began moving with deliberation along to the _Mona_. Something was said
by the woman behind us, but so quietly I did not catch it. Her husband
made confident noises of amusement, and replied in French that it was
always the way with these local folk--always the way. The result, I
gathered, of a slow life, though that was hardly the way he put it.
Nothing in it, she could be sure. These difficulties were made to raise
the price. The morning was beautiful. Still, if she did not want to go
... if she did not want to go. And his tone was that perhaps she would
be as absurd as that. I heard no more, and both followed us.
I got out to the _Mona_, cast off her stern mooring, got in the anchor,
and the pull on that brought us to the stone steps of the
landing-stage. While I made the seats ready for the voyagers and handed
them in, Yeo took two reefs in the lug-sail (an act which seemed, I
must say, with what wind we felt there, to be carrying his prescience
to bold lengths) and hauled the sail to its place. I went forward to
lower the centre keel as he came aft with the sheet in his hand. The
_Mona_ sidled away, stood out, and then reached for the distant
sandhills. The village diminished and concentrated under its hill.
When clear of the shelter of the hill, on the lee foot of which the
village shelters from the westerly winds, the _Mona_ went over suddenly
in a gust which put her gunwale in the wash and kept it there. The
dipper came adrift and rattled over. Yeo eased her a bit, and his
uncanny eyes never shifted from their fixed scrutiny ahead. Our
passenger laughed aloud, for his wife had grasped him at the unexpected
movement and the noise. "That's nothing," he assured her. "This is
fine."
We cleared the shallows and were in the channel where the weight of the
incoming tide raced and climbed. The _Mona's_ light bows, meeting the
tide, danced ecstatically, sending over us showers which caught in the
foot of the sail. The weather in the open was bright and hard, and the
sun lost a little of its warmth in the wind, which was north of west.
The dunes, which had been evanescent through distance in the wind and
light, grew material and great. The combers, breaking diagonally along
that forsaken beach, had something ominous to say of the bar. Even I
knew that, and turned to look ahead. Out there, across and above the
burnished sea, a regular series of long shadowy walls were forming.
They advanced slowly, grew darker, and grew higher; then in their
parapets appeared arcs of white, and at once, where those lines of
sombre shadows had been, there were plunging strata of white clouds.
Other dark bands advanced from seaward continuously. There was a tremor
and sound as of the shock and roll of far thunder.
We went about again, steering for the first outward mark of the
fairway, the Mullet Buoy. Only the last house of the village was now
looking at us remotely, a tiny white cube which frequently sank, on its
precarious ledge of earth, beneath an intervening upheaval of the
waters. The sea was superior now, as we saw the world from our little
boat. The waters moved in from the outer with the ease of certain
conquest, and the foundering shores vanished under each uplifted send
of the ocean. We rounded the buoy. I could see the tide holding it down
aslant with heavy strands of water, stretched and taut. About we went
again for the lifeboat-house.
There was no doubt of it now. We should be baling soon. Yeo, with one
brown paw on the sheet and the other on the tiller, had not moved, nor
even, so he looked, blinked the strange, unfrowning eyes peering from
under the brim of his hat. The _Mona_ came on an even keel by the
lifeboat-house, shook her wing for a moment as though in delight, and
was off again dancing for the Mid Buoy. She was a live, responsive, and
happy bird. "Now, Yeo," said the passenger beside the sailor, beaming
in proper enjoyment of this quick and radiant experience. "Didn't I
tell you so? What's the matter with this?"
There was nothing the matter with that. The sea was blue and white. The
frail coast, now far away, was of green and gold. The sky was the
assurance of continued good. Our boat was buoyant energy. That bay,
when in its uplifted and sparkling mood, with the extent of its liberty
and the coloured promise of its romantic adventure, has no hint at all
of the startling suddenness of its shadow, that presage of its complex
and impersonal malice.
Yeo turned the big features of his impassive face to his passenger,
looked at him as he would at a wilful and ill-mannered child, and said,
"In five minutes we shall be round the Mid Buoy. Better go back. If you
want to go back, say so now. Soon you won't be able to. We may be kept
out. If we are, don't blame me."
"Oh, go on, you," the man said, smiling indulgently. He was not going
to relinquish the fine gift of this splendid time.
