The Black Bag Part 23

Ramshackle tenements with sharp gable roofs lined either side of the way.

Frowsy women draped themselves over the window-sills. Pallid and wasted parodies on childhood contested the middle of the street with great, slow drays, drawn by enormous horses. On the sidewalks twin streams of masculine humanity flowed without rest, both bound in the same direction: dock laborers going to their day's work. Men of every nationality known to the world (he thought) pa.s.sed him in his short five-minute wait by the horse's head; Britons, brown East Indians, blacks from Jamaica, swart Italians, Polaks, Russian Jews, wire-drawn Yankees, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, even a Nubian or two: uniform in these things only, that their backs were bent with toil, bowed beyond mending, and their faces stamped with the blurred type-stamp of the dumb laboring brute. A strangely hideous procession, they shambled on, for the most part silent, all uncouth and unreal in the clear morning glow.

The outlander was sensible of some relief when his cabby popped hurriedly out of the entrance to a tenement, a dull-visaged, broad-shouldered waterman ambling more slowly after.

"Nevvy of mine, sir," announced the cabby; "and a fust-ryte waterman; knows the river like a book, he do."

The nephew touched his forelock sheepishly.

"Thank you," said Kirkwood; and, turning to the man, "Your boat?" he asked with the brevity of weariness.

"This wye, sir."

At his guide's heels Kirkwood threaded the crowd and, entering the tenement, stumbled through a gloomy and unsavory pa.s.sage, to come out at last upon a scanty, unrailed veranda overlooking the river. Ten feet below, perhaps, foul waters purred and eddied round the piles supporting the rear of the building. On one hand a ladder-like flight of rickety steps descended to a floating stage to which a heavy rowboat lay moored. In the latter a second waterman was seated bailing out bilge with a rusty can.

"'Ere we are, sir," said the cabman's nephew, pausing at the head of the steps. "Now, where's it to be?"

The American explained tersely that he had a message to deliver a friend, who had shipped aboard a vessel known as the _Alethea_, scheduled to sail at floodtide; further than which deponent averred naught.

The waterman scratched his head. "A 'ard job, sir; not knowin' wot kind of a boat she are mykes it 'arder." He waited hopefully.

"Ten shillings," volunteered Kirkwood promptly; "ten shillings if you get me aboard her before she weighs anchor; fifteen if I keep you out more than an hour, and still you put me aboard. After that we'll make other terms."

The man promptly turned his back to hail his mate. "'Arf a quid, Bob, if we puts this gent aboard a wessel name o' _Allytheer_ afore she syles at turn o' tide."

In the boat the man with the bailing can turned up an impa.s.sive countenance. "Coom down," he clenched the bargain; and set about shipping the sweeps.

Kirkwood crept down the shaky ladder and deposited himself in the stern of the boat; the younger boatman settled himself on the midship thwart.

"Ready?"

"Ready," a.s.sented old Bob from the bows. He cast off the painter, placed one sweep against the edge of the stage, and with a vigorous thrust pushed off; then took his seat.

Bows swinging down-stream, the boat shot out from the sh.o.r.e.

"How's the tide?" demanded Kirkwood, his impatience growing.

"On th' turn, sir," he was told.

For a long moment broadside to the current, the boat responded to the st.u.r.dy pulling of the port sweeps. Another moment, and it was in full swing, the watermen bending l.u.s.tily to their task. Under their unceasing urge, the broad-beamed, heavy craft, aided by the ebbing tide, surged more and more rapidly through the water; the banks, grim and unsightly with their towering, impa.s.sive warehouses broken by toppling wooden tenements, slipped swiftly up-stream. Ship after ship was pa.s.sed, sailing vessels in the majority, swinging sluggishly at anchor, drifting slowly with the river, or made fast to the goods-stages of the sh.o.r.e; and in keen anxiety lest he should overlook the right one, Kirkwood searched their bows and sterns for names, which in more than one case proved hardly legible.

The _Alethea_ was not of their number.

In the course of some ten minutes, the watermen drove the boat sharply insh.o.r.e, bringing her up alongside another floating stage, in the shadow of another tenement.--both so like those from which they had embarked that Kirkwood would have been unable to distinguish one from another.

