There is a hush, as though at sunset the world had really resolved, and had stopped moving.  But from the waiting steamer looming over us, a gigantic and portentous bulk, a thin wisp of steam hums from a pipe, and hangs across the vessel, a white wraith.  Yet the hum of the steam is too subdued a sound in the palpable and oppressive dusk to be significant.  Then a boatswain’s pipe rends the heavy dark like the gleam of a sword, and a great voice, awed by nothing, roars from the steamer’s bridge.  There is a sudden commotion, we hear the voice again, and answering cries, and by us, towards the black chasm of the River in which hover groups of moving planets, the mass of the steamer glides, its pale funnel mounting over us like a column.  Out she goes, turning broadside on, a shadow sprinkled with stars, then makes slow way down stream, a travelling constellation occulting one after another all the fixed lights.

Captain Tom knocks out his pipe on the heel of his boot, his eyes still on the lights of the steamer.  “Well,” says Tom, “they can still do it.  They don’t want any help old Tom could give aboard her.  A good man there.  Where’s she bound for, I wonder?”

Now who could tell him that?  What a question to ask me.  Did Tom ever know his real destination?  Not he!  And have I not watched Dockland itself in movement under the sun, easily mobile, from my window in its midst?  Whither was it bound?  Why should the old master mariner expect the young to answer that?  He is a lucky navigator who always finds his sky quite clear, and can set his course by the signs of unclouded heavenly bodies, and so is sure of the port to which his steering will take him.

IV.  The Heart’s Desire.

If the evening was one of those which seem longer than usual but still have far to go, it was once a custom in Millwall to find a pair of boots of which it could be claimed that it was time they were mended, and to carry the artful parcel around to Mr. Pascoe.  His cobbler’s shop was in a street that had the look of having retired from the hurry and press of London, aged, dispirited, and indifferent even to its defeat, and of waiting vacantly for what must come to elderly and shabby despondence.  Each grey house in the street was distinguished but by its number and the ornament which showed between the muslin curtains of its parlour window.  The home of the Jones’s had a geranium, and so was different from one neighbour with a ship’s model in gypsum, and from the other whose sign was a faded photograph askew in its frame.  On warm evenings some of the women would be sitting on their doorsteps, watching with dull faces their children at play, as if experience had told them more than they wanted to know, but that they had nothing to say about it.  Beyond this street there was emptiness.  It ended, literally, on a blind wall.  It was easy for a wayfarer to feel in that street that its life was caught.