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He liked, too, the off-hand deference of the men about him, from turnstile to betting shed, once his calling was known. They were all ready to curry favor with him, touts and rail-birds, dockers and owners, jockeys and gamblers and bookmakers, placating him with an occasional "sure-thing" tip from the stables, plying him with cigars and advice as to how he should place his money.
perhaps we shall see whether we are on the right system: and if so, we'll dose her with youthful society in a more irrashinal form; conversaziones, cookeyshines, et citera. And if we find ourselves on the wrong tack why then we'll hark back. Stick blindly to 'a course, the Dockers cry. But it does me harm: Then 'twill do good by-and-bye. Where lairned ye that, Echoes of Echoes, say!
"What I think will matter more a little later, perhaps, when I get over being desperate." "Perhaps what the dockers think will matter more a little later, too." In the meantime are not their scared and hateful opinions as good as my scared and hateful opinions?
In England itself there was a summer fever of strikes; Liverpool was choked by a dockers' strike, the East Anglian agricultural labourers were in revolt, and the building trade throughout the country was on the verge of a lockout. Russia seemed to be in the crisis of a social revolution. From Baku to St.
As for the people who did the work of the Port the loading and the unloading those whom now we call the stevedores, coalers, dockers, lightermen, and watermen, they lived in the narrow lanes and crowded courts above and about Thames Street. When the trade of London Port increased, these courts became more crowded; some of them overflowed, and a colony outside the walls was established in St.
There can be no reason to doubt that if public authority had not winked at illegal coercion of outside labour, and public opinion touched by sentiment condoned the winking, the Dock strike would have failed as other movements of low-skilled labour have generally failed. The success of the Dockers is no measure of the power of combination among low-skilled labourers.
But I cannot be content, as I take my stand by the dockers, with sympathizing in general. I want to sympathize to the point. And on the practical side of what to do next in behalf of the dockers, or of what to let them do, I find myself facing two facts: First, the dockers are desperate. I take their desperation as conclusive and imperative. It must be obeyed.
It was freezing cold, and the chill was worse in the dock that I entered. I buttoned my ulster tighter. The big place was dark and empty. The dockers, I learned from the watchman, had quit work at three o'clock, for a few tons of fruit was all the freight that remained to be loaded. The ship was to sail at nine o'clock. The stokers had not yet gone aboard.
"I'll see what I can do," I said. I came back to my new hunting ground and all night long I prowled about. I sipped large schooners of beer at bars, listening to the burly dockers crowded close around me. I watched the waterfront, empty and still, with acres of spectral wagons and trucks and here and there a lantern.
He was followed by retorts in the same vein. "I say, Grishka, what good care they do take of you! Made your inspection, eh?" shouted one out of a group of dockers, who had finished dinner and were lying on the ground, resting. "I'm barefoot, so here's Semyonitch watching that I shouldn't graze my foot on anything," answered Chelkash. They reached the gates.
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