John Egerton groped in the locker for rowlocks with an oppressive sense
of incompetence and delay. His fingers moved with an ineffectual
urgency in a messy confusion of spanners and oil-cans, tins of grease,
and slimy labyrinths of thin cord. Only one rowlock was discoverable.
The finding of the second became in his mind a task of inconceivable
importance and difficulty. Vast issues depended on it--Stephen ...
Margery ... babies ... Emily Gaunt ... and somehow or other Mrs. Bantam.
Thunderous mutterings rolled down distantly from the bows. John groaned
helplessly. He caught his fingers sharply on the edge of a screw-driver.
"It's not here ... it's not here ... it _can't_ be, Stephen." With a
sense of heroic measures he hauled out in clattering handfuls the whole
muddle of implements in the locker. Under the electric coil lurked the
missing rowlock.
"Row, then, like the devil," ordered Stephen. Out here, in this strange
watery adventure, Stephen was the readily acknowledged commander. John
rowed, with grunts and splashings.
They rounded the Island, the moon glowing remotely beyond it through the
traceries of young willow stems. Stephen was doing something with an
anchor at the mouth of the sack, breathing audibly through his nose.
John sculled obliquely across the river, struggling against the tide,
steadily losing ground, he felt. "Losing ground," he thought insanely,
"ought to be losing _water_, of course." So strangely do the minds of
men move in critical hours.
When they were half-way over, the chunk-chunk of a motor-boat came
lazily upstream. "God!" said Stephen, "a police-boat." John thought,
"Will it _never_ end?" It was appalling, this accumulation of obstacles
and delays and potential witnesses. He was tired now, and acutely
conscious of a general perspiration.
They drifted downstream under the bank, while the police-boat phutted up
on the far side, a low black shape without lights. Caped figures
chattered easily in the stern and took no evident notice of the small
white motor-boat under the bank; but Stephen and John imagined fatal
suspicions and perceptions proceeding under the peaked caps. They
passed.
"_Now!_" Stephen was fiddling with his anchor again, tugging at a knot;
his tone was final. "Take her out into the middle again ... _quick_!"
John pulled gallantly with his left. They were opposite the house again
now, moving smoothly towards Hammersmith Bridge. No other craft was in
sight or sound.
Stephen said thickly, "If we don't get her over now, we never shall ...
stand by.... No, no ... you trim the boat.... I'll manage it."
He edged Emily close up against the gunwale, her extremities on a
couple of thwarts, her middle sagging down the side of the boat. He
looked quickly up the river and down the river and at Hammerton Terrace
and at the oil-mills below and at the empty towpath on the opposite
bank, all silent, all still. Stephen put a hand under the sack. Close by
a tiny fish leaped lightly from the river. Stephen saw the flash of its
belly, and took his hand away with a start. Then with a great heave
under Emily's middle, a violent pushing and lifting with feet and body
and arms, that set the sculls clattering and the boat precariously
rocking he got the body half over the gunwale, John perched anxiously on
the other side, striving to correct the already dangerous list. Stephen
struggled blasphemously with the infuriating sack. Somehow, somewhere it
was maddeningly entangled with something in the boat. Frantic tugging
and thrusting, irritable oaths, moved it not at all. John looked
fearfully behind him. A lighted omnibus was swimming through space,
perilously near ... Hammersmith Bridge. Stephen was kicking the body now
with a futile savagery.
"What the hell?" he said. "O God!"
John groped distantly with a hand in the dark. Then, "The anchor!" he
said--"the anchor's caught...." He heard a relieved "O Lord!" from
Stephen, "thought I'd put the anchor end over first"--and for the first
time made himself a petulant comment, "Why the devil didn't you?" It
was too much--this sort of thing. Then the shaggy end of the sack was
slithering quietly over the side, the anchor twinkled swiftly in the
moon, and the relieved boat rocked suddenly with a wild, delighted
levity. Emily was gone.
Peering back upstream, the two men saw a slowly expanding circle on the
black water. And there were a few bubbles. Emily was indeed gone.
Stephen sat in a limp posture of absolute exhaustion, his shoulders
hunched, his head on his hands, speechless.
John looked at his watch. It was a quarter-past ten--only about an hour
since Emily died. He stared incredulous at the faintly luminous hands