London River Part 8

I then got the sad feeling, much too soon, that the inhospitable North was greeting us. It is after sundown at sea, when looking through the dark to the stars, listening to sounds that are as though ancient waters were still wandering under a sky in which day has not been kindled, seeking coasts not yet formed, it is in such nights that one's thoughts are of destiny, and then the remembrance of our late eager activities brings a little smile. There being no illumination in the wheel-house but the restricted glow from the binnacle, this silent comment of mine on man and his fate caused the helmsman no amus.e.m.e.nt. "I hope you are bringing us luck this trip," said the sailor to me. "Last trip we got a poor catch. I don't know where the fish have got to." Somewhere, north-east about two hundred miles, was the fleet which, if I were the right sort of mascot to the Windhover, we should pick up on the evening of the next day.

3

When I left the wheel-house to go below, it was near midnight. As I opened the heavy door of the house the night howled aloud at my appearance. The night smelt pungently of salt and seaweed. The hand-rail was cold and wet. The wind was like ice in my nose, and it tasted like iron. Sometimes the next step was at a correct distance below my feet; and then all that was under me would be swept away. I descended into the m.u.f.fled saloon, which was a little box enclosing light and warmth partially submerged in the waters. There it smelt of hot engine-oil and stale clothes. I got used to the murmuring transit of something which swept our outer walls in immense bounds, and the flying grind of the propeller, and the bang-clang of the rudder when it was struck . . . and must have gone to sleep. . . .

When I woke, it was because the saloon in my dreams had gone mad.

Perhaps it had been going mad for some time. Really I was not fully awake--it was four in the morning, the fire was out, and violent draughts kept ballooning the blanket over me--and in another minute I might have become quite aware that I had gone to sea for the first time. It was my bench which properly woke me. It fell away from me, and I, of course, went after it, and my impression is that I met it halfway on its return journey, for then there came the swooning sensation one feels in the immediate ascent of a lift. When the bench was as high as it could go it overbalanced, canting acutely, and, grabbing my blanket, I left diagonally for a corner of the saloon, accompanied by some sea-boots I met under the table. As I was slowly and carefully climbing back, the floor reversed, and I stopped falling when my head struck a panel. The panel slid gently along, and the mate's severe countenance regarded me from inside the bunk. I expected some remonstrance from a tired man who had been unfairly awakened too soon. "Hurt yourself?" he asked. "It's getting up outside. Dirty weather. Take things easy."

I took them as easily as perhaps should be expected of a longsh.o.r.eman.

There was no more sleep, though no more was wanted. By putting out my hand to the table I managed to keep where I was, even when, in those moments of greatest insecurity, the screw was roaring in mid-air. Our fascinating hanging lamp would perform the impossible, hanging acutely out of plumb; and then, when I was watching this miracle, rattle its chain and hang the other way. A regiment of boots on the floor--I suppose it was boots--would tramp to one corner, remain quiet for a while, and then clatter elsewhere in a body. Towards daybreak the skipper appeared in shining oilskins, tapped the barometer, glanced at me, and laughed because my pillow--which was a linen bag stuffed with old magazines--at that moment became lower than my heels, and the precipitous rug tried to smother me. I enjoyed that laugh.

Later still, I saw that our dark skylight was beginning to regain its sight. Light was coming through. Our lunatic saloon lamp was growing wan. I ventured on deck. When my face was no more than out of the hatch, what I saw was our ship's stern upturned before me, with our boat lashed to it. It dropped out of view instantly, and exposed the blurred apparition of a hill in pursuit of us--the hill ran in to run over us--and in that very moment of crisis the slope of wet deck appeared again, and the lashed boat. The cold iron was wet and slippery, but I grasped it firmly, as though that were an essential condition of existence in such a place.

The _Windhover_, too, looked so small. She was diminished. She did not bear herself as buoyantly as yesterday. Often she was not quick enough to escape a blow. She looked a forlorn trifle, and there was no aid in sight. I cannot say those hills, alive and deliberate on all sides, were waves. They were the sea. The dawn astern was a narrow band of dead white, an effort at daybreak suddenly frustrated by night, but not altogether expunged. The separating black waters bulked above the dawn in regular upheavals, shutting out its pallor, and as incontinently collapsed again to release it to make the _Windhover_ plainer in her solitude.

