§ 2.

It is a region, this seven-mile sequence of granite-lipped lagoons, which is invested, as may be supposed, with some conspicuous properties of romance; and yet its romance is never of just that quality which one might perhaps expect. It is not here, certainly, in spite of the coming and going of great ships, and the aching appeal of brine, that the mind is moved to any deep sense of kinship with the folk who wielded the river-weapon in old days. The place is as modern as the town, as purged of traditions as the town, and the drama that goes on here is one that has never been enacted in the world before. Its effectiveness, indeed (I do not now speak of its efficiency), is a thing that aligns with no preconceived notions of effectiveness. Neither of the land nor of the sea, but possessing almost in excess both the stability of the one and the constant flux of the other—too immense, too filled with the vastness of the outer, to carry any sense of human handicraft—this strange territory of the Docks seems, indeed, to form a kind of fifth element, a place charged with daemonic issues and daemonic silences, where men move like puzzled slaves, fretting under orders they cannot understand, fumbling with great forces that have long passed out of their control....

That, certainly, is the first impression—an impression that has nothing whatever to do with the romance of commerce or the ingenuity of man, or anything of that kind, but that is simply the effect of the unhuman spaciousness of it all, the strangely quiet, strangely patient presence of great ships, the vast leaning shadows, the smooth imprisoned waters, the slow white movements of a sea-bird gravely dipping and curving, dipping and curving, between the shadow and the sun, the sudden emergence in the midst of this solemnity of some great fever of monstrous echoing activity. Afterwards, of course, as the senses grow accustomed to the new order of things, to the frightening spaciousness and the bursts of tangled effort, there ensues another attitude. Names catch the eye: Naples, Hong-Kong, Para; and the imagination gets its practised opportunity. The sudden activities, too—the clustered, wrangling cranes, perched on their high roofs, and pecking tirelessly; the bound, leaning carcass of the ship below them, bleeding from a score of wounds, the cranes about her own masts adding to the riot; the long sheds, ringing with echoes, dappled with tiny figures delving in a long ruin of all the goods of the world—they begin to affect the mind more intimately. You find yourself in the shadow of some slab hill of cotton-bales, or peering up the slopes of a swelling cone of grain, a sibilant alp of gold, and you begin to envision the anÆmic spinster who will one day wrap herself in some part of that sodden mound, or the white hen, in some dreamful farmyard, that will one day peck this grain.... Or you come down to the Docks after nightfall, passing out of the greasy silence of the northern streets, under the terrace of the Overhead Railway, and so through the gates behind the Huskisson. The air is troubled with a soft sustained groaning: the Saxonia (let us say) is at her berth discharging. She arrived from Boston on Thursday, she will sail again on Tuesday, and every instant, day and night, that soft moaning will continue. And that direful sound, and the torment of labour going forward, in a shower of green light, beneath the vague riven masses of the liner, serve somehow to drive you on to thoughts concerning Liverpool’s efficiency and tirelessness, concerning the bigness of her interests.

§ 3.

