Gangway

“ About the forward gangway a band of overworked stevedores were stowing in the last of the cargo, aided by a donkey engine, which every now and then broke out into a spasm of sputtering coughs. At the passenger gangway a great crowd was gathered, laughing and exchanging remarks with the other crowd that leaned over the railings of the decks.
There was a smell of pitch and bilge in the air mingled with the reek of hot oil from the engines. About twelve o'clock an odour of cooking arose, and the steward went about the decks drumming upon a snoring gong for dinner. ”

“ One is drawn up a gangway by a windlass and fastened so it cannot struggle, and a knife is driven behind the horns, severing the medulla oblongata, and another into the heart, and the blood drawn off by a conduit while the carcass falls into a car and is drawn to the skinning room and in six minutes is quartered and sold. The city market is a wonder all by itself. ”

“ With the exception of the Manchesters, all the troops were in khaki, and were easily distinguishable from the dark-coloured mass of civilians. Thus there was always a yellow pool of colour in the midst of the black mass, and all the morning a thin yellow line flowed from the pool to the ship's gangway. As often as one looked, during the whole morning, there was a line of men in the act of ascending the gangway. One felt as though one had fallen asleep for a moment and dreamed, and waked again to find the same men in the same position, so little did the appearance of things change. ”

“ On they poured, in a thick mass, up the gangway, with all conceivable sorts of luggage: bundles, embroidered carry-alls, bags, saddle-bags—the q-b lamenting she had not bought one—a sudden surging mass of people and goods. There are soldiers too—but these are lined upon the bit of a quay, to wait.
Our interest is to see whether there will be any more first-class passengers. Coming up the wide board which serves as gangway each individual hands a ticket to the man at the top, and is shooed away to his own region—usually second class. ”

“ Here I left the central car and walked toward the rear car along the keelway, which is flanked with balloon cloth, and which is closed at the end of the keelway by a celluloid door. I opened the door and stepped out on the narrow aluminum gangway, which runs down sharply to the rear car. The gangway has no protecting handrail. It is merely ribbed to give a better foothold. ”

“ It involved a passage across the crashing and splintering gangways, a drop over the parapet into the field of fire of the German machine guns which swept its length, and a further drop of some sixteen feet to the surface of the mole itself. Many were killed and more wounded as they crowded up the gangways, but nothing hindered the orderly and speedy landing by every gangway. ”

“ Yet, unlike the pandemonium in the other islands, there is no scramble of venders and beggars up the gangway to the discomfiture of descending passengers; no crowding of boatmen about it fighting with one another for each possible fare, to the not infrequent disaster of the latter. A bull-voiced negro police sergeant, in a uniform that suggests he has been loaned from the cast of “Pinafore,” keeps perfect order from the top of the gangway, permitting boats to draw near only when they are called by name and ruling the clamoring situation with an iron hand. ”

“ But it was after five o'clock before a stir went round the pier, and a rush of officers towards a little wooden room at the foot of the gangway told that the long-waited-for official had arrived.
“Well, we won't hurry,” said Mr. Linton. “Let the married men get on first.”
There were not many who did not hurry. A few of the older officers kept back; the majority, who were chiefly subalterns, made a dense crowd about the little room, their long-pent impatience bursting out at last. Passports examined, a procession began up the gangway ”

“ The moon was rising at this moment on our starboard beam, an arch of blood defining the indigo-black line of the horizon there that on either hand of her went melting out into a blending of starladen sky, with the dark and gleaming ocean brimming to the yacht, vast as the heavens themselves looked. Presently up through the hatch rose the figures of Captain Finn and the two men, swaying under the weight of the canvas-shrouded form they bore. The watch on deck came aft and gathered about the gangway, where they glimmered like visionary creatures to the dull, yellow shining of the lamps. ”

“ The ocean was a weak blue, and ran with a frosty sparkle into a sort of film or thickness that went all round the sea. The breeze had freshened, and it whipped the waters into little billows, with yearning and snapping heads of foam, and it was pouring its increasing volume into the lofty height and wide expanse of canvas under which the brig was thrusting along in a staggering, rushing way, the glass-smooth curve of brine at the bow breaking abreast of the gangway with a twelve-knot flash of the foam into the throbbing race of the long wake. ”

“ H.M.S. Vindictive had to be fitted with a special deck from which gangways could be extended to bridge the gulf between the ship and the top of the twenty-nine-foot wall. For this purpose she was given {78} a large number of gangways poised at an angle of about forty-five degrees from the ship's side. The idea was that on arriving alongside the Mole, the gangways would be lowered till they rested on the top of the wall. The storming parties, at a prearranged signal, should run out along the gangways and jump down to the parapet pathway four feet below the wall top. ”

“ If the gang whose turn of work it is refuse the ship at the price offered, then it is offered to all the gangs, and if accepted by any other gang, the next in rotation may claim it as their right, before all others. In connexion with the office there is a long hall, extending from the street to the water-side, where the men wait to take their turn. There is also a room called the basket-men’s room, where the foremen of the gang remain in attendance. There is likewise a floating pier called a dépôt, which is used as a receptacle for the tackle with which the colliers are unloaded. ”

“ While Nigger Mike and his guests are in talk, run your eye over the scene. Those citizens of Gangland assembled about the Chatham Club tables would have made a study, and mayhap a chapter, for Lombroso. Speaking generally, they are a stunted litter, these gangmen, and seldom stand taller than five feet four. Their weight wouldn't average one hundred and twenty pounds. They are apt to run from the onslaught of an outsider. ”