Yeo put his pipe in his mouth and resumed his stare outwards. He said
no more. On we went, skimming over inflowing ridges with exhilarating
undulations, light as a sandpiper. It was really right to call that a
glorious morning. I heard the curlews fluting among the stones of the
Morte Bank, which must then have been almost awash; but I did not look
that way, for the nearing view of the big seas breaking ahead of us
fixed my mind with the first intentness of anxiety. Though near the top
of the flood, the fairway could not be made out. What from the distance
had appeared orderly ranks of surf had become a convulsive wilderness
of foam, piled and dazzling, the incontinent smother of a heavy ground
swell; for after all, though the wind needed watching, it was nothing
much. The _Mona_ danced on towards the anxious place. Except the
distant hills there was no shore. Our hills were of water now we neared
the bar. They appeared ahead with surprising suddenness, came straight
at us as though they had been looking for us, and the discovery made
them eager; and then, when the head of the living mass was looking over
our boat, it swung under us.
We were beyond the bar before we knew it. There were a few minutes
when, on either hand of the _Mona_, but not near enough to be more than
an arresting spectacle, ponderous glassy billows ceaselessly arose,
projected wonderful curves of translucent parapets which threw shadows
ahead of their deliberate advance, lost their delicate poise, and
became plunging fields of blinding and hissing snow. We sped past them
and were at sea. Yeo's knowledge of his work gives him more than the
dexterity which overcomes difficulties as it meets them; it gives him
the prescience to avoid them.
The steady breeze carried away from us the noise of that great tumult
on the bar, and here was a sunny quietude where we heard nothing but
the wing of the _Mona_ when it fluttered. The last of the land was the
Bar Buoy, weltering and tolling erratically its melancholy bell in its
huge red cage. That dropped astern. The _Mona_, as though she had been
exuberant with joy at the promise of release, had come out with whoops
and a fuss, but, being outside, settled down to enjoy liberty in quiet
content. The little lady with us, for the first time, appeared not
sorry to be there. The boat was dry. The scoured thwarts were even hot
to the touch. Our lady held the brim of her big straw hat, looking out
over the slow rhythm of the heavy but unbroken seas, the deep
suspirations of the ocean, and there was even a smile on her delicate
face. She crouched forward no longer, and did not show that timid
hesitation between her fear of sudden ugly water, when she would have
inclined to her husband's side, and her evident nervousness also of her
mate. She sat erect, enjoying the slow uplift and descent of the boat
with a responsive body. She gazed over-side into the transparent deeps,
where large jellyfish were shining like sunken moons. I got out my
pipe. This suggested something to our other passenger, and he got out
his. He fumbled out his pouch and filled up. He then regarded the
loaded pipe thoughtfully, but presently put it away, and leaned
forward, gazing at the bottom of the boat. I caught Yeo's eye in a very
solemn wink.
The _Mona_, lost in the waste, coursed without apparent purpose.
Sometimes for a drowsy while we headed into the great light shining
from all the Atlantic which stretched before us to America; and again
we turned to the coast, which was low and far beyond mounting seas. By
watching one mark ashore, a grey blur which was really the tower of a
familiar village church, it was clear Yeo was not making Pebblecombe
with any ease. I glanced at him, and he shook his head. He then nodded
it towards the western headland of the bay.
That was almost veiled by a dark curtain, though not long before the
partitioned fields and colours of its upper slopes were clear as a
mosaic; so insidiously, to the uninitiated, do the moods of this bay
change. Our lady was at this moment bending solicitously towards her
husband, whose head was in his hands. But he shook her off, turning
away with a face not quite so proud as it had been, for its complexion
had become that of a green canary's. He had acquired an expression of
holiness, contemplative and sorrowful. The western coast had
disappeared in the murk. "Better have something to eat now," said Yeo,
"while there's a chance."
The lady, after a hesitating glance at her husband, who made no sign,
his face being hidden in his arms, got out the luncheon-basket. He
looked up once with a face full of misery and reproach, and said,
forgetting the past with boldness, "Don't you think we'd better be
getting back? It's looking very dark over there."
Yeo munched with calm for a while, swallowed, and then remarked, while
conning the headland, "It'll be darker yet, and then we shan't go back,
because we can't."
The _Mona_ continuously soared upwards on the hills and sank again,
often trembling now, for the impact of the seas was sharper. The man
got into the bottom of the boat and groaned.
