Chapter V

Broughton strode away through the foggy suburban streets. He was afraid he’d been a bit offhand with that lawyer chap. Well, he couldn’t help that! He felt he couldn’t stand his gabble--not at present.

He wanted above everything else to be alone. He didn’t feel as if he could face the well-meant curiosity and the equally well-meant sympathy of those men who had wished him luck that morning. His wound had struck too deep for such superficial salves to be other than an added irritation. Normally inclined to err on the side of amiability, he felt just now at odds with all the rest of humankind. He could fancy the whispers that would follow him--“There goes poor Broughton--feeling pretty sickish, you bet!”

The first staggering sensation of blank and bewildered disappointment had passed away, and in its place there surged up within him a cold tide of black anger against Old Featherstone.

So the old devil had been laughing at him in his sleeve that night--even as he was laughing at him now, very likely, in whatever unholy place he was gone to! He had guessed his thoughts, he supposed, in that damned uncanny way he had. If the dead face now lying under the cold cemetery mould had lain in Broughton’s pathway now he would have ground his heel into the sardonic smile that still curled its stiff and silent lips.

Him and his blasted picture!... A thing that wasn’t worth giving wall-space to! A damned ship-chandler’s daub! Why, give him a few splashes of ship’s paint and a brush and he’d make a better fist at it himself!

He strode blindly on, through interminable crescents of smug villas, their pavements greasy with fallen leaves, along dreary streets of shabby “semis,” without noticing or caring where he was going: swinging his neatly rolled umbrella regardless of the fine rain which had begun to fall and was gathering in a million glistening drops on his black coat. His mood cried aloud for the relief of physical effort, of physical discomfort. Now and then he was brought up short by a blank wall that drove him back upon his traces; now and then he cannoned unnoticing into passing pedestrians, who turned, conscious of something unusual in his manner, to watch him out of sight, then continued their way wondering if he were drunk or mad.

Presently the streets of dull “semis” gave place to streets of seedy rows, with here and there a corner off-licence or a fried-fish shop discharging its warm oily odours upon the chill air; and at last, turning a corner, he found himself suddenly in a wide road whose greasy pavements were lined with stalls and flares, yelling salesmen, and groups of draggle-tailed women.

He looked about him stupidly, uncertain of his bearings, though the blare of a ship’s syren striking on his ear told him that he was not far from the river. He was suddenly aware that he was wet and hungry and very tired, and that his feet in his best boots hurt him abominably, for he was no better a walker than most sailormen. He asked a passing pedestrian where he was.

“Lower Road, Deptford.”... Why, he was less than a quarter of an hour’s walk from the Surrey Commercial Docks, where the “Maid of Athens” was even now lying, having just finished discharging the cargo of linseed she had loaded at the River Plate. He couldn’t do better than get on to the ship, he decided; he had been knocked out of time, and no mistake, and there he would be able to sit down quietly and think things over.

The fog, which had been comparatively light on the higher ground, had been steadily growing denser as he neared the river. There were haloes round the flares that roared above the street stalls, and the lighted shop windows were mere luminous blurs in the surrounding murk.

“Want to mind where you’re steppin’ to-night, Cap’n,” the watchman hailed him as he passed the dock gates; “it’s thick, an’ no mistake--thick as ever I see it!”

Thick wasn’t the word for it! Once away from the fights and noise of the road, the darkness seemed like something you could feel--a solid mass of clammy, clinging moisture, catching at the throat like a cold hand, getting into the backs of your eyes and making them ache and smart. You couldn’t see your hand before your face.

Broughton groped his way along the narrow, slimy causeway which lay between the stacks of piled-up lumber, exuding their sharp, damp, resinous fragrance, and the intense darkness, broken occasionally by a vague tremulous reflection where some ship’s lights contrived to pierce it, which brooded over the unseen waters of the dock. Lights showed forlornly here and there at the openings of the lanes which led away between the piled deals--abysses of blackness as dark as the Magellanic nebulæ. Ship’s portholes gleamed round and watchful as the eyes of huge monsters of the slime. Bollards started up suddenly out of the fog like menacing figures, and cranes straddled the path like black Apollyons in some marine Pilgrim’s Progress. Once Broughton pulled himself up only just in time to save himself from stepping over the edge of a yawning pit of nothingness in which the water lipped unseen against the slimy piles. The thought involuntarily crossed his mind that perhaps he might have done worse; but he put it from him resolutely. His code, a simple one, did not admit suicide as a permissible solution of the problems of life.

