Below the Town Quay in the dark shadow lay the
boats--themselves a shadowy crowd, ghostly, with a glimmer of white
paint here and there on gunwales, thwarts, stern-sheets. Their
thole-pins had been wrapped with oakum and their crews sat
whispering, ready, with muffled oars. On the Quay, lantern in hand,
the Major moved up and down between his silent ranks, watched by a
shadowy crowd.
In that crowd, as I am credibly informed, were gathered--but none
could distinguish them--gentle and simple, maiden ladies with their
servants or housekeepers, side by side with longshoremen, hovellers,
giglet maids, and urchins; all alike magnetised and drawn thither by
the Man and the Hour. But the Major recognised none of them.
His dispositions had been made and perfected a full week before; how
thoroughly they had been perfected might be read in the mute alacrity
with which man after man, squad after squad, without spoken command
yet in unbroken order, dissolved out of the ranks and passed down to
the boats. You could not see that Gunner Tippet, being an
asthmatical man, wore a comforter and a respirating shield; nor that
Sergeant Sullivan, as notoriously susceptible to the night air,
carried a case-bottle and a small basket of boiled sausages. Yet
these and a hundred other separate and characteristic necessities had
been foreseen and provided for.
Van, mainguard, rearguard, band, ambulance, forlorn hope, all were
embarked at length.
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