t. I never knew a ship take such a hell of a
time to sink as that one.

"I sighted the steamer, right ahead, and we wondered whether the iron
under us would wait till she come. We counted every roller that went
over us. The other steamer was a slow ship all right. But she came
up, and put out her boats. We had to lower the drunks into them. I
left in the last boat with the old man. 'Jim,' he said, looking at her
as we left her, 'she's got no more than five minutes now. I just felt
her drop. Something's given way.' Before we got to the other ship we
saw the _Starlight's_ propeller in the air. Right on end. Yes. I
never seen anything like that--and then she just went . . ."

The sailor made a grimace at me and nodded. From the shipwright's next
door the steady, continuous hammering in the dry-dock was heard again,
as though it had been waiting, and were now continuing the yarn.

X. Off-Shore

1

For weeks our London days had been handmade with gas and oil. It was a
winter of the kind when the heaven of the capital is a brown obscurity
not much above the highest reached by the churches, and a December more
years before the War then it would be amusing to count. There was enough
of the sun in that morning to light my way down Mark Lane, across Great
Tower Street to Billingsgate. I was on my way to sea for the first time,
but that fortune was as incredible to me as the daylight. And as to the
daylight, the only certainty in it was its antiquity. It was a gloom
that was not only because the year was exhausted, but because darkness
was falling at the end of an epoch. It was not many years before the
War, to be a little more precise, though then I was unaware of the reason
of the darkness, except common fog.

Besides, why should a Londoner, and even an East-Ender whose familiar
walls are topped by mastheads, believe in the nearness of the ocean? We
think of the shipping no more than we do of the paving stones or of the
warnings of the pious. It is an event of the first importance to go for
a first voyage, though mine was to be only by steam-trawler to the Dogger
Bank; yet, as the event had come to me so late, I had lost faith in the
omens of London's foreshore, among which, at the bottom of Mark Lane, was
an Italian baking chestnuts over a coke fire. The fog, and the slops,
and the smell by Billingsgate, could have been tokens of no more than a
twopenny journey to Shepherd's Bush. I had belie