Light clouds, the feathery growth of the threatening obscurity which
had hidden the western land, first spread to dim the light of the sun,
then grew thick and dark overhead too, leaving us, after one ray that
sought us out again and at once died, in a chill gloom. The glassy seas
at once became opaque and bleak. Their surface was roughened with
gusts. The delicate colours of the world, its hopeful spaciousness, its
dancing light, the high blue vault, abruptly changed to the dim, cold,
restricted outlook of age. We waited.
As Yeo luffed the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of wind
and white rain, pressing us into the sea. The _Mona_ made ineffective
leaps, trying to get release from her imprisonment, but only succeeded
in pouring water over the inert figure lying on the bottom boards. In a
spasm of fear he sprang up and began to scramble wildly towards his
wife, who in her nervousness was gripping the gunwale, but was facing
the affair silently and pluckily. "Keep still there!" peremptorily
ordered the sailor; and the man bundled down without a word, like a
dog, an abject heap of wet rags.
The first weight of the squall was released. The _Mona_ eased. But the
rain set in with steadiness and definition. Nothing was in sight but
the waves shaping in the murk and passing us, and the blurred outline
of a ketch labouring under reduced canvas to leeward. The bundle on the
boat's floor sat up painfully and glanced over the gunwale. He made no
attempt to disguise his complete defeat by our circumstances. He saw
the ketch, saw she was bigger, and humbly and loudly implored Yeo to
put him aboard. He did not look at his wife. His misery was in full
possession of him. When near to the ketch we saw something was wrong
with a flag she was flying. We got round to her lee quarter and hailed
the three muffled figures on her deck.
"Can we come aboard?" roared Yeo.
One of the figures came to the ship's side and leaned over. "All
right," we heard, "if you don't mind sailing with a corpse."
Yeo put it to his passengers. The woman said nothing. Her pale face,
pitifully tiny and appealing within a sailor's tarpaulin hat, showed an
innocent mind startled by the brutality of a world she did not know,
but a mind controlled and alert. You could guess she expected nothing
now but the worst, and had been schooling herself to face it. Her
husband, when he knew what was on that ship, repudiated the vessel with
horror. Yet we had no sooner fallen slightly away than he looked up
again, was reminded once more that she stood so much higher than our
boat, and cried, "Yes, yes!"
The two craft imperceptibly approached, as by gravitation. The men of
the ketch saw we had changed our minds, and made ready to receive us.
On one noisy uplift of a wave we got the lady inboard. Waiting another
opportunity, floundering about below the black wall of the ship,
presently it came, and we shoved over just anyhow the helpless bulk of
the man. He disappeared within the ship like a shapeless sack, and
bumped like one. When I got over, I saw the _Mona's_ mast, which was
thrusting and falling by the side of the ketch, making wild
oscillations and eccentrics, suddenly vanish; and then appeared Yeo,
who carried a tow-line aft and made fast.
The skipper of the ketch had been drowned, we were told. They were
bringing his body home. The helmsman indicated a form lashed in a
sail-cloth to the hatch. They were standing on and off, waiting to get
it over the bar. Yeo they knew so well that hardly any words passed
between them. They were glad to put the piloting in his hands. He took
the wheel of the _Judy of Padstow_.
The substantial deck of the _Judy_ was a great relief after the dizzy
gyrations of the aerial _Mona_; and our lady, with a half-glance at
what on the hatch was so grimly indifferent to all that could happen
now, even smiled again, perhaps with a new sense of safety. She saw her
husband settled in a place not too wet, and got about the venerable
boards of the _Judy_, looking at the old gear with curiosity, glancing,
with her head dropped back, into the dark intricacy of rigging upheld
by the ponderous mainmast as it swayed back and forth. Every time the
men went hurriedly trampling to some point of the running gear she
watched what they were at. For hours we beat about, in a great noise of
waters, waiting for that opportunity at the entrance to home and
comfort. Once Yeo took us as far towards the vague mist of surf as the
dismal tolling of the Bar Buoy, but evidently did not like the look of
it, and stood out again.
At last, having decided, he shouted orders, there was a burst of
activity, and we headed for the bad place. Soon we should know.
