Chapter V

Arthur Atkinson had no difficulty in finding an obliging skipper.

He was well known on the water side as a parson who came on your decks without malice; he never looked into things or suggested mission services. He simply sat harmlessly and smoked good coarse tobacco which he shared alike with the just and the unjust.

He did not offer drinks or take them; in fact he did not deal in ready money at all, so that from the first it was realised that he wasn’t going to get anything out of anybody—nor was any one, however wily, going to get anything beyond tobacco out of him. It was a restful situation. The parson simply became an accustomed and friendly figure.

In time his advice was asked upon Saturday night disputes, and later he was successfully promoted to domestic brawls. He was remarkably useful in a deal, and it was discovered that superior lawyers of low reputation and large practice couldn’t get round the parson. He seemed simple enough, but he knew things.

He read contracts and, with an unerring instinct, put his broad, tobacco-stained finger on doubtful clauses. He would push his hat back from his dreamy forehead and say with deadly mildness—

‘Now just explain this, will you? I don’t quite follow this clause.’ And it had to be explained to him.

Nothing glib ever got by him. He would swing his tall figure in the direction of a liar, listen with careful attention, shake his head vaguely—not in the least reproachfully—and drift away from the speaker, leaving a disappointing sensation of exposure and flatness behind him.

The parson was a valued repository of deeds. I. O. U.’s and last wills and testaments lay carefully labelled in cardboard boxes all over his bedroom floor.

Joe Moucher, the skipper he had chosen for Jim, was among his best friends. The skipper’s language was reported to be the worst on the river; he was considered by the port authority, not without reason, to be a hard-drinking, doubtful and rather disreputable person. But he had never done any one else any particular harm. His boys liked him, his dog never winced at his voice and it was not the first time that he had actively co-operated with the parson to give some one or other a ‘turn.’

It was to his barge that Jim was conducted, replete with tea, after the initiation of a long silent hour with his new friend. It could not be said that their conversation had been either brilliant or instructive, but it left Jim with the feeling that he wasn’t in any direction being ‘got at.’

Arthur had provided him with an outfit of second-hand clothes—clothes that had no possible hint of penitentiaries—that breathed of barges, and in which Jim saw himself in a small, dusty mirror as beautifully like any other rough and independent boy who never had to escape being a schoolmaster.

The parson did not have a house; he had two large rooms, full of books, fishing-rods, dust and unanswered letters.

He could get a spare room when he wanted it, and he explained to Jim that he should like him to turn up between his voyages, if he had nowhere better to go.

Then he dragged down half a dozen volumes from a shelf, tied them inefficiently with string, and put them under his arm.

‘You might sometimes want to read,’ he explained apologetically. ‘One does, you know.’

Jim scowled frankly. He was not going to read; reading led to schoolmastering; he was relieved when the skipper objected to the books more strongly still.

Joe Moucher was a man of few words, fewer ideas, and incredible superstitions. He said there was something not quite right about books on a barge. He couldn’t exactly remember a case in point, but if anything did happen he should know at once it was the books. Arthur had dropped them upon the deck, and the skipper turned them over gingerly with his foot. He said he didn’t mind a Bible—with a Bible and a black cat you were more or less safe, even with a raft in mid-ocean; but anything less than sacred was dangerous truck on the water and might lead to their fouling an anchor.

‘Any’ow,’ he finished moodily, ‘wot’s the use of bringing me a bloke fer me ter break into a barge while you’re a-trying ter break ’im inter books? ’E won’t know which way ’is nose is put on ’is face. Not that it much matters with ’is features bein’ wot they are. ’Is nose looks like something washed up by the tide nah; and it’ll look worse by the time I’m done with ’im!’

The skipper gave a deep growl, which was promptly echoed by his dog Cadger, but in both cases it was an empty threat and preceded the direct benevolence of kippers.

The skipper prepared these delicacies himself with a grimy but agile paw.

‘Arter this you do the cooking,’ he explained to Jim, ’an’ wot yer don’t cook right yer’ll ’ave to eat, stummick or no stummick, ter teach yer to be light-’anded.’

Jim’s duties were arduous only by fits and starts. He was to cook all the meals, keep the barge as clean as, and no cleaner, than the skipper required.

‘I don’t want no baby’s bassinetts,’ the skipper explained, ‘same as these ’ere yachts they call ’emselves, that I wouldn’t take on in a puddle. You get some of the coal off and when I ’oller, “Nuff,” yer stop using up good water as could be mixed with rum if I carried any, as a-course I don’t!’

The skipper looked defensively at the parson. He had smuggled rum regularly and successfully up and down the river for many years, and he often felt uncomfortably uncertain whether the parson knew it or not. He could be trusted not to say anything if he did suspect it, but he could not be trusted to sympathise. He had ideas which were all right in a pulpit, but out of place on a barge.

Jim was to keep a look-out on deck and learn to use the poles in the narrow waterways. He would be shown how to tow when the occasion arose, and he was to manage the steering-gear when the skipper wasn’t on deck. Finally, he was not to make the kind of nuisance of himself which the skipper knew he would.

In return for these attentions he was to receive board and lodging for two voyages, and if he was efficient he would then gradually arrive at the princely wage of a pound a week. If he wasn’t efficient he would go.

‘Religion or no religion,’ the skipper finished, ‘if yer ain’t fitted for life on the water yer’d better get off of it, even if the Gospels says the direct con-trary.’

Arthur ate one kipper in their company and wandered thoughtfully away, leaving the books behind him.

The scheme of the barge was not his scheme, and he was more favourably inclined to it than if it had been.

Here was a case of a bruised reed, and it would choose its own method of getting over its bruises.

