He had, it appeared, lost those friends.  He was now seeking, with varying emotions, both the girl and the swab.  I suggested the dock and his ship would be a better quest.  No, it was no good, he said.  He tried that late last night.  Both had gone.  The policeman at the gate told him so.  The dock was there again this morning, but a different policeman; and whatever improbable world the dock and the policeman of midnight had visited, there they had left his ship, inaccessible, tangled hopelessly in a revolving mesh of saloon lights and collapsing streets.  Now he had no name, no history, no character, no money, and he was hungry.

We went into a coffee-shop.  It stands at the corner of the street which is opposite the Steam Packet beerhouse.  You may recognize the place, for it is marked conspicuously as a good pull-up for carmen, though then the carmen were taking their vans steadily past it.  The buildings of a shipwright’s yard stand above it, and the hammers of the yard beat with a continuous rhythmic clangour which recedes, when you are used to it, till it is only the normal pulse of life in your ears.  The time was three in the afternoon.  The children were at school, and alone the men of the iron-yard made audible the unseen life of the place.  We had the coffee-shop to ourselves.  On the counter a jam roll was derelict.  Some crumpled and greasy newspapers sprawled on the benches.  The outcast squeezed into a corner of a bench, and a stout and elderly matron appeared, drying her bare arms on her apron, and looked at us with annoyance.  My friend seized her hand, patted it, and addressed her in terms of extravagant endearment.  She spoke to him about that.  But food came; and as he ate—­how he ate!—­I waited, looking into my own mug of tepid brown slop at twopence the pint.  There was a racing calendar punctuated with dead flies, and a picture in the dark by the side of the door of Lord Beaconsfield, with its motto:  “For God, King, and Country”; and there was a smell which comes of long years of herrings cooked on a gas grill.  At last the hungry child had finished scraping his plate and wiping his moustache with his hands.  He brought out a briar pipe, and a pouch of hairy skin, and faded behind a blue cloud.  From behind the cloud he spoke at large, like a confident disreputable Jove who had been skylarking for years with the little planet Earth.

At a point in his familiar reminiscences my dwindling interest vanished, and I noticed again, through the window, the house fronts of the place I knew once, when Poplar was salt.  The lost sailor himself was insignificant.  What was he?  A deck hand; one who tarred iron, and could take a trick at the wheel when some one was watching him.  The place outside might have been any dismal neighbourhood of London.  Its character had gone.

The tap-tapping on iron plates in the yard next door showed where we were today.  The sailor was silent for a time, and we listened together to the sound of rivets going home.  “That’s right,” said the outcast.  “Make them bite.  Good luck to the rivets.  What yard is that?” I told him.