The _Judy_ began to plunge alarmingly. The incoming rollers at times
swept her along with a rush, and Yeo had his hands full. Her bowsprit
yawned, rose and fell hurriedly, the _Judy's_ unsteady dexter pointing
in nervous excitement at what was ahead of her. But Yeo held her to it,
though those heavy following seas so demoralized the _Judy_ that it was
clear it was all Yeo could do to keep her to her course. Columns of
spray exploded ahead, driving in on us like shot.
"Look out!" cried Yeo. I looked. Astern was a grey hill, high over us,
fast overtaking us, the white turmoil of its summit already streaming
down its long slope. It accelerated, as if it could see it would soon
be too late. It nearly was, but not quite. A cataract roared over the
poop, and Yeo vanished. The _Judy_, in a panic, made an attempt at a
move which would have been fatal then; but she was checked and her head
steadied. I could do nothing but hold the lady firm and grasp a pin in
its rail. The flood swept us, brawling round the gear, foundering the
hatch. For a moment I thought it was a case, and saw nothing but
maniacal water. Then the foam subsided to clear torrents which flung
about violently with the ship's movement. The men were in the rigging.
Yeo was rigid at the wheel, his eyes on the future. I could not see the
other passenger till his wife screamed, and then I saw him. Two figures
rolled in a flood that was pouring to the canting of the deck, and one
of them desperately clutched at the other for aid. But the other was
the dead skipper, washed from his place on the hatch.
We were over the bar again, and the deck became level. But it remained
the bottom of a shallow well in which floated with indifference the
one-time master of the _Judy_, face downwards, and who presently
stranded amidships. Our passenger reclined on the vacated hatch, his
eyes wide with childish and unspoken terror, and fixed on his wife,
whose ministering hands he fumbled for as does a child for his mother's
when he wakes at night after a dream of evil.
XII. The Lascar's Walking-Stick
The big face of Limehouse Church clock stared through the window at us.
It is rather a senseless face, because it is so full of cracks that you
can find any hour in it you do not want, especially when in a hurry.
But nobody with a life that had not wide areas of waste leisure in it
would ever visit Hammond now, where he lives in a tenement building, in
a room which overlooks the roofs and railway arches of Limehouse. Just
outside his window the tower of the church is rather too large and too
close.
Hammond has rooms in the tenement which are above the rest of the
street. He surmounts many layers of dense humanity. The house is not
the usual model dwelling. Once it knew better days. Once it was the
residence of a shipowner, in the days when the London docks were full
of clippers, and shipowners husbanded their own ships and liked to live
near their work. The house has a broad and noble staircase, having a
carved handrail as wide as a span; but much of the old and carved
interior woodwork of the house is missing--firewood sometimes runs
short there--and the rest is buried under years of paint and dirt.
Hammond never knows how many people share the house with him. "I've
tried to find out, but the next day one of 'em has died and two more
are born." It is such a hive that most of Hammond's friends gave up
visiting him after discovering in what place he had secluded himself;
but there he stays with his books and his camera, his pubs and his
lightermen, Jews, Chinamen, sailors, and dock-labourers. Occasionally a
missionary from the studios of Hempstead or Chelsea goes down to sort
out Hammond from his surroundings, and to look him over for damage,
when found.
"Did I ever tell you about Jabberjee?" Hammond asked me that afternoon.
No, he hadn't. Some of Hammond's work, which he had been showing me,
was scattered over the floor, and he stepped among the litter and came
and looked through the window with me. "A funny thing happened to me
here," he said, "the other evening. A pal of mine died. The bills which
advertise for the recovery of his body--you can see 'em in any pub
about here--call him Joseph Cherry, commonly called Ginger. He was a
lighterman, you know. There was a sing-song for the benefit of his wife
and kids round at the George and Dragon, and I was going.
"On my way I stopped to look in at my favourite pawnshop. Do you know
the country about here? Well, you have to mind your eye. You never know
what will turn up. I never knew such a place. Not all of Limehouse gets
into the Directory, not by a lot. It is bound on the east by China, on
the north by Greenland, on the south by Cape Horn, and on the west by
London Bridge.
"The main road near here is the foreshore of London. There's no doubt
the sea beats on it--unless you are only a Chelsea chap, with your eyes
bunged up with paint. All sorts of things drift along. All sorts of
wreckage. It's like finding a cocoanut or a palm hole stranded in a
Cornish cove. The stories I hear--one of you writer fellers ought to
come and stay here, only I suppose you are too busy writing about
things that really matter. You are like the bright youths in the art
schools, drawing plaster casts till they don't know life when they see
it.
