Our voyage was to begin at midnight from near Limehouse Hole. The hour
and the place have been less promising in the beginning of many a
strange adventure. Where the voyage would end could not be said,
except that it would be in Bugsby's Reach, and at some time or other.
It was now ten o'clock, getting towards sailing time, and the way to
the foreshore was unlighted and devious. Yet it was somewhere near.
This area of still and empty night railed off from the glare of the
Commercial Road would be Limehouse Church. It is foolish to suppose
you know the Tower Hamlets because you have seen them by day. They
change. They are like those uncanny folk of the fables. At night,
wonderfully, they become something else, take another form, which has
never been more than glimpsed, and another character, so fabulous and
secret that it will support the tales of the wildest romanticist, who
rightly feels that if such yarns were told of 'Frisco or Timbuctoo they
might get found out. Was this the church? Three Chinamen were
disputing by its gate. Perhaps they were in disagreement as to where
the church would be in daylight.
At a corner where the broad main channel of electric light ended, and
perplexity began, a policeman stood, and directed me into chaos.
"Anywhere," he explained, "anywhere down there will do." I saw a
narrow alley in the darkness, which had one gas lamp and many cobbled
stones. At the bottom of the lane were three iron posts. Beyond the
posts a bracket lamp showed a brick wall, and in the wall was an arch
so full of gloom that it seemed impassable, except to a steady draught
of cold air that might have been the midnight itself entering Limehouse
from its own place. At the far end of that opening in the wall was
nothing. I stood on an invisible wooden platform and looked into
nothing with no belief that a voyage could begin from there. Before me
then should have been the Thames, at the top of the flood tide. It was
not seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters of
brilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars which
detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void,
sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of
trembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on
the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering
light did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travelling
road--that chasm before me was black because it was filled with fluid
night. Night, I discovered suddenly, was in irresistible movement. It
was swift and heavy. It was unconfined. It was welling higher to
douse our feeble glims and to founder London, built of shadows on its
boundary. It moved with frightful quietness. It seemed confident of
its power. It swirled and eddied by the piles of the wharf, and there
it found a voice, though that was muffled; yet now and then it broke
into levity for a moment, as at some shrouded and alien jest.
There were sounds which reached me at last from the opposite shore,
faint with distance and terror. The warning from an unseen steamer
going out was as if a soul, crossing this Styx, now knew all. There is
no London on the Thames, after sundown. Most of us know very little of
the River by day. It might then be no more native to our capital than
the Orientals who stand under the Limehouse gas lamps at night. It
surprises us. We turn and look at it from our seat in a tram, and
watch a barge going down on the ebb--it luckily misses the piers of
Blackfriars Bridge--as if a door had unexpectedly opened on a mystery,
revealing another world in London, and another sort of life than ours.
It is as uncanny as if we had sensed another dimension of space. The
tram gets among the buildings again, and we are reassured by the
confined and arid life we know. But what a light and width had that
surprising world where we saw a barge drifting as leisurely as though
the narrow limits which we call reality were there unknown!
But after dark there is not only no River, when you stand where by day
is its foreshore; there is no London. Then, looking out from
Limehouse, you might be the only surviving memory of a city that has
vanished. You might be solitary among the unsubstantial shades, for
about you are only comets passing through space, and inscrutable
shapes; your neighbours are Cassiopeia and the Great Bear.
But where was our barge, the _Lizzie_? I became aware abruptly of the
skipper of this ship for our midnight voyage among the stars. He had
his coat-collar raised. The _Lizzie_, he said, was now free of the
mud, and he was going to push off. Sitting on a bollard, and pulling
out his tobacco-pouch, he said he hadn't had her out before. Sorry
he'd got to do it now. She was a bitch. She bucked her other man
overboard three days ago. They hadn't found him yet. They found her
down by Gallions Reach. Jack Jones was the other chap. Old Rarzo they
called him. Took more than a little to give him that colour. But he
was All Right. They were going to give a benefit concert for his wife
and kids. Jack's brother was going to sing; good as Harry Lauder, he
is.
Below us a swirl of water broke into mirth, instantly suppressed. We
could see the _Lizzie_ now. The ripples slipped round her to the tune
of they-'avn't-found-'im-yet, they-'avn't-found-'im-yet-they 'avn't.
