Chapter VII

For three years in the penitentiary Jim’s inner life had stopped; he had had no dealings with it. All his consciousness was in his hot rebellious pride; slavery numbed his imagination. He could force himself to obey only by trampling out his thoughts. His hands and the mechanical part of his mind lived, not his heart. He did not want to understand anything because if he had understood it he could not have borne it. He was like a bird that will not sing in the dark.

Now, at the signal of beauty, a rush of new questions came upon him; the floodgates of his inner life swung back. Jim would have liked to talk to the parson about his new experiences, but he had no words for his thoughts.

There was a new language to meet this new life, and he had not yet mastered it.

When the parson took him off for a long country walk behind the smoke, and Jim first saw an apple orchard in the spring break like dawn across his bewildered vision, the only thing he could say was,—

‘Gord! Look at them sheep under the ruddy trees!’

Arthur understood that Jim really knew and felt more than he could express; but not even Arthur knew how much more.

Books came to Jim’s rescue. Books were full of his new life; they had something which was outside himself, but they corresponded as well with what he had within.

When he understood words better he knew that what he felt in them was a sense of inclusion and of permanence.

Something that stood behind time broke through and claimed him; something that stood behind space put out a friendly hand.

Jim could not think easily—letting his thoughts go like water through a sieve, leaving no trace behind. The abstract was merely the concrete at a distance to him.

When he had a thought he put it into instant execution, and gripped on to a fresh conception like a dog on to a bone. He never succeeded in understanding people whose thoughts come readily and drop; it was easier for him to follow the skipper’s processes, who had no ideas at all but moved unconsciously from instinct to habit. The skipper at any rate wasted nothing that came to him; though Jim wished he could sometimes make the skipper explain what things meant.

The skipper had never read a book in his life. All the attention he had was spent on the river traffic. He gave his new boy the benefit of a few rough river rules, and did not leave him in charge until he saw that he understood them, but he was seldom to be tempted beyond the moment’s need.

The river, he admitted, was a bag of tricks, and no mistake. She was like a woman. Sometimes she had to be studied and others she’d be better left alone. She was never twice alike, and when she looked most secure and bland she was apt to upset you by starting a new current.

A barge was all right in the open water, except for the traffic. It was the bridges that caught you out; the bridges, and of course the fogs.

The skipper was not a person to whom forethought made any appeal, but he agreed that Jim had just as well think out what he’d do if he were alone in a fog with no lights visible to guide. You had to keep the river in your mind and then feel your way along, as a blind man feels his way across Trafalgar Square at noon; keeping your ears well open—and luck—pulled you through.

Things were mostly luck, the skipper explained, unless you upset them. People said there were rules—to hear a pilot talk you’d think the river was like a flight of steps without a bend to them; all you had to do was to get your foot on them right, and climb up. But you couldn’t make rules about water; you had to have sense for it; and even when you had sense there was traffic.

‘Nah, traffic,’ the skipper said in his leisurely drawl, steering to avoid two lighters and a wobbling line of barges tossed unevenly behind them; ‘you got ter get used to traffic, same as a man gets used to putting on his trahsers. ’Abit, that’s what saves a man at a pinch; don’t you forget it.

‘Don’t you never trust a fellow as does things differently each time. Flighty, that’s wot ’e is—and it don’t do ter be flighty on a barge. Yer want ter do things the same till you _can’t_ do ’em no different when there isn’t time to think—and things is going crooked all arahnd you.

‘Everythink on this ’ere river knows its own mind, or oughter. You get to know yours and stick to it.

‘Ladies and ’ens are the worst traffic dodgers I know on—’cos why? ’Cos they won’t keep still and see wot the other person’s doin’ of. Every collision I ever come acrorst was ’cos somebody started movin’ out of turn. ’Oot and wait! ’Oot and wait; that’ll bring a man out of the worst mess a dark night ever shoves ’im inter!’

They were going up to London for the first time, and Jim watched the thickening traffic with fascinated eyes. No more river banks now, no more towing and rat catching and hours of slow surrender to sunshine and to dreams. They were out on the broad reaches of the Thames, surrounded by its unhindered, multitudinous life. The great stream of outgoing and incoming boats never seemed to jostle; all the smaller fry manœuvred briskly, as at her appointed hour an ocean-going liner claimed her unfettered way. The tramps got all the sea-room they had a right to expect and no more, though they squealed for it.

