Chapter VIII

All day there had been wisps and banks of fog. The ground was as wet as a sponge, and the sky was low and very heavy. The river banks seemed extraordinarily near and still. Sound was as muffled as footsteps at a funeral.

Jim had been six months on the river now, and he was used to every change in her perpetual variety. He looked about him with the settled look of eyes that study water and search out wind. But there was no advantage he could take of the heavy, breathless day, no stir upon the water; even the leaves on the November trees, those brittle and fugitive last children of the year, hung safe and still. Jim worked his pole steadily in and out of the thick water.

The barge moved very slowly, as if through treacle. The banks slid away from her like the last solidity of earthly things.

Fog came up from the sea, at first with a deceptive air of leisure, blotting out the landmarks one by one, and then, in a sudden stroke, hiding the last vestige of the day. The sky was gone, the day was gone; even the water was lost.

Jim could not see the end of his pole. His hand slipped away from him into space, and reappeared mysteriously out of clammy whiteness.

Cadger, the moisture standing in big drops all over him, became nothing but a shadowy point. He kept up a dejected sniffing to remind Jim that he was but a reluctant companion. The skipper was downstairs, warm with an oil-lamp behind him, like a creature in another world.

But Cadger, with the code of the perfect lover, knew that his duty was with the more uncomfortable of his two gods. He regretted the discomfort, but it never occurred to him to evade it.

All around them, from far and near, tortured sirens hooted their unquiet thoughts, sometimes far away and flabby, with the piteousness of creatures lost and insecure, sometimes with an imperative shriek, right above them out of the dense wall of fog. Jim’s ear was trained—he knew which siren could be ignored and which his whole being must respond to, without the loss of a second. Nothing is safer than a barge ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and nothing more helpless in that hundredth moment when the fog blinds her, and her heavy bulk can neither see nor turn.

Jim was soaked through, and cold, but all his senses were alert. He held the river in his mind as a backwoodsman holds the dense reaches of a primeval forest; but he did not know her under-water secrets. The river tricked him in the dark. He was being borne down by the shifting of an invisible current, straight against the side of an iron bridge.

The first sign by which Jim knew that the current had shifted was the unexpected pressure on his pole. He tried to withdraw it, and was picked off the barge as clean as if a hand had plucked and tossed him into midstream.

He had no time to think before the icy water caught him, and began to play its awful strangling game upon him in the dark.

He shut his mouth and beat upon the water with his feet and hands until he reached the surface; then he struck out in spite of the weight of his clothes, and felt his powerlessness.

He had not been frightened till then. But now he had a moment of sheer panic when it seemed to him cruel and a shame that his feeble strength should be pitted against such a heavy weight of water. He knew he must be overwhelmed. The odds were too strong against him. All his strength and courage would be sucked down and blotted out.

He set his teeth and shuffled his leaden limbs through the water without hope. If he was going to be drowned he wouldn’t let go before he had to. He would pay something back.

He shouted once or twice but his voice beat feebly into the fog and was lost.

He went on with the swimming, a weight of iron contracted his arms, and his feet dragged under him as if they were anchors anxious to fasten him to the bottom of the river.

It wasn’t any good struggling, but he went on struggling. His mind moved as swiftly as his limbs moved slowly. It grasped a thousand broken flying thoughts, and let them go again. Eliza with her hard eyes and pullable hair fled through his brain; and Bert and little Margaret, clean and colourless, guarded by sad-faced Sisters in black robes. They had had nothing to say to him when he saw them, and they had nothing to say to him now—they seemed only, like Eliza, to reassert that it didn’t matter where he was; the bottom of the Thames would do.

The water rose to his lips and ears and dragged him under, drenched and stiffened.

His hands clutched emptily at fog.

Then his limbs relaxed—fear slipped away from him. He became conscious of a great relief. It was as if he were being withdrawn by a sure hand into safety—to a fresh place, below the reach of fear. Nothing weighed on him any more, not his water-sodden clothes, nor the rebellion of his fighting senses.

He felt curiously light and free, and as if his mind was full of music. A sound struck hard against his withdrawing senses—the slap of a rope upon the water. He heard from an infinite distance the skipper’s voice calling—

‘Jim! Jim! You there, Jim!’

It was impossible to say where he was; but he didn’t want to come back.

A feeble voice sounded somewhere in his brain, and a hand seized the rope—a curious, heavy hand that felt the pull and jerk of the rope’s wet length run through fumbling fingers.

Then he felt the skipper’s arm under him, and was hauled over the boat’s side like a sack. There was nothing now but a great white darkness inside him and without.

When he came to himself Jim found that he was lying in the skipper’s bunk, warmed and dry, with burning rum trickling down his throat. The skipper was roused out of his ordinary taciturnity into direct expression.

He recounted for the third time the story of Jim’s rescue, decorated with his favourite expletives.

‘It was that dawg that saved yer. I ain’t never seed ’im in such a fantag. ’E ’ad me on the floor out of me bunk as quick as an oath. Shriek! ’E fair tore the blanket orff of me and a-screamin’ steady as if ’e was arter a rabbit. Orff ’e flew onter the deck and back ag’in ter drag at me trahsers, an’ then made as if ’e’d lep into noffin’ arter yer.

‘’E didn’t arf worry me to get the boat aht! Current, that’s wot it was. Shifted. An’ the barge she just got clear of the bridge, abaht a knife’s edge between ’em.

‘I came on the pole arter I ’ad you inter the boat ’ave some more rum?

‘Gord! My boy, you won’t never ’ave no closer call than wot you’ve ’ad ternight, and don’t you forget it!’

Warmth and light flowed back upon Jim’s shaken senses. He felt grateful for Cadger’s rough tongue against his hand, and the kindliness of the skipper’s eyes welcoming him into human companionship.

This, too, was safety; it was a warm, good safety, but not as deep as the safety Jim had felt before.

He had come out of a place safer than the cabin of the barge—safer and kinder and deeper.

He was comfortable and grateful, but he missed something.

‘You must ’ave put up a fight for it,’ the skipper continued admiringly, ‘wot wiv’ yer boots on an’ all.

‘I never thought I’d see yer ugly mug agen. Not arter twenty minutes knockin’ abaht in the river—twenty minutes proper, wot with gettin’ the boat aht an’ all. Not many boys—nor men neither—would ’ave ’eld aht that long, I will say that fer yer.

‘Born ter be ’ung, that’s what you are!’

‘I had a funny feeling,’ said Jim weakly. ‘I fought as ’ow I’d get ter ’eaven er somethink arter I’d stopped choking.’

‘No fear,’ said the skipper kindly. ‘Wot you struck was the river, an’ an uncommon narsty piece of ’er—thick as soup and not arf so nourishing.’

‘Where’d I ’ave got to,’ Jim persisted, ‘if I ’adn’t ’ung onter that rope?’

‘Bottom of the Thames,’ said the skipper with conviction. ‘’Ave some more rum?’

Jim took the rum thankfully. Everything that he could touch and feel was friendly to him.

But he knew that he had been somewhere deeper than the bottom of the Thames.