"Well, about this pawnshop. It's a sort of pocket--you know those
places on the beach where a lot of flotsam strands--oceanic
treasure-trove. I suppose the currents, for some reason sailors could
explain, eddy round this pawnshop and leave things there. That pawnshop
is the luckiest corner along our beach, and I stopped to turn over the
sea litter.
"Of course, there was a lot of chronometers, and on top of a pile of
'em was a carved cocoanut. South Sea Islands, I suppose. Full of
curious involuted lines--a mist of lines--with a face peering through
the mist, if you looked close enough. Rows of cheap watches hung on
their chains, and there was a lot of second-hand meerschaum pipes, and
a walrus tusk, carved about a little. What took my eye was an old
Chinese bowl, because inside it was a little jade idol--a fearful
little wretch, with mother-o'-pearl eyes. It would squat in your
thoughts like a toad, that idol--eh, where does Jabberjee come in?
Well, here he comes.
"I didn't know he was coming at all, you understand. I shouldn't have
jumped more if the idol had winked at me.
"There stood Jabberjee. I didn't know that was his name, though. He was
christened Jabberjee after the trouble, by a learned Limehouse
schoolboy, who wore spectacles. Do I make myself clear?"
I murmured that I was a little dense, but time might carry out
improvements. Hammond was talking on, though, without looking at me.
"There the Lascar was. Lots of 'em about here, you know. He was the
usual bundle of bones and blue cotton rags, and his gunny bags flapped
on his stick legs like banners. He looked as uncertain as a
candle-flame in a draught. Perhaps he was sixteen. I dunno. Maybe he
was sixty. You can't tell these Johnnies. He had a shaven cranium, and
his tight scalp might have been slipped over the bony bosses of his
head with a shoehorn.
"I don't know what he was saying. He cringed, and said something very
quickly; I thought he was speaking of something he had concealed on his
person. Smuggled goods, likely. Tobacco.
"Looking over his shoulder, wishing he would go away, I saw a policeman
in the dusk at the opposite corner, with his eye on us.
"Then I could see something was concealed under the Lascar's flimsies.
He seemed trying to keep it quiet. He kept on talking, and I couldn't
make out what he was driving at. I was looking at his clothes,
wondering what the deuce he had concealed there. At last something came
out of his rags. Talk about making you jump! It really did look like
the head of a snake. It was, too, but attached to a walking-stick--sort
of handle. A scaly head it was, in some shiny material. Its eyes were
like a pair of rubies. They picked up the light somehow, and glittered.
"Now listen. I looked up then into the Lascar's face. I was surprised
to find he was taller. Much taller. He put his face forward and down,
so that I wanted to step back.
"He had an ugly look. He was smiling; the sweep was smiling, as though
he knew he was a lot cleverer than I. Another thing. The place was
suddenly quiet, and the houses and shops seemed to have fallen far
back. The pavement was wider.
"There was something else, I noticed. The bobby had left the street
corner, and was walking our way. The curious thing was, though, the
more he walked the farther off he got, as though the road was being
stretched under his feet.
"Mind you, I was still awake and critical. You know there is a
substratum of your mind which is critical, when you are dreaming,
standing looking on outside you, like a spectator.
"Then the stick touched my hand. I shouted. I must have yelled jolly
loud, I think. I couldn't help it. That horrible thing seemed to
wriggle in my fingers.
"It was the shout which brought the crowd. There was the policeman. I
can't make out how he got there. 'Now, what's your little game?' he
said. That brought the buildings up with a rush, and broke the road
into the usual clatter.
"It was all quite simple. There was nothing in it then out of the
ordinary. Just a usual Lascar, very frightened, waving a cheap cane
with a handle like a snake's head. Then another policeman came up in a
hurry, and pushed through the crowd. The crowd was on my side, maudlin
and sympathetic. They knew all about it. The coolie had tried to stab
me. An eager young lady in an apron asked a boy in front--he had just
forced through--what was the matter. He knew all about it.
"'The Indian tried to bite the copper.'
"'Tried to bite him?'
"'Not 'arf he didn't.'
"The Hindoo was now nearly hysterical, and the kiddies were picking up
his language fast. 'Now then, old Jabberjee,' said one nipper in
spectacles. The crowd was laughing, and surging towards the police. I
managed to edge out of it.