Arthur would have proposed for Jim a good grammar school with special coaching for a year, and then, if he could have afforded it, the university; but he saw that the iron of enforced education had eaten too deeply into the boy’s spirit.

He associated all learning with the penitentiary, and until he discovered for himself that freedom lay in knowledge, he was safer without it. If he were really intelligent he would discover this primary truth quickly. Fortunately, he was young enough to spare time for the lessons of experience.

The skipper, with Cadger at his heels, left the _Water-Lily_ in Jim’s charge, and slouched slowly away up the narrow Greenhithe Lane toward his favourite public house.

It was a sweet-scented June evening. Jim leaned over the barge’s side and washed the tea things in the Thames. Footsteps and shouted jokes reached him like music across a stretch of water. All the summer sounds were soft and slow. Around him was a waste of sun-illumined water, colourless and light.

A ball of red fire settled down slowly and mysteriously into an evening mist.

Other barges passed with their orange sails growing dark. The river lapped against the boat’s side, singing the persistent low song of moving waters.

Jim lay motionless upon the deck, soaked in the immensity of his freedom.

Not even the parson had guessed what solitude would mean to this child of crowds and baffled privacies.

Jim had never been alone in his life. In his childhood there were always Eliza and the other children, and the streets were never empty. In the penitentiary there were twelve boys in each dormitory; and supervision all day long. Privacy is expensive. It is usually supposed that people who can’t afford it don’t want it, but Jim had always wanted it.

He lay crouched into the deck as if he thirsted to be forgotten.

He longed even for the vanishing of the friendly colour in the sky. He wanted the dark to envelop him with great wings, and hide him out of sight. Nobody was after him now.

An ache, that had been so long a part of his being that he had not discovered it was pain, felt suddenly at ease.

For the first time without flinching he thought of his mother’s face.

He saw again the rare smile which altered her expression like an unexpected ray of light, and which only he could rouse.

He wondered how death had come to her, and if it was quick and kind. Like all children of the poor he knew death and love without illusion. They were concrete to him and unaccompanied by fancies.

Jim had a healthy animal’s horror of extinction for himself, but not for her. His mother was too tired of life to know fear. It couldn’t have made it much harder for her, his father being gone, but it wouldn’t have been much easier without the money. She had taken in washing.

Eliza had not been any help to her. Eliza was like an open mouth without eyes. She saw nothing, but she took what she could get.

Jim had asked Arthur about her, but Arthur had not been able to tell him very much. He believed that she had disappeared before Mrs. Barton died. Rats could teach nothing to Eliza. She always knew a sinking ship by the feel of her self-preserving feet.

Oddly enough it was Jim who had the maternal instinct of the family. It had been a little smothered by the acuteness of his personal struggle, but the moment the pressure was removed it sprang into life again. He wanted to save and protect all his scattered family, even Eliza.

He had never forgotten Bert’s and the Baby’s addresses. Arthur said they were quite safe, Margaret in a sisterhood, and Bert with the waifs and strays. Sisters were very religious women, generally quite good, who looked after children, and though they were called sisters they did not bear the least resemblance to Eliza.

Jim had to make a few voyages before he would have earned enough to take the children a humming top and a doll, as well as pay his fares. Bert was six years old—a perfect age for a humming top—and he hoped Margaret, who was now three and a half, would like almost any doll.

The future opened before Jim as the dark descended—wide and without the limitations of experience.

He had never seen the night before; something wrenched his heart with pleasure.

At first he thought the stars were human lights—London perhaps—and then he saw how much farther off they were, and how high, and knew that they were stars.

Jim had learned fluently and superficially about stars from books, but if you always went to bed before the dark, or with the blinds down, you did not see them.

They were pointed and alive, in endless circles through the soft sky, not large and luminous like southern stars, which seem so near a hand could touch them, but sparkling and cold, and very far away.

What place had they in the great darkness of the universe? And what had he who watched them for the first time? Had he any kinship with the stars?

Where would he be if he fell into the sky? He held his breath with awe, for suddenly, as he asked himself the question, one of the sparkling lights detached itself and fell. Fell—and he could watch it fall, flash down and down in one great silvery plunge—into the dark!

It vanished. Rank upon rank the other stars remained, unshaken and at peace. The heavens composed themselves anew; there was no gap. Where was the fallen star?

It must be somewhere—or could you get where there was nowhere?

It had detached itself as suddenly and hurriedly as his father’s soul under the blows of the poker—that, too, must have fallen somewhere.

Was it terrible to fall? Jim had not meant to make his father rush so suddenly into the dark.

Perhaps nobody ever knew the only things that you wanted to know.

Far away a bell rang out. It was a clock striking. Each note fell on the light air with a long reverberation. Nothing had to be done about it.

Jim crouched still lower on the deck; the velvet dark grew thick and nearer; the stars swam mistily before his eyes.

‘Wot I got on my barge,’ Joe Moucher was saying complacently to his friends, ‘is a murderer. Yus! Murdered ’is father at the age of fourteen as if ’e was a rat—with a fire-iron. That’s what ’e is! Another two years and ’e’d ’ave swung for it! Parson brought ’im along.

‘“Give him a chanct,” he says, and I laughs at ’im, fer I knows ’is ways.

‘“Yus!” I says. “An’ then anover chanct! And then anover chanct! Gord! Yer’d give a pack of wolves a chanct if yer ’ad ’em ’andy!”

’owsomdever, I took the boy on in the end, and that’s why I shan’t ’urry back. No fear! Stands ter reason if yer can do your father in at fourteen, at seventeen yer must be ’arf-way ter a watchdog! There ain’t no need fer me to ’ang about on board, now I got a murderer ter look after me barge.’ And the murderer, his heavy eyes closed in sleep, turned as softly upon the deck of _The Water-Lily_ as if he slept upon his mother’s breast.