Chapter X

Eliza passed out of Jim’s life with the same suddenness and casualness with which she had re-entered it.

When Jim asked her for her address, outside their tea-shop in the Strand, Eliza stared at him with open hostility. She said that she never stayed long anywhere and made a point of never putting anything into writing, but she agreed, not without kindly contempt, that she would write to Jim at Arthur’s address, if she should need his help at any time.

‘I don’t see what use _you_ could be,’ she observed with frankness, ‘but I don’t mind taking the address if it’ll make you feel any more comfortable. It’s a pity you give yourself away so easily—but there! It will never come to anything—and I knew where that parson was, anyhow, if I’d thought he’d be any good to me. But I didn’t. So long, old dear!’

And Eliza swung herself on to a rapidly moving bus with an expert skill which won even the hardened admiration of the conductor.

When Jim gave Arthur an outline of his interview with his sister, Arthur’s only comment was,—

‘Well, on the whole I agree with Eliza—what you want, Jim, is education. You can’t do much more without it.’

‘Wot do I want with an eddication on a barge?’ asked Jim.

He looked at Arthur with eyes which held a flash of deep self-mockery.

‘I kin push a pole.’

‘Is that all you want to push?’ asked Arthur. ‘Of course it’s all right if it is.’

Jim relapsed into silence. He was sitting over the parson’s fire on a winter evening. The shadows darkened around them; their only light was the small spark at the end of their friendly pipes, and the occasional spark of the flame eating its way into the blackness of the coal.

Jim was recalling in his mind rather an odd incident which had happened to him the week before. He was half-ashamed to speak of it even to the parson, but it had made an impression on him—difficult to shake off—and Arthur had stirred it up afresh.

Jim had been to a big meeting of dock labourers. There was great unrest on the river. The dockers were growing aware of the handicap which the long shifts, loading and unloading, were to their strangled lives. They wanted shorter shifts and better pay, and the men’s leaders poured argument and flame upon the mass of their dull resentment.

Jim was, as usual, on the outskirts of the crowd, listening without much sympathy to the men who had come down from London to address the meeting.

Their speeches were glib, bitter, and superficial. They had got their arguments second-hand from newspapers and ill-digested books. They were there to make trouble; and they were making trouble; but they had not known trouble. The greatest argument was in the faces of the men before them—men who had lost the flower of their manhood at thirty; heavy, slouching figures and pasty cheeks—men worn out and spoiled with thirty-six hour shifts of ceaseless toil, followed by three days of sodden laziness. Three heavy, empty days out of the week—sickened with overwork, and with drink—like a light in darkness, making in their cloudy minds a few short spasms of exultation and warm forgetfulness.

Jim watched their faces and listened till a strange feeling grew in him, as if he were being caught hold of and pushed forward by a large, firm hand.

He was hardly conscious of how he got through the crowd and on to the platform.

A sea of smoky faces danced before him, lifted and fell, and then settled into a solid stillness.

Jim stood for a moment in silence with his heavy chin thrust forward and his blue eyes blazing, and then a torrent of words streamed from him. Words with an edge and thrust to them that went through the meeting with the rip of a squall at sea.

He knew what he wanted to say. The ache of their days was in his heart, and their emptiness. Sudden and astonishing, first-hand and without hesitation, the words poured out of him. Eliza was part of what he had to say; prison was part of it. His words did not stick to party arguments. All the influences of Swanhill, seared into his childhood, found themselves ready for his use.

And he held the men spellbound, for they knew that what he said was true. He put in words, with the awful power of words, how they spent their days, and forced their eyes to see them with his eyes.

He gripped them with his simplicity and by his sudden, odd drops into irony and laughter—the laughter that sees the fun of the losing game, and never forgets the pain of it. He held them most by the strange force that is always behind conviction and by some odd personal magic of which he was quite unconscious.

The fierceness of their silence was like an empty cup held out for him to fill. For a time Jim was not conscious of the human element; his heart was fixed on truth; but suddenly he began to remember where he was and what he was doing.

The cloudy, blurred faces became significant and human. They were men from whom, singly, Jim was afraid to ask for a match. Panic seized him; his legs trembled under him; his tongue stammered and refused to articulate.

