouse presently!" This was the only cause of his
interest in the ship's beautiful spars. I own that for a time I
was struck dumb by the bizarre associations of yard-arms and
window-panes. To break windows is the last thing one would think
of in connection with a ship's topgallant yard, unless, indeed, one
were an experienced berthing-master in one of the London docks.
This old chap was doing his little share of the world's work with
proper efficiency. His little blue eyes had made out the danger
many hundred yards off. His rheumaticky feet, tired with balancing
that squat body for many years upon the decks of small coasters,
and made sore by miles of tramping upon the flagstones of the dock
side, had hurried up in time to avert a ridiculous catastrophe. I
answered him pettishly, I fear, and as if I had known all about it
before.
"All right, all right! can't do everything at once."
He remained near by, muttering to himself till the yards had been
hauled round at my order, and then raised again his foggy, thick
voice:
"None too soon," he observed, with a critical glance up at the
towering side of the warehouse. "That's a half-sovereign in your
pocket, Mr. Mate. You should always look first how you are for
them windows before you begin to breast in your ship to the quay."
It was good advice. But one cannot think of everything or foresee
contacts of things apparently as remote as stars and hop-poles.