“ Gangland is not dull, and will overlook even a want of courage in one who, for bed and beef stews, freely places his purse at its disposal.
There are two great gangs on the East Side. These are the Five Points and the Monk Eastmans. There are smaller gangs, but each owes allegiance to either the one or the other of the two great gangs, and fights round its standard in event of general gang war.
There is danger in belonging to either of these gangs. But there is greater danger in not. I speak of folk of the Bottler's ways and walks. ”

“ Who are these close-nudged folk and whither away?
She who runs may read them for hard-headed, white-handed men in search of "prospects"; brown-throated homesteaders; real-estate agents out for talking points and for snap fortunes; mining engineers with dunnage bags—young fellows all in the full force of life—these, and "the gang," who are ill-looking men and rather dirty. The gang fare forth to work on the railway grades. They are always ganging—that is going—for the words are strictly synonymous. The gang going to the city meet the gang coming out. ”

“ You can see them now, as they go ashore over the gang plank, if you stand by the deck rail and look down.
A crowd of the strangest looking people pour over the gang plank from the third deck, or steerage. They look like little bits of all the countries you have seen or read about. Few of the women wear hats. They have handkerchiefs or caps or shawls on their heads. They carry babies in their arms, on their hips or their backs. Little children cling to their short, wide skirts. The men and boys carry mountains of queer shaped bundles and boxes and bags, on their heads and shoulders. ”

“ The men work in gangs, which relieve each other every six hours, and when the hour of relief comes, a steward or foreman attends the dressing- room to see the men change their dresses as they come up one by one out of the mine. The clothes are examined by the steward to see that no black-lead is concealed in them; and when the men have dressed they leave the mine, making room for another gang, who change their clothes, enter the mine, and are fastened in for six hours. ”

“ The gang is an institution in New York. The police deny its existence while nursing the bruises received in nightly battles with it that tax their utmost resources. The newspapers chronicle its doings daily, with a sensational minuteness of detail that does its share toward keeping up its evil traditions and inflaming the ambition of its members to be as bad as the worst. The gang is the ripe fruit of tenement-house growth. ”

“ A gang of the crew leans near me—a larger gang further down. Heaven knows what they can all be—but they never do anything but stand in gangs and talk and eat and smoke cigarettes. They are mostly young—mostly Palermitan—with a couple of unmistakable Neapolitans, having the peculiar Neapolitan hang-dog good looks, the chiselled cheek, the little black moustache, the large eyes. But they chew with their cheeks bulged out, and laugh with their fine, semi-sarcastic noses. The whole gang looks continually sideways. Nobody ever commands them—there seems to be absolutely no control. ”

“ Then the big gong thundered thrice for a sign that it was flood and not fire; conch, drum, and whistle echoed the call, and the village quivered to the sound of bare feet running upon soft earth. The order in all cases was to stand by the day’s work and wait instructions. The gangs poured by in the dusk; men stopping to knot a loin-cloth or fasten a sandal; gang-foremen shouting to their subordinates as they ran or paused by the tool-issue sheds for bars and mattocks; locomotives creeping down their tracks wheel-deep in the crowd ”

“ The gangs belt the city like a huge chain from the Battery to Harlem--the collective name of the "chain gang" has been given to their scattered groups in the belief that a much closer connection exists between them than commonly supposed--and the ruffian for whom the East Side has became too hot, has only to step across town and change his name, a matter usually much easier for him than to change his shirt, to find a sanctuary in which to plot fresh outrages. ”

“ Now on the canal, we had to organize our work, and I had seen a lot of public labor done between Albany and Buffalo; so I had my ideas as to people's getting in one another's way. I told him that his men were working in too large gangs, as I looked at it. Where he had twenty breaking-teams following one another, if one broke his plow, or ran on a boulder and had to file it, the whole gang had to stop for him, or run around him and make a balk in the work. ”

“ When the necessity presents itself for a descent upon the gang after some particularly flagrant outrage, the police have a task on hand that is not of the easiest. The gangs, like foxes, have more than one hole to their dens. In some localities, where the interior of a block is filled with rear tenements, often set at all sorts of odd angles, surprise alone is practicable. Pursuit through the winding ways and passages is impossible. The young thieves know them all by heart. ”

“ This is the starting point of the New York "gangster." He is handicapped, and under ancestral disabilities and the disadvantages of environment that is pernicious, he cannot get very far. A boy usually qualifies with a gang on his [42] own personality and tastes. He will often wander from one gang to another until he has found his particular atmosphere. The best will never find any one gang congenial enough to hold him, and he finally emerges a decent citizen. It is all a process of finding himself. ”

“ As sure as my monaker is Pretty Agnes, I'll have him cooked.”
“Good goil!” said Sammy Hart.
Gangland discusses things social, commercial, political, and freely forms and gives opinions. From a panic in Wall Street to the making of a President, nothing comes or goes uncommented upon and unticketed in Gangland. Even the fashions are threshed out, and sage judgments rendered concerning frocks and hats and all the latest hints from Paris. This you can test for yourself, on any evening, at such hubs of popular interest as Sirocco's, Tony's, Jimmy Kelly's or the Chatham Club. ”

“ And I don’t think that they will suspect either car, especially if no one except the driver is visible. I will drive mine and you can lie down out of sight in the back. Peters can drive the other and the operative can lie down in the back. How’s that?”
“All right, sir. But keep well behind the other car. I mean keep a safe distance, so that they can’t catch us both in the same trap. They’re a wonderfully organized gang,” I laughed. “I don’t believe I’m timid about it, but I want to get our friends out of the clutches of that gang.” ”

“ It is a peculiarity of the gangs that they usually break out in spots, as it were. When the West Side is in a state of eruption, the East Side gangs "lie low," and when the toughs along the North River are nursing broken heads at home, or their revenge in Sing Sing, fresh trouble breaks out in the tenements east of Third Avenue. This result is brought about by the very efforts made by the police to put down the gangs. ”