And gradually, too, the system of the labyrinth begins to emerge. That first period of bewilderment, of bewilderment that was almost fear, when you crept along narrow shelves running between dead water and warehouse wall, and watched the vistas unfolding, some gloomy, some naked, some clotted with ships as a mill-dam is clotted with drift-wood; when you crossed bridge after bridge, from granite islands to granite mainland, and heard the wailful voices of men coming desperately out of the distances, and decided with a sickening sense of despair that the whole thing had swollen utterly out of hand, that those ships would never be extricated, those giant forces never recaptured—that bewilderment is followed by the certainty that specific things will always be going on in specific places, and that the whole litter of events is really made up of two or three constantly recurring happenings. It becomes plain, for instance, that in one branch of the Huskisson you will always find the brick-red and black funnels of the Cunarders, and in another the cream and black of the White Star. You learn, again, that in the Wellington one or other of Glynn’s boats will always be unloading grain from the Danube, that cotton from the Brazils and india-rubber from the Amazon will always be found in the sheds beside the Queens, and grapes and wines from Spain in the next dock to that, and rice from Calcutta over in the Toxteth. An austere elevator in the Coburg insists on the constant attendance of grain-barges; a mustard-coloured stain on the rim of the Harrington stands for cotton-seed meal from Galveston; silver-hulled coasters, their spars and rigging hanging in tender meshes against the blue, fill the quiet reaches of the Salthouse; and in the cloisters surrounding the sunless quadrangle of the Waterloo, men are always moving, as Mr. Hay has painted them, in a deep warm tumult of golden dusk. One-seventh of all the ships in the world, it is true, laden with fabulous loot, are driven along these intricate waterways, are penned in these monstrous interwoven cells; and one-third of all the goods the Kingdom receives, one-fourth of all the goods she sends away, pass through these great sheds and cumber these endless quays. But those vast herds, charging so wonderfully across the plains of the Seven Seas, hold here for the end of their flight a space that is measured by inches; and you may, therefore, in spite of its enormity, map out the whole labyrinth in your mind either chromatically or topographically, either by the names of companies or in terms of grapes and silks and dyes and precious ores, just as your temperament inclines.

§ 4.

But however neatly familiarity may thus label the place and tie it up into little packages of effort, that first sense of the superhumanity of the drama going on here never for an instant lightens. The actors employed, whether the liners themselves, or the gaunt roof-cranes, or the dire monsters that effect the coaling, or the deliberate jaws of the dock-gates, are designed on so immensely loftier a scale than the rather draggled humans who run to and fro in their shadows, watched by the great silences, that they inevitably upraise the expectations to their own gigantic measure. Only in one brief corner of this seven-mile harbourage is it possible to return once more to the intimate human romance, the traditional drama, of harbours and sea-traffickings. It is a little basin between the Coburg Dock and the Brunswick Half Tide, and there, for a little while longer, beneath an old-world quay, brown sails dip softly in a quiet haven. Fishermen sit and smoke above them, nets hang in the sun, low buildings with broken, domestic roofs run round a cobbled square; and in one corner a pier-master’s cottage has its ivy, its curtains, its canary in a wicker cage. It is a relic that serves only to italicize the change. A pace to the right of it, a pace to the left, the new world of draggled humans and unhuman gestures is awaiting one: a world where the blues of those jerseys, the warm browns of those sails, have faded into the sad blues and yellows of mechanics’ overalls. From the cyclopean platform of granite, frowned upon by a cirque of raw cliff, and patterned with the shaggy heads and shoulders of half-embedded liners, which lies at one end of the chain, through all the rigid convolutions of honey-coloured water which lead to the interminable clangour of the Atlantic berths at the other, it is a place, invariably, where a new relation has been established between man and the outer seas. It is in hieroglyphs of granite and water, in monstrous shapes and silences, that the bare-handed individual and the naked element make their communications; and in the face of this terrible script it is not strange that the writer should be forgotten. The efficiency of Liverpool, yes; but never, quite, the efficiency of the people of Liverpool.

§ 5.

I went down the other evening, for instance, to see the Baltic and the Campania come in to their berths. They had both arrived that morning from New York, they had landed their passengers and their mails at the Stage, and all afternoon they had been lying in mid-stream, two steep-shored islands, with the ferry-boats passing beneath them and silver clouds of gulls ranging about their coasts. And now, the tide being at the full, they had awakened wonderfully to life, and were moving processionally down the flood. A brace of tugs marched at the head of each, one a little to starboard, one to port, and in the wake of each another tug nodded and dipped.

It was a grey evening; a cold wind pressed upon the tide, slats of rain broke upon the surface. But the sight of that pageant out there in the stillness warmed the grey as with fire. It stirred the heart like music; it was as elemental in appeal as music. It fingered a new range of emotions, untouched by the doings of men. It was a progress as brave and unhuman as the progress of clouds across the sky.