In the bows old Bob lifted up a stentorian voice, summoning one William.

Recognizing that there was some design in this, the pa.s.senger subdued his disapproval of the delay, and sat quiet.

In answer to the third ear-racking hail, a man, clothed simply in dirty shirt and disreputable trousers, showed himself in the doorway above, rubbing the sleep out of a red, bloated countenance with a mighty and grimy fist.

"'Ello," he said surlily. "Wot's th' row?"

"'Oo," interrogated old Bob, holding the boat steady by grasping the stage, "was th' party wot engyged yer larst night, Bill?"

"Party name o' _Allytheer_," growled the drowsy one. "W'y?"

"Party 'ere's lookin' for 'im. Where'll I find this _Allytheer?_"

"Best look sharp 'r yer won't find 'im," retorted the one above. "'E _was_ at anchor off Bow Creek larst night."

Kirkwood's heart leaped in hope. "What sort of a vessel was she?" he asked, half rising in his eagerness.

"Brigantine, sir."

"_Thank--you!_" replied Kirkwood explosively, resuming his seat with uncalculated haste as old Bob, deaf to the amenities of social intercourse in an emergency involving as much as ten-bob, shoved off again.

And again the boat was flying down in midstream, the leaden waters, shot with gold of the morning sun, parting sullenly beneath its bows.

The air was still, heavy and tepid; the least exertion brought out beaded moisture on face and hands. In the east hung a turgid sky, dull with haze, through which the mounting sun swam like a plaque of bra.s.s; overhead it was clear and cloudless, but besmirched as if the polished mirror of the heavens had been fouled by the breath of departing night.

On the right, ahead, Greenwich Naval College loomed up, the great gray-stone buildings beyond the embankment impressively dominating the scene, in happy relief against the wearisome monotony of the river-banks; it came abreast; and ebbed into the backwards of the scene.

The watermen straining at the sweeps, the boat sped into Blackwall Reach, Bugsby Marshes a splash of lurid green to port, dreary Cubitt Town and the West India Docks to starboard. Here the river ran thick with shipping.

"Are we near?" Kirkwood would know; and by way of reply had a grunt of the younger waterman.

Again, "Will we make it?" he asked.

The identical grunt answered him; he was free to interpret it as he would; young William--as old Bob named him--had no breath for idle words. Kirkwood subsided, controlling his impatience to the best of his ability; the men, he told himself again and again, were earning their pay, whether or not they gained the goal of his desire.... Their labors were t.i.tanic; on their temples and foreheads the knotted veins stood out like discolored whip-cord; their faces were the shade of raw beef, steaming with sweat; their eyes protruded with the strain that set their jaws like vises; their chests heaved and shrank like bellows; their backs curved, straightened, and bent again in rhythmic unison as tiring to the eye as the swinging of a pendulum.

Hugging the marshy sh.o.r.e, they rounded the Blackwall Point. Young William looked to Kirkwood, caught his eye, and nodded.

"Here?"

Kirkwood rose, balancing himself against the leap and sway of the boat.

"Sumwhere's ... 'long ... o' 'ere."

From right to left his eager glance swept the river's widening reach.

Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel leviathan of the deep seas, half cargo, half pa.s.senger boat, warping reluctantly into the mouth of the Victoria Dock tidal basin,--but no brigantine, no sailing vessel of any type.

The young man's lips checked a cry that was half a sob of bitter disappointment. He had entered into the spirit of the chase heart and soul, with an enthusiasm that was strange to him, when he came to look back upon the time; and to fail, even though failure had been discounted a hundredfold since the inception of his mad adventure, seemed hard, very hard.

He sat down suddenly. "She's gone!" he cried in a hollow gasp.

The boatmen eased upon their oars, and old Bob stood up in the bows, scanning the river-scape with keen eyes shielded by a level palm.

Young William drooped forward suddenly, head upon knees, and breathed convulsively. The boat drifted listlessly with the current.

Old Bob panted: "'Dawn't--see--nawthin'--o' 'er." He resumed his seat.