The skipper waddled briskly aft, and stood beside me. He put his nose inside the galley. "I smell coffee," he said. His charge reared, and pitched him against the bulwarks. "Whoa, you b.i.t.c.h," he cried cheerfully. "Our fleet ought not to be far off," he explained. "Ought to see something of them soon." He glanced casually round the emptinesss of the dawn. He might have been looking for some one with whom he had made an appointment at Charing Cross. He then backed into the hatch and went below. The big mate appeared, yawned, stooped to examine a lashed spar, did not give the sunrise so much as a glance, did not allow the ocean to see that he was even aware of its existence, but went forward to the bridge.

The clouds lowered during the morning, and through that narrowed s.p.a.ce between the sea and the sky the wind was forced at a greater pace, dragging rain over the waters. Our fleet might have been half a mile away, and we could have gone on, still looking for it. The day early surrendered its light, a dismal submission to conditions that had made its brief existence a failure. It had nearly gone when we sighted another trawler. She was the _Susie_. She was smaller than the _Windhover_. We went close enough to hail the men standing knee-deep in the wash on her deck. It would not be easy to forget the _Susie_. I shall always see her, at the moment when our skipper began to shout through his hands at her. She was poised askew, in that arrested instant, on a gla.s.sy slope of water, with its crest foaming above her.

Surge blotted her out amid-ships, and her streaming forefoot jutted clear. She plunged then into the hollow between us, showing us the plan of her deck, for her funnel was pointing at us. Her men bawled to us.

They said the _Susie_ had sighted nothing.

Our engine-bell rang for us to part company. Our little friend dropped astern. She seemed a poor little thing, with a squirt of steam to keep her alive in that stupendous and hurrying world. A man on her raised his arm to us in salute, and she vanished.

4

The talk of our skipper, who began to be preoccupied and abrupt veered to the subject of Jonah. We should now have been with our fleet, but were alone in the wilderness, and any course we took would be as likely as another. "This hasn't happened to me for years," he apologized. He stared about him, tapping the weather-dodger with his fingers, and whistled reflectively. He turned to the man at the wheel. "Take her east for an hour, and then north for an hour," and went below.

Day returned briefly at sunset. It was an astonishing gift. The clouds rapidly lifted and the sky cleared, till the sea extended far to a bright horizon, hard and polished, a clear separation of our planet and heaven.

The waves were still ponderous. The _Windhover_ laboured heavily. We rolled over the bright slopes aimlessly. She would rear till the forward deck stuck up in front of us, then drop over, flinging us against the dodger, and the shock would surround her with foam that was an eruption of greenish light.

The sun was a cold rayless ball halved by the dark sea. The wall of heaven above it was flushed and translucent marble. There was a silver paring of moon in a tincture of rose. When the sun had gone, the place it had left was luminous with saffron and mauve, and for a brief while we might have been alone in a vast hall with its crystalline dome penetrated by a glow that was without. The purple waters took the light from above and the waves turned to flames. The fountains that mounted at the bows and fell inboard came as showers of gems. (I heard afterwards it was still foggy in London.) And now, having made all I can of sunset and ocean, and a spray of amethysts, jacinths, emeralds, zircons, rubies, peridots, and sapphires, it is no longer possible for me to avoid the saloon, the thought of which, for an obscure reason, my mind loathed.

And our saloon, compared with the measure of the twilight emptiness now about us, was no bigger than the comfort a man feels amid mischance when he remembers that he is still virtuous. The white cloth on its table, I noticed, as I sat down, was contaminated by a long and sinful life. But the men round it were good and hearty. I took my share of ham and fish on the same plate, and began to feel not so hungry as before. I was informed that ash.o.r.e we are too particular about trifles, because we have the room for it, but on a trawler there is not much room. You have to squeeze together, and make do with what is there, because fish is the most important pa.s.senger. My hunk of bread was placed where the cloth bore the imprint of a negro's hand. The mugs of tea were ma.s.sive, and sweetish (I could smell that) with condensed milk. Did I want my tea? I noticed there were two men between me and the exit, and no room to pa.s.s.

