By the time that I reached the docksheds the day was breaking over their roofs. 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 found about a hundred of them huddled along the steel wall of the shed. Some of them had old leather grips or canvas bags, but many had no luggage at all. A few wore seedy overcoats, but the greater part had none, they stood with their hands in their ragged pockets, shivering and stamping. Most of them were undersized, some tough, some rather sickly. A dull-eyed, wretched, sodden lot. I got the liquor on their breaths. A fat old Irish stoker came drifting half-drunk up the pier with a serene and waggish smile.
He looked more fagged than the day before. I noticed that his lips were blue and that his teeth were chattering.
"Joe," I said abruptly, "you're not fit to be here. Let's get out of this, you belong in bed." He glanced at me impatiently.
"I'm fit enough," he muttered. "We'll stay right here and see this show--unless you feel you want to quit----"
"All right, then wait a minute. They're about ready to go on board."
But as we stood and watched them, I still felt the chattering teeth by my side, and a wave of pity and anger and of disgust swept over me. Joe wouldn't last long at this kind of thing!
"What do you think of my friends?" he asked.
"I think you're throwing your life away!"
"Because they're an utterly hopeless crowd! Look at 'em--poor devils--they look like a lot of Bowery bums!"
"Yes--they look like a lot of bums. And they feed all the fires at sea."
"No better dressed," he answered. "A million lousy brothers of Christ."
"And you think you can build a new world _with them_?"
"Do you know what I think they'll do themselves? If they ever do win in any strike and get a raise in wages--they'll simply blow it in on drink!"
"They'll do so much more than drink," he said. "Come on," he added. "They're going aboard."
They were forming in a long line now before the third-class gang-plank. As they went up with their packs on their shoulders, a man at the top gave each a shove and shouted out a number, which another official checked off in a book. The latter I learned was the chief engineer. He was a lean, powerful, ruddy-faced man with a plentiful store of profanity which he poured out in a torrent: