He could tell by the shops he passed that he was approaching the docks. All the grocers had posted signs assuring the public that the barrels of beef and pork and biscuit they sold would keep forever in any climate, and every other shop window seemed to be crowded with brass sextants and telescopes and compasses—and the stiff paper compass-cards printed with the crystallized-looking rose indicating the directions. These shook with the rattling passage of every carriage as if fluttering in some otherwise-undetectable magnetic wind.
His tablecloth bundle was attracting the rude attention of a crowd of street boys, so he stepped into a shop that displayed luggage in the window—but the proprietor, after greeting him civilly enough at first, took a second look at Crawford’s face and then asked him how he dared to bring “filthy bones and teeth and marbles” into a store run by a Christian; the man actually drew a pistol from under the counter when Crawford tried to explain that his bundle just contained clothes and that he wanted luggage, so he fled back out to the street and the clamoring children.
One of the boys ran up behind him with a knife, slashed the bottom of his bundle and then yanked on the bulge of garment exposed; the sleeve of his green velvet jacket wound up hanging out, with a pair of undershorts from his more heavy-set days somehow caught in the lacy cuff.
Crawford whirled around so fast that the sleeve-and-shorts stood out behind him like a tail, but he wasn’t quick enough to see which boy had done it—though he did see the luggage shop proprietor standing in the shop doorway looking after him, and Crawford thought he saw the man make a hand-signal to someone across the street.
Just what I wanted, Crawford thought hysterically—an inconspicuous exit.
A pub door banged open farther down the street and two skinny, sick-looking men came hobbling out toward him, each of them waving a bloody handkerchief; they were both jabbering at once, but Crawford caught the word “stone” and another word that seemed to be “neffy-limb.”
He turned around to run back the way he’d come, but he thought he glimpsed stiff limbs swinging in the crowd, and a rigid, expressionless face … and so he swung his bundle around in a fast circle, much as Keats had done with his portmanteau, and let go of it. The tablecloth blew open and clothing billowed out in all directions and shoes flew into the crowd, and Crawford ran down an alley.
Enough people ran squabbling into the street after the explosion of valuable clothing to cause a raging traffic jam, but several members of the crowd came pelting along the alley after Crawford; he rounded a corner into a narrow old brick court and then, before his pursuers could appear behind him, he found a door, yanked it open and stepped inside, and then drew it closed behind him. There was a bolt on the inside, and he slid it across the gap into its bracket.
He was at the back of a crowd of men, evidently some class of laborers, in a low-ceilinged room that smelled of beer and sweat and candle wax, and though he wasn’t very successful in his efforts to breathe slowly, the men near him just glanced his way, nodded civilly and returned their attention to whatever was going on in front.
“Pile of old sail pieces here by the door,” came an authoritative voice from the far end of the room.
Crawford heard steps on the cobbles outside, and someone rattled the door at his back; but none of his companions made a move to let the person in, and a moment later the footsteps clumped away.
“Pick ‘em up as you go out,” the voice at the front of the room added, and the whole crowd began shuffling forward across the floor of what Crawford now recognized as a pub. Old sail pieces? he thought. What are we expected to do, wash windows?
No one gave him a second look as he filed out the pub door into the sunlight again, following the example of his companions and picking up several sheets of coarse cloth from a pile by the doorway. Once out in the yard the men around him began tying the rags around their shoes and ankles, and Crawford imitated them as best he could.
“More like this ‘ere, mate,” said one old fellow, tightening Crawford’s wrappings and pulling the overlap wider. “Loose like that and you’re sure to get gravel in there, and then it’s harder to get it out of your shoes than if you wasn’t wrapped at all.”
“Aha!” said Crawford. “Many thanks.” His gratitude was doubly sincere, for now he knew what sort of employment he had inadvertently volunteered for; these men were ballast-heavers, whose job it was to shovel gravel into the holds of ships that had discharged their cargoes and now needed extra weight in the holds to keep them from heeling too far to the wind. He had seen such work done often enough, he thought, to be able to do it himself. And it ought to get him aboard a ship.
The docks were vast, a series of interconnected canals and basins and pools; masts and spars and the diagonal slashes or droops of rigging fenced out the misty sky except for directly overhead, and the slow progress of a ship in the middle distance being towed in or out could be read by the way its profile blended and separated in the stationary pattern. Sitting in the stern of the ballast-heaver boat, Crawford eyed the hulls they poled and rowed their way between—towering away above if the ship had been unloaded and was riding high in the water or, if it was still laden with cargo, low enough so that he could have jumped and touched the railings—and he wondered which one might be his transport out of England.
The load of gravel in the boat smelled of the weedy river bottom it had lately been dredged from, but whenever there was a cold gust of breeze he could catch on it the smells of foreign lands—a heartening mix of tobacco and coffee aromas from one direction, a curry of conflicting spices from another, and the decayed smell of hides from a third; and the songs of the sailors on various ships made a cacophonous, multilingual opera to fill in the moments when the released chains of the cranes weren’t springing noisily upward and the coopers weren’t hammering barrels. He was glad conversation in the boat was practically impossible.
When the boat was finally turned toward the bow of the ship they were to ballast, another boat was already working on the portside. Crawford hiked himself up on his thwart and looked to refresh his memory of how the job was done.
A platform had been set up on poles that fitted into the boat’s gunwales, and men were shovelling gravel from the boat’s waist up onto the platform, where other men scooped it up and poked spadeful after spadeful into a yard-wide porthole in the side of the ship. Soon the view was cut off, as Crawford’s boat rounded the bow to load the starboard side, but he had seen enough to dampen his hope of getting aboard a ship this way. The Navy ships he’d sailed on had used stone blocks for ballast, and the heavers had had to be aboard the ships to stow it, but these men never even touched the ship except with the blades of their shovels.
Damn, he thought, it looks as if all I’ve done is committed myself to a day’s hard work—and without pay, since I’m not on the work list. Should I just dive overboard and swim away? I’ve got no luggage to worry about anymore.
The men on his own boat had already stood up and erected the scaffolding. “Up on the stage with ye,” growled an old fellow near him, pushing him forward, and a moment later Crawford found himself trying to climb up onto the platform while gripping the shovel someone had thrust into his hand. By the time he had clambered up onto the platform and was able to get to his feet, another man was already standing there and digging his shovel into the gravel that the men below were flinging up onto the sagging beams.