The room was hot. The bench was rising and falling. My soul felt pale and faintly apprehensive, compelling me, now I was beset, to take hold of it firmly, and to tell it that this was not the time to be a miserable martyr, but a coa.r.s.e brute; and that, whether it liked it or not, I was going to feed at once on fish, ham, and sickly liquor, and heaven help us if it failed me before these sailors. It made no response, being a thin nonconformist soul, so I had to leave it, and alone I advanced on the food. As so often happens, the conquest was a little less hard than it appeared to be. I progressed, though slowly, and at last was sufficiently disengaged from my task to count the minutes moving at their funeral pace to the end of the meal. The heat of the room mounted. The movements of the ship continued to throw my stomach against the edge of the table.

My companions, however, were in no hurry to move. They discussed, among other things, Hull, and its unfortunate system of sanitation. While this gossip, which was explicit with exuberant detail, was engaging us, I summoned my scientific mind, which is not connected with my soul, to listen to what was being said, and the rest of me was deaf. They went on to tell each other about other trawlers and other crews. Other ships and men, I heard, had most of the luck. "The fish follow some of 'em about,"

complained the skipper. "I should like to know how it's done."

"They ought to follow us," replied the second engineer. "When I went down to take over this morning, Mac was singing Scotch songs. What more could we do below?"

"It's a grand life," nodded his superior's polished bald head. "Aye, there's guid reason for singing. Sing to yon codfish, y'ken."

The skipper looked at the engineer in doubtful innocence. "Well, I wish singing would do it," he said gravely. "I don't know. How do you account for some fellows getting most of the luck? Their ships are the same, and they don't know any more."

Mac shook his head. "The owners think they do. There's their big catches, y'ken. Ye'll no convince owners that the sea bottom isna' wet and onsairten."

The rosy face of the skipper became darker, and there was a spark in his eyes. This was unfair. "But dammit, man, you don't mean to say the owners are right? Do these chaps know any more? Look at old Rumface, old Billy Higgs. Got enough women to make him hate going into any port.

Can't be happy ash.o.r.e unless he's too drunk to know one woman from another. What does he do? Can't go to sea without taking his trawler right over all the fish there is. Is that his sense? Ain't G.o.d good to him? Shows him the fish every time."

The engineer stood up, bending his head beneath a beam, crooking an elbow to consider one hairy arm. "Ah weel, I wouldna call it G.o.d. Ye canna tell. Man Billy has his last trip to make. Likely he'll catch fish that'd frighten Hull. Aye."

The skipper moved impatiently, made noises in his throat, rose, and both went out. The mate, who had been chewing and looking at nothing all the time, chuckled.

The mate pulled off his big boots, and climbed into his bunk. The steward cleared the table. I had the saloon to myself, and tried to read from a magazine I extracted from my pillow. The first story was rollicking of the sea, and I have never seen more silly or such dreary lies in print. And the others were about women, magazine women, and the land, that magazine land which is not of this earth. The bench still heaved, and there was a new smell of sour pickles. I think a jar had upset in a store cupboard. Perhaps I should feel happier in the wheel-house. It was certain the wheel-house would not smell of vinegar, boots, and engine oil. It would have its own disadvantages--it would be cold and damp--and the wind and seas on the lively deck had to be faced on the way to it. The difficulty there is in placing the second course on London's cosy dinner-tables began to surprise me.

Our wooden shelter, the wheel-house, is ten feet above the deck, with windows through which I could look at the night, and imagine the rest. I had, to support me, the mono-syllabic skipper and a helmsman with nothing to say. I saw one of them when, drawing hard on his pipe, its glow outlined a bodyless face. The wheel chains rattled in their channels.

There was a clang when a sea wrenched the rudder. I clung to a window-strap, flung back to look upwards through a window which the ship abruptly placed above my head, then thrown forward to see wreaths of water speeding below like ghosts. The stars jolted back and forth in wide arcs. There were explosions at the bows, and the ship trembled and hesitated. Occasionally the skipper split the darkness with a rocket, and we gazed round the night for an answer. The night had no answer to give. We were probably nearing the North Pole. About midnight, the silent helmsman put away his pipe, as a preliminary to answering a foolish question of mine, and said, "Sometimes it happens. It's bound to. You can see for ye'self. They're little things, these trawlers.