He stumbled off the platform hurriedly, amazed and chilled by his own audacity.

Jim had got out somehow, but not before one or two of the older men had spoken to him.

They asked him his name and urged him to join the union. One of them said,—

‘You got ter get an education; you could be a leader if you got education.’

Jim had hardy noticed at the time what they said, he was possessed by a kind of horror at himself, and a longing to get away as quickly as he could. He had fled back to the river and his barge in an agony of reaction. For several days afterward he was afraid to show himself on shore, but the incident had had no sequel; unless his talk to-night was to be a sequel.

The vicar’s eyes rested on Jim with a steady urgency. Was that really all he wanted, to push the pole of a barge?

‘Yer can’t git eddication wivaht money,’ Jim said obstinately. ‘A pretty fool I’d look tryin’ ter git an eddication nah. I ’ad my choice up at the prison and I chose different.’

‘I don’t think you were in a position to choose then,’ said Arthur, ‘and as to money—I have enough for two. I’ll give you your chance now, if you’ll take it. I’ve only been waiting for you to want it.’

Jim stared at him.

‘Money,’ he said with extreme resentment, ‘from you? Think likely I’d take it? It ’ud be a funny thing to take money from a friend.’

He spat angrily at the fire, though he was perfectly aware that it was a habit which Arthur did not particularly like.

‘It would be a funnier thing not to,’ said Arthur calmly, ‘when your friend has it and you haven’t. You wouldn’t like to be cheated of your chance to set a man free if you were in my place, would you?

‘I don’t believe you know the value of money, or the value of life. People seldom do, who have too little—or too much of it. The value of money is what you can do with it, in order to set life free; and the value of life is to set free what there is in a man.

‘It is the act of a criminal and a maniac combined to let any human power run to seed.

‘Education acts on power like a corkscrew; you can’t get the wine out till you’ve pulled the cork. All I’m doing is to hand you the corkscrew. Are you going to say you won’t take it?’

Arthur seldom spoke with energy, but there was something in his voice now which Jim had never heard before—it was the anguish of all his own ineffectual years. There was no sound within the room but the faint vent of little flames in the grate.

Outside in the street were the usual Saturday night noises, shouts and songs and an occasional wavering scream.

‘Are you contented with life as it is?’ Arthur asked slowly. ‘Or do you want to put your back into it and try to make it better?’

Jim had a vision in the quiet, twilit room. He saw Arthur’s life—its stagnation and its futility, the stored wisdom of his mind, the deep and tender feelings which had had no visible outlet. He saw pain sweeping up in waves, and human pity fighting through it and engulfed in the breaking surf.

In that very room he felt the tenseness of the life-line that pulls back the half-drowned and so often slips from the hand of the rescuer.

Jim’s youth rebelled against this desultory process of compassion—it seemed like asking him to turn out of the direct current of life. Why should he not take the easy, vivid way, work and drink, love and fight, deal directly with daily labour and the reaction of daily labour?

He didn’t want to be a criminal like Eliza, but he was sure his own way was easier than Arthur’s. Why should he force himself to join the brittle line—that pitiful, half-defeated, struggling line of rescuers? Why not let the defeated go? Weren’t there always derelicts and rubbish heaps?

Arthur had given his life, and Arthur had failed—Arthur, with his education, his intuition, his selfless kindliness.

Was there a drunken man the less for Arthur, or a woman with more honour, or a child safer from flinching at a blow? His fighting spirit chafed at the futility of sacrifice.

‘What’s the use of it all, parson?’ he muttered. ‘What’s the damned use?’

Arthur put out his hand and laid it on Jim’s shoulder. But he gave him no audible answer.

Jim’s muscles tightened under the touch of that light, friendly hand; but for a long time he did not speak.

He was wrestling with himself to give up freedom for affection.

‘All right,’ he said at last gruffly; ‘I don’t mind if I do take yer money. I don’t know what I’ll ’ave a go at yet, but I dessay I’ll ’ave a go at somethink. Gawd! It’s late. I must be getting back to the barge.’