Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (824 page)

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 cafés, 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.

XXXII.

The view of ships lying moored in some of the older docks of London has always suggested to my mind the image of a flock of swans kept in the flooded backyard of grim tenement houses.  The flatness of the walls surrounding the dark pool on which they float brings out wonderfully the flowing grace of the lines on which a ship’s hull is built.  The lightness of these forms, devised to meet the winds and the seas, makes, by contrast with the great piles of bricks, the chains and cables of their moorings appear very necessary, as if nothing less could prevent them from soaring upwards and over the roofs.  The least puff of wind stealing round the corners of the dock buildings stirs these captives fettered to rigid shores.  It is as if the soul of a ship were impatient of confinement.  Those masted hulls, relieved of their cargo, become restless at the slightest hint of the wind’s freedom.  However tightly moored, they range a little at their berths, swaying imperceptibly the spire-like assemblages of cordage and spars.  You can detect their impatience by watching the sway of the mastheads against the motionless, the soulless gravity of mortar and stones.  As you pass alongside each hopeless prisoner chained to the quay, the slight grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes a sound of angry muttering.  But, after all, it may be good for ships to go through a period of restraint and repose, as the restraint and self-communion of inactivity may be good for an unruly soul — not, indeed, that I mean to say that ships are unruly; on the contrary, they are faithful creatures, as so many men can testify.  And faithfulness is a great restraint, the strongest bond laid upon the self-will of men and ships on this globe of land and sea.

This interval of bondage in the docks rounds each period of a ship’s life with the sense of accomplished duty, of an effectively played part in the work of the world.  The dock is the scene of what the world would think the most serious part in the light, bounding, swaying life of a ship.  But there are docks and docks.  The ugliness of some docks is appalling.  Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery.  Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coal-dust.  The most important ingredient for getting the world’s work along is distributed there under the circumstances of the greatest cruelty meted out to helpless ships.  Shut up in the desolate circuit of these basins, you would think a free ship would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage.  But a ship, perhaps because of her faithfulness to men, will endure an extraordinary lot of ill-usage.  Still, I have seen ships issue from certain docks like half-dead prisoners from a dungeon, bedraggled, overcome, wholly disguised in dirt, and with their men rolling white eyeballs in black and worried faces raised to a heaven which, in its smoky and soiled aspect, seemed to reflect the sordidness of the earth below.  One thing, however, may be said for the docks of the Port of London on both sides of the river: for all the complaints of their insufficient equipment, of their obsolete rules, of failure (they say) in the matter of quick despatch, no ship need ever issue from their gates in a half-fainting condition.  London is a general cargo port, as is only proper for the greatest capital of the world to be.  General cargo ports belong to the aristocracy of the earth’s trading places, and in that aristocracy London, as it is its way, has a unique physiognomy.

The absence of picturesqueness cannot be laid to the charge of the docks opening into the Thames.  For all my unkind comparisons to swans and backyards, it cannot be denied that each dock or group of docks along the north side of the river has its own individual attractiveness.  Beginning with the cosy little St. Katherine’s Dock, lying overshadowed and black like a quiet pool amongst rocky crags, through the venerable and sympathetic London Docks, with not a single line of rails in the whole of their area and the aroma of spices lingering between its warehouses, with their far-famed wine-cellars — down through the interesting group of West India Docks, the fine docks at Blackwall, on past the Galleons Reach entrance of the Victoria and Albert Docks, right down to the vast gloom of the great basins in Tilbury, each of those places of restraint for ships has its own peculiar physiognomy, its own expression.  And what makes them unique and attractive is their common trait of being romantic in their usefulness.

In their way they are as romantic as the river they serve is unlike all the other commercial streams of the world.  The cosiness of the St. Katherine’s Dock, the old-world air of the London Docks, remain impressed upon the memory.  The docks down the river, abreast of Woolwich, are imposing by their proportions and the vast scale of the ugliness that forms their surroundings — ugliness so picturesque as to become a delight to the eye.  When one talks of the Thames docks, “beauty” is a vain word, but romance has lived too long upon this river not to have thrown a mantle of glamour upon its banks.

The antiquity of the port appeals to the imagination by the long chain of adventurous enterprises that had their inception in the town and floated out into the world on the waters of the river.  Even the newest of the docks, the Tilbury Dock, shares in the glamour conferred by historical associations.  Queen Elizabeth has made one of her progresses down there, not one of her journeys of pomp and ceremony, but an anxious business progress at a crisis of national history.  The menace of that time has passed away, and now Tilbury is known by its docks.  These are very modern, but their remoteness and isolation upon the Essex marsh, the days of failure attending their creation, invested them with a romantic air.  Nothing in those days could have been more striking than the vast, empty basins, surrounded by miles of bare quays and the ranges of cargo-sheds, where two or three ships seemed lost like bewitched children in a forest of gaunt, hydraulic cranes.  One received a wonderful impression of utter abandonment, of wasted efficiency.  From the first the Tilbury Docks were very efficient and ready for their task, but they had come, perhaps, too soon into the field.  A great future lies before Tilbury Docks.  They shall never fill a long-felt want (in the sacramental phrase that is applied to railways, tunnels, newspapers, and new editions of books).  They were too early in the field.  The want shall never be felt because, free of the trammels of the tide, easy of access, magnificent and desolate, they are already there, prepared to take and keep the biggest ships that float upon the sea.  They are worthy of the oldest river port in the world.