All work was long since over, and the docks were as silent and deserted as the grave--nothing to be heard but the steady drip-drip of the rain, once the distant tinkle of a banjo on board some vessel out in the dock, and now and again the melancholy wail of a steamer groping her way up river. The “Maid of Athens” lay right at the far end of one of the older basins; she was all still and dark but for the oil lamp that burned smokily at the head of the gangway, and a faint glow from the galley which showed where the old shipkeeper sat alone with his pipe and his memories.

Old Mike came hobbling out at the sound of Broughton’s step on the plank.

“’Strewth, Cap’n,” he exclaimed in astonishment, “you’ve chose a grand night to come down an’ no fatal error! Will I make a bit o’ fire in the cabin an’ brew ye a cup o’ tea? Sure you’re wet to the skin!”

“Poor old chap!” Broughton thought, as he watched him busying himself about his fire-lighting with the gnarled and shaking hands that had hauled on so many a tackle-fall in their day. It would be a hard blow for him when he knew that ship was to be sold. He had served in Featherstone’s ships many years as A.B. and latterly as bos’n, until a fall from aloft put an end to his seagoing days; and this little job of shipkeeping was one of the very few planks between him and the workhouse.

The world was none too kind to old men who had outlived their usefulness. What was it that old flintstone had said: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”? Well, that was true enough, anyway!

He called to mind an incident that had happened in Sydney his last voyage there. An old man had come up to him begging for a job. He didn’t care what--night watchman, anything; and he had opened his coat to show that he had neither waistcoat nor shirt beneath it.

“You don’t remember me, Broughton,” the old fellow had said; and, looking closer, he had recognized in that incredibly seedy wreck one of his own old skippers--before whose almost godlike aloofness and majesty he had once trembled in mingled fear and awe. It was a pitiful tale he had to tell. He had been thrown out of a berth at sixty-five, through his ship being lost by no fault of his own, and couldn’t get in anywhere. That proud, arrogant old man, full of small vanities!... Broughton had had little enough cause in the past to think of him over kindly; but the memory of the encounter had remained with him for weeks at the time, and returned to trouble him now with an added significance.

Old Mike’s bit o’ fire smouldered a little and went out, leaving nothing but an acrid stink to mark its passing. The well-stewed tea in the enamel cup at his elbow, with the two ragged slices of margarine-plastered bread beside it in the slopped saucer, grew cold unheeded. Outside, the rain dripped down like slow tears. And there he sat, with his clenched hands before him on the table, staring into the Past.

There wasn’t a plank of her, not a rivet, not a rope-yarn that didn’t mean something to him. True, Old Featherstone had given his money for her: and if he knew that old man aright he hadn’t given a brass farthing more than he could help. But he--what had he given to her? Money--well, he had given that, too, since Old Featherstone had turned mean, though his twenty pounds a month hadn’t run to a great deal. But that was neither here nor there. Things money could never buy he was thinking of, sitting there in the cold, fog-dimmed cabin.

The years of his life had gone into her--affection, understanding, ungrudging service, sleepless nights and anxious days. What wonder that she seemed almost like a part of himself? What wonder that to a man of his rigid, slow-moving type of mind a future in which she had no part was a thing unthinkable?

His memory passed on to all the mates and second mates who had faced him at meals over that very cabin. A regular procession of them--Marston--Reid--what was the name of that chap with the light eyelashes?--Barnes, was it?--Digby--he was a decent chap, now--went into steam years ago and was chief officer in one of the B. I. ships last time Broughton heard of him. That was what _he_ ought to have done. He had known it at the back of his mind all along. But he couldn’t leave her--he couldn’t leave her!

Well, well, there was no use meeting trouble half-way! What was it old Waterhouse, his first skipper in his brassbound days, used to say? “If you’re jammed on a lee shore and can’t stay, why, then try wearing. If that don’t work, try boxing her off. But whatever you do, do something! Don’t sit down and howl!”

They used to laugh at him and mimic him behind his back, cheeky young devils; but it was damned good advice for all that. He was on a lee shore now right enough; but there was bound to be a way out somewhere if he kept his head.

An intense drowsiness and weariness had begun to creep over him--just such a leaden desire for sleep as he had experienced in that same cabin many a time after days of incessant and anxious battling with gales and seas. His unmade bed looked singularly unenticing, so, dragging a blanket from the pile upon it, he kicked off his sodden boots and lay down on the cabin settee.

A rising wind had begun to moan and sigh in the rigging, driving the rain in sheets against the skylight ... there was a way out, a way out ... if he could only think of it ... somewhere....