Just about last Christmas--wasn't it about Christmas-time, Skipper?--the _Mavis_ left the fleet to go home. Boilers wrong. There was one of our hands, Jim Budge, who was laid up, and he reckoned he'd better get home quick. So he joined her. We were off the Tail of the Dogger, and it blew that night. Next morning Jim's mate swore Jim's bunk had been laid in. It was wet. He said the _Mavis_ had gone. I could see the bunk was wet all right, but what are ventilators for? Chance it, the _Mavis_ never got home. A big sea to flood the engine-room, and there she goes."

5

After the next daybreak time stood still--or rather, I refused to note its pa.s.sage. For that morning I made out the skipper, drenched with spray, and his eyes bloodshot, no doubt through weariness and the weather, watching me from the saloon doorway. I did not ask any questions, but pretended I was merely turning in my sleep. It is probably better not to ask the man who has succeeded in losing you where you are, particularly when his eyes are bloodshot and he is wondering what the deuce he shall do about it. And greater caution still is required when his reproachful silence gives you the idea that he thinks you a touch of ill-luck in his enterprise. My companions, I believe, regretted I had not been omitted. I tried, therefore, to be inconspicuous, and went up to seclude myself at the back of the boat on the p.o.o.p, there to understudy a dog which is sorry it did it. Not adverse fate itself could show a more misanthropic aspect than the empty overcast waste around us. It was useless to appeal to it. It did vouchsafe us one ship that morning, a German trawler with a fir tree lashed to her deck, ready for Christmas morning, I suppose, when perhaps they would tie herrings to its twigs. But she was no good to us. And the grey animosity granted us three others during the afternoon, and they were equally useless, for they had not sighted our fleet for a week. All that interested me was the way the lookout on the bridge picked out a mark, which I could not see, for it was obscured where sea and sky were the same murk, and called it a ship. Long before I could properly discern it, the look-out behaved as though he knew all about it. But it was never the sign we wanted. We had changed our course so often that I was beginning to believe that n.o.body aboard could make a nearer guess at our position than the giddy victim in blindman's-buff. A s.e.xtant was never used. Apparently these fishermen found their way about on a little mental arithmetic compounded of speed, time, and the course. That leaves a large margin for error. So if they felt doubtful they got a plummet, greased it, and dipped it overboard. When it was hauled up they inspected whatever might be sticking to the tallow, and at once announced our position. At first I felt sceptical. It was as though one who had got lost with you in London might pick up a stone in an unknown thoroughfare, and straightway announce the name of that street. That would be rather clever. But I discovered my fishermen could do something like it.

Our skipper no longer appeared at meals. He was on the bridge day and night. He acted quite well a pose of complete indifference, and said no more than: "This has not happened to me for years." He repeated this slowly at reasonable intervals. But he had lost the nimble impulse to chat about little things, and also his look of peering and innocent curiosity. As now he did not come to our table, the others spoke of Billingsgate carriers, such as ours, which had driven about the Dogger till there was no more in the bunkers than would take them to Hull to get more coal. From the way they spoke I gathered they would crawl into port, in such circ.u.mstances, without flags, and without singing. This gave my first trip an appearance I had never expected. Imagination, which is clearly of little help in geography, had always pictured the Dogger as a sea where you could hail another trawler as you would a cab in London. A vessel might reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunk it had left behind. But here we were with our ship plunging round the compa.s.s merely expectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly like the others,

But at last we had them. We spoke a rival fleet of trawlers. Their admiral cried through a speaking-trumpet that he had left "ours" at six that morning twenty miles NNE., steaming west. It was then eleven o'clock. Hopefully the _Windhover_ put about. We held on for three hours at full speed, but saw nothing but the same waves. The skipper then rather violently addressed the Dogger, and said he was going below.

The mate asked what course he should steer. "Take the d.a.m.ned ship where you like," said the skipper. "I'm going to sleep." He was away ten minutes. He reappeared, and resumed his silent parade of the bridge.

The helmsman grinned at the mate. By then the wind had fallen, the seas were more deliberate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight, insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, for the night began to fill the hollows of the Dogger almost at once, and soon there was nothing to be seen but the glimmer of breaking waves.

6

There is nothing to be done with an adventure which has become a misprise than to enjoy it that way instead. What did I care when they complained at breakfast of the waste of rockets the night before? What did that matter to me when the skylight above our morning coffee was open at last, really open? Fine weather for December! Across that patch of blue, which was a peep into eternity, I saw drift a bird as white as sanct.i.ty.