The skipper and crew rose, fumbling at his feet for a rope. There did
not seem to be much of the _Lizzie_. She was but a little raft to
drift out on those tides which move among the stars. "Now's your
chance," said her crew, and I took it, on all fours. The last remnant
of London was then pushed from us with a pole. We were launched on
night, which had begun its ebb towards morning.
The punt sidled away obliquely for mid-stream. I stood at one end of
it. The figure of Charon could be seen at the other, of long
acquaintance with this passage, using his sweep with the indifference
of habitude. Perhaps it was not Charon. Yet there was some
obstruction to the belief that we were bound for no more than the
steamer _Aldebaran_, anchored in Bugsby's Reach. From the low deck of
the barge it was surprising that the River, whose name was Night, was
content with the height to which it had risen. Perhaps it was taking
its time. It might soon receive an influx from space, rise then in a
silent upheaval, and those low shadows that were London, even now half
foundered, would at once go. This darkness was an irresponsible power.
It was the same flood which had sunk Knossos and Memphis. It was
tranquil, indifferent, knowing us not, reckoning us all one with the
Sumerians. They were below it. It had risen above them. Now the time
had come when it was laving the base of London.
The crew cried out to us that over there was the entrance to the West
India Dock. We knew that place in another life. But should Charon
joke with us? We saw only chaos, in which the beams from a reputed
city glimmered without purpose.
The shadow of the master of our black barge pulled at his sweep with a
slow confidence that was fearful amid what was sightless and unknown.
His pipe glowed, as with the profanity of an immortal to whom eternity
and infinity are of the usual significance. Then a red and green eye
appeared astern, and there was a steady throbbing as if some monster
were in pursuit of us. A tug shaped near us, drew level, and exposed
with its fires, as it went ahead, a radiant _Lizzie_ on an area of
water that leaped in red flames. The furnace door of the tug was shut,
and at once we were blind. "Hold hard," yelled our skipper, and the
_Lizzie_ slipped into the turmoil of the tug's wake.
There would be Millwall. The tug and the turmoil had gone. We were
alone again in the beyond. There was no sound now but the water
spattering under our craft, and the fumbling and infrequent splash of
the sweep. Once we heard the miniature bark of a dog, distinct and
fine, as though distance had refined it as well as reduced it. We were
nearly round the loop the River makes about Millwall, and this unknown
region before us was Blackwall Reach by day, and Execution Dock used to
be dead ahead. To the east, over the waters, red light exploded
fan-wise and pulsed on the clouds latent above, giving them momentary
form. It was as though, from the place where it starts, the dawn had
been released too soon, and was at once recalled. "The gas works,"
said the skipper.
Still the slow drift, quite proper to those at large in eternity. But
this, I was told, was the beginning of Bugsby's Reach. It was first a
premonition, then a doubt, and at last a distinct tremor in the
darkness ahead of us. A light appeared, grew nearer, higher, and
brighter, and there was a suspicion of imminent mass. "Watch her,"
warned the skipper. Watch what? There was nothing to watch but the
dark and some planets far away, one of them red. The menacing one
still grew higher and brighter. It came at us. A wall instantly
appeared to overhang us, with a funnel and masts above it, and our
skipper's yell was lost in the thunder of a churning propeller. The
air shuddered, and a siren hooted in the heavens. A long, dark body
seemed minutes going by us, and our skipper's insults were taken in
silence by her superior deck. She left us riotous in her wake, and we
continued our journey dancing our indignation on the uneasy deck of the
_Lizzie_.
The silent drift recommenced, and we neared a region of unearthly
lights and the smell of sulphur, where aerial skeletons, vast and
black, and columns and towers, alternately glowed and vanished as the
doors of infernal fires were opened and shut. We drew abreast of this
phantom place where names and darkness battled amid gigantic ruin.
Charon spoke. "They're the coal wharves," he said.
The lights of a steamer rose in the night below the wharves, but it was
our own progress which brought them nearer. She was anchored. We made
out at last her shape, but at first she did not answer our hail.
"Hullo, _Aldebaran_," once more roared our captain.
There was no answer. In a minute we should be by her, and too late.
"Barge ahoy!" came a voice. "Look out for a line."