Part 24

"Ever bin had?" cried the humorist. "There ain't no pleading fire! This is a picnic, this is. 'Ave a banana?"

"WhichWAY?" screamed the engine. "Don't no one know which way?"

The humorist answered them by a gesture known in polite circles as a "raspberry." Then a constable, with fierce face, battered helmet, and torn tunic, and with an arm-lock on a perfectly innocent non-combatant, flung commands in rapid gusts--

"This way, Fire. King's name. Out hoses!"

The fog rolled and rolled. The Britannia gleamed on the scene with almost tragic solemnity. Agonized shapes rushed hither and thither. Women screamed. Then a rich Irish voice sang loud above all: "Weeny, boys!"

As the firemen leaped from their perches on the engine to out hoses, so, mysteriously, did the combat cease. Constables found themselves, in a moment, wrestling with thick fog and nothing more. The boys were gone. Only women screamed.

Some one said: "If I cop a hold of the blankety blank blanker what trod on my blanking 'and, I'll just about----!"

On the word "Weeny" Simple Simon was once again jerked by the arm, and hustled furiously down passages, round corners, and through alleyways, finally to be flung into the misty radiance of Shoreditch High Street, with the terse farewell: "Now run--for the love of glory, run!"

But he didn't. He stood still against a friendly wall, and suffered. He straightened his dress. He touched sore places with a tender solicitude. His head was racking. All his limbs ached and burned. He desired nothing but the cold sheets of his bed and a bottle of embrocation. He swore at the fog, with a fine relish for the colour of sounds. He swore at things that were in no way responsible for his misfortune. Somewhere, he conjectured, in warmth and safety, Henry Wiggin, the copper's nark, was perfectly enjoying his supper of fried fish and 'taters and stout.

And then, over the sad, yellow night, faint and sweet and far away, as the memory of childhood, came a still small voice--

"No, but 'e 'ad a rummy 'at on, eh?"

A DOWN-STREAM NIGHT

BLACKWALL

WEST INDIA DOCK ROAD

Black man--white man--brown man--yellow man-- All the lousy Orient loafing on the quay: Hindoo, Dago, Jap, Malay, and Chinaman Dipping into London from the great green sea!

Black man--white man--brown man--yellow man-- Pennyfields and Poplar and Chinatown for me! Stately-moving cut-throats and many-coloured mysteries, Never were such lusty things for London lads to see!

On the evil twilight--rose and star and silver-- Steals a song that long ago in Singapore they sang: Fragrant of spices, of incense and opium, Cinnamon and aconite, the betel and the bhang.

Three miles straight lies lily-clad Belgravia, Thin-lipped ladies and padded men and pale. But here are turbaned princes and velvet-glancing gentlemen, Tom-tom and sharp knife and salt-caked sail.

Then get you down to Limehouse, by riggings, wharf, and smoke-stack, Glamour, dirt, and perfume, and dusky men and gold; For down in lurking Limehouse there's the blue moon of the Orient-- Lamps for young Aladdins, and bowies for the bold!

A DOWN-STREAM NIGHT

BLACKWALL

Tide was at flood, and below Limehouse Hole the waters thrashed the wharves with malice. The hour was late, but life ran high in those parts. Against the savage purple of the night a few wisps of rigging and some gruff funnels stood up in East and West India Docks.

Sheer above the walls of East India Dock rose the deck of the Cawdor Castle, as splendidly correct as a cathedral. The leaping lines of her seemed lost in the high skies, and she stood out sharply, almost ecstatically. Against such superb forces of man, the forces of Nature seemed dwarfed. It was a lyric in steel and iron. Men hurried from the landing-stage, up the plank, vanishing into the sly glooms of the huge port-holes. Chains rang and rattled. Lascars of every kind flashed here and there: Arabs, Chinkies, Japs, Malays, East Indians. Talk in every lingo was on the air. Some hurried from the dock, making for a lodging-house or for The Asiatics' Home. Some hurried into the dock, with that impassive swiftness which gives no impression of haste, but rather carries a touch of extreme languor. An old cargo tramp lay in a far berth, and one caught the sound of rushing blocks, and a monotonous voice wailing the Malayan chanty: "Love is kind to the least of men, EEEE-ah, EEEE-ah!" Boats were loading up. Others were unloading. Over all was the glare of arclights, and the flutter of honeyed tongues.

A few tugs were moored at the landing-stages. One or two men hung about them, smoking, spitting. The anger of the Blackwall streets came to them in throbbing blasts, for it was Saturday night, and closing time. Over the great plain of London went up a great cry. Outside the doors of every hostelry, in Piccadilly and Bermondsey, in Blackwall and Oxford Street, were gathered bundles of hilarity, lingering near the scenes of their recent splendours. A thousand sounds, now of revelry, now of complaint, disturbed the brooding calm of the sky. A thousand impromptu concerts were given, and a thousand insults grew precociously to blows. A thousand old friendships were shattered, and a thousand new vows of eternal comradeship and blood-brotherhood were registered. A thousand wives were waiting, sullen and heavy-eyed, for a thousand jovial or brutal mates; and a thousand beds received their occupants in full harness, booted and hatted, as though the enemy were at the gates. Everywhere strains of liquor-music surged up for the next thirty minutes, finally to die away piecemeal as different roads received different revellers.

In the hot, bilious dark of Blackwall, the tug swayed and jerked, and the voices of the men seemed almost to shatter the night. But high above them was the dirty main street, and there "The Galloping Horses" flared and fluttered and roared. There seemed to be trouble.... One heard a querulous voice: "I said TIME, din' I?" And another: "Well, let 'im prove it. Let 'im 'it me, that's all!" From the tug you could see the dust of the street rise in answering clouds to the assaults of many feet. Then, quite suddenly, the wide swing-doors of the bar flapped back. A golden gleam burst on the night and seemed to vomit a slithering mass of men which writhed and rolled like an octopus. Then you heard the collapsible gates run to their sockets with a glad clang, and the gas was switched off.

The fester of noise widened and widened, and at last burst into twenty minute pieces. And now a large voice commanded the silence of the night, and cried upon London: "What I said is what I say now: that fan-tan is fan-tan. And blasted miracles is blasted miracles."

I stood on the tug, with some of the boys, and in silence we watched the drama that was about to unfold itself. I had tramped there, unthinkingly, up the thunderous length of Rotherhithe Tunnel and down East India Dock Road and had fallen in with Chuck Lightfoot and some of his waterside cronies. We were lounging on the tug, so far as I remember, because we were lounging on the tug. For no other reason.

After the outcry of the Great Voice, there was a short silence. It was broken by a woman, who cried: "Ar-ferr!"