The police boats darted in and out like swallows catching flies on summer evenings.

The ineffable sluggish slowness of the drifters was short-circuited by a series of light-handed miracles.

The flat incapacity of a barge to turn, when there is oceans of room for her to do it in, passed without mishap in showers of fiery language.

Row-boats hovered in and out of the broad stream of traffic like mosquitoes, threatening at every turn to get run down, and skilfully pulling from under at the last conceivable and abusive moment.

The skipper stood on the deck with his somnolent eyes half open, giving his quiet, perfunctory orders. Jim’s mind surged with doubts and questions. He wanted to understand the river. He wanted to learn the landmarks; he craved for direct instructions, which were as flatly denied him.

‘Gord!’ the skipper replied to his insistent questions, ‘wot’s the damned use of all that scum on the top of the beer? It don’t reach anywhere, and it’s windy. You’ll learn in time. You do what I says when I says it, and if you don’t see why it don’t make no odds to the river, does it?

‘Wot you want is an _’ead_. In a tight place if you ’ave an ’ead you get aht, and if yer ’aven’t an ’ead yer get under. That’s all there is to it.

‘’Ow does a dog learn to swim? Don’t listen ter no chat aht of a book abaht it, does ’e? Nah! Fro’ ’im in! Fro’ ’im in!

The skipper spat past Cadger’s head, barely grazing an ear.

He was not more communicative about the city which lay before them.

‘Yus,’ he said, pointing to a great smudge that lay upon the horizon, ‘that’s London. Don’t yer give no back talk to nobody and they won’t do you no ’arm. It ain’t no different to any other place, as fur as I can see.’

But to Jim it was already different. He had often thought about London; and the burglars, the prison boys had told him about, breaking into houses full of jewels. It was where books were made; and all the great laws, that when you broke them, whether you knew them or not, you got so heavily punished for.

He was in London now, though it was only houses in a bunch. There were more of them than Jim had ever seen before; line upon line of uncertain grayness stretched before him, broken as an old man’s teeth. Here was a tall tower, and a big square building, and next to it small, squat houses like the shells of inconspicuous fishes.

Immense warehouses brooded over empty docks. Chimneys sprang up like a forest and died suddenly into insignificant spaces full of tin cans.

Bridges and boats blocked the way, and opened out at intervals into curious vistas—a black wharf; a row of houses like disused biscuit tins; a long, corrugated iron caterpillar, where men and women worked furiously under a great glass roof, like creatures in a hive. But their fury and their ugliness passed quickly into a sudden arbour of greenery out of which rose a great cathedral, and a road as wide as a river, down which the traffic roared and fumbled its blind way. Jim watched the road till it, too, lost itself in miles and miles of small, gray houses, sucking up all the life around them into an indistinguishable dirty sponge. This was London.

The barge put in at a dock near the Radcliff Highway, and the skipper remarked briefly that Jim had better sleep on board, and that they wouldn’t begin to unload until to-morrow. Then he dropped into a small boat which shot out suddenly from under them like an offertory plate for a six pence, and Jim and Cadger were left alone.

It was curious that Jim felt more alone than he had ever felt before, when there were so many people around them.

The night would have been dark in the country, but it was not dark in London. The river was ablaze with lights—they hung like a gigantic string of pearls on a dusky neck, glittering all night long.

Jim could not sleep; the hours were too full of life and colour. He could hear all round him the shouts and songs of human beings, their laughter and their curses. It seemed to him that he was surrounded and invaded by a million lives. None of them left him alone and yet none of them belonged to him. He was as disconnected as a separate bead, and yet, he, too, was in that perpetual moving circle of lights and human beings.

The sounds died down with the passing of the night, but the lights still burned on, furtive and mysterious, until the colourless dawn.

Everything was very still for a time, like a child that has cried itself into an exhausted sleep, and then far off the rumble of the country carts began, and one by one the sounds returned and fixed themselves into the voice of London.

The barge unloaded all that day and all the next, so that Jim had plenty of time to see what the city was like; but it never looked any different—gray houses and more gray houses, and a noise like a persistent hammering upon a door that no one ever opened.

Far away up the river, beyond anything Jim could ever reach, there were shining towers.