And did it matter if the imprints on our tablecloth of negroes' thumbs were more numerous and patent than ever, in such a light? Not in the least. For I myself had long since given up washing, as a laborious and unsatisfactory process, and was then cutting up cake tobacco with the rapture of an acolyte preparing the incense. If this was what was meant by getting lost on the Dogger, then the method, if only its magic could be formulated, would make the fortunes of the professional fakirs of happiness in the capitals of the rich. Yet mornings of such a quality cannot be purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of virtue.

On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic. The wind was steady and generous. The warm sunlight danced. I should not have been surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the greatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek, smiling with approval of the scene below--melancholy approval, for we would remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale and sickly when Paul, that argumentative zealot, came to provide a world, already thinking more of industry and State politics than of the G.o.ds, with a hard-wearing theology which would last till Manchester came. For the _Windhover_ had drifted into a time and place as innocent of man's highest achievements as is joy of death. The wind and sea were chanting.

The riding of the ship kept time to that measure. The vault was turquoise, and the moving floor was cobalt. The white islands of the Olympians were in the sky.

Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, with nothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over from earth's earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in the north. That cloud did not rise. It blew towards us straight over the seas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail, heading east of south of us. She was, when at a distance, a baffling ma.s.s of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed. She got abeam of us. Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper to give grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the ship of romance, and in such a time and place. She was a cloud that, when it mounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into the meridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mist blown forward on the wind. She might have risen at any moment. Her green hull had the sheer of a sea hollow. Her bows pressed continually onward, like the crest of a wave curving forward to break, but held, as though enchanted. Sometimes, when her white ma.s.s heeled from us under the pressure of the wind, a red light flashed from her submerged body.

She pa.s.sed silently, a shining phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms do.

7

When the boots, exploded on the saloon floor by the petulant mate, woke me, it was three of a morning which, for my part, was not in the almanac.

"We're bewitched," the mate said, climbing over me into his cupboard. "I never thought I should want to see our fleet so much."

"Aye," remarked the chief engineer, who came shuffling in then for some sleep, "ye'll find that fleet quick, or the stokers are giving orders.

D'ye think a ship is driven by the man at the wheel? No' that I want to smell Hull."

A kick of the ship overturned the fireshovel, and I woke again to look with surprise at so small a cause of a terrible sound, and was leaving the shovel to its fate when it came to life, and began to crawl stealthily over the floor. It was an imperative duty to rise and imprison it. When that was forgotten the steward arrived, and roused me to watch the method of setting a breakfast-table at sea; but I had seen all that before, and climbed out of the saloon. There are moments in a life afloat when the kennel and chain of the house-dog appear to have their merits. The same wash was still racing past outside, and the ship moving along. The halyards were shaking in the cold. The funnel was still abruptly rocking. A sailor was painting the starboard stanchions.

A stoker was going forward off duty, in his shirt and trousers, indifferent to the cruel wind which bulged and quivered his thin rags.

The skipper was on the bridge, his hands in the pockets of his flapping overcoat, still searching the distance for what was not there. A train of gulls was weaving about over our wake. A derelict fish-trunk floated close to us, with a great black-backed gull perched on it. He c.o.c.ked up one eye at me when he drew level, crouched for flight, but perhaps saw on my face the reason why I prefer working tomorrow, and contemptuously stayed where he was. Then I noticed the skipper looking back at the bird. He nodded to it, and cried: "There goes a milestone. The fleet is about somewhere." I danced with caution along the treacherous deck, where one day that voyage a sea picked up two men and stranded them on top of the engine-room casing, and got up with the master. He had just ordered the ship to be put over to a trawler in sight. With the seas so swift and ponderous I completely forgot the cold wind in watching the two lively ships being manoeuvred till they were within earshot. When the engines were stopped the steering had to be nicely calculated, or erratic waves brought them dangerously close, or else took them out of call. Our new friend had not seen "our lot," but had left a fleet with an unknown house-flag ten miles astern. We surged forward again.

We steamed for two hours, and then the pattern of a trawler's smoke was seen ahead traced on a band of greenish brilliance which divided the sea from the sky. Almost at once other faint tracings multiplied there. In a few minutes we could make out plainly within that livid narrow outlet between the sea and the heavy clouds a concourse of midget ships.