The great moment came when they curved slowly about in the dusk, and began to move imperturbably across the flood to where the head-light of our pier upheld a cold gleam against the grey. The wind beat about them as they advanced, flurries of rain beset them, but neither the wind nor the rain, nor the racing tide, nor the narrowness of the granite-guarded opening they had to enter, seemed in the least to trouble that impassive progress. And then they were upon the gap, and the sheer walls were crushing about their flanks, and a vague tumult of sounds drifted down the air, and so they passed through, with a kind of contemptuous precision, into the dead reaches beyond. One admired, one marvelled, but it was never the admiration one gives to human things. That vague drift of sound, the dim peering faces away up there on the bridge, the little group of men running with a rope along the quay—they all seemed quite irrelevant—little happenings to which the lordly shapes remained profoundly indifferent. It was to them, to those lordly shapes, that the homage went out; theirs was the courage and the beauty and the wise strength. And when one lighted porthole, and then another, revealed rooms filled with living people, it became scarcely possible to resist a cry. The monster, after all, beneath this impassivity, was really crammed and feverish with some dreadful parasitic life.... It is a sensation not dissimilar to that which one gets when, standing in Hyde Park on some clear spring morning, one surveys the far landscape rising and falling away in the east, and then suddenly realizes with a stound that all that palely gleaming country-side is riddled with caverns enclosing living men.

§ 6.

After the starkness and rigour of the Docks, the Landing Stage itself, the half-mile raft, moored to the City’s gates, which forms their centre-piece, presents a somewhat dilettante appearance, almost, indeed, a sentimental. It certainly makes amends, at any rate, for the absence of the human note in the theatre that stretches away at either end of it. Half of Liverpool uses it as a matter of business, the other half as a matter of health and pleasure, and it presents all day long the appearance of a democratic promenade. It is, in fact, the finest of Liverpool’s parks, furnished with its sheet of water, provided with its cafÉs, its bookstalls, its seats. Merchants and clerks from the contiguous bone-part of the fan slip down here at lunch-time, mothers bring their children from the recesses of the suburban plume. The actual people of Liverpool are here at last to be seen in vital conjunction with the weapon they employ. All that is vivid in the movements of great waters is made into a bright piece of their lives, a familiar picture on the walls of their living-room. A breeze is blowing, maybe, and all the wide surface is curded and laced with foam. The foam makes a silver lattice up which the golden roses of the morning climb and burn. The scent of their blooming has coloured the dreams of the ages.

Nor is even the utilitarian, the northern, end of the Stage, where the great liners, the Baltics and Campanias, discharge and accept their passengers and mails, altogether free from that effect of festival. The mass of the steamer blots out the sky, indeed, and it is thus in a cistern of shade that the actual leave-takings are effected and the baggage plucked aboard. But there is always so much of briskness, of white-handed briskness, of silks and uniforms and an active sociability, that the gloom becomes a positive aid to the drawing-room sparkle of it all. Deep amongst those monstrous shapes and silences at the Docks all the real effort has gone forward—the loading, the coaling, even the embarkation of the emigrants—and having suffered that in secret, the liner simply plays the part of stolid protector of intimacies. The human drama is never very obvious: there are more tears and tension at any of the great railway-stations; and although the actual severance of the ship from its moorings—breaking away, as it seems from a distance, like a solid lump of the land—does make some restoration of that unhuman drama of elemental quantities, the massed, fluttering handkerchiefs, the lines of upturned faces by the water’s edge, keep the moment intimate and gallant.

More of the real emotion of distance, of destinies astonishingly contravened, belongs to the instant of the steamer’s arrival. The naked fact of the departure is always somewhat misted, and the last severance gradually prepared for, by the way the process extends: the steamer protects the Stage for an hour or so, the nerves are habituated. But the incoming of the liner is a different matter. It is a smear in the sky, it is a neatly pencilled apparition, it is a towering event in the River, it is a vast door barring out the west, all in the briefest space of time: from start to climax the event leaps up through a swift crescendo of incident, and the little figures trooping an instant later over the high gangways that are really bridges from New York to London have a fine aura of adventure. To see all this accomplished in some evening of amber and emerald, with the lights unfolding like pale flowers on the far-drawn violet shores, is to get another vision of the world’s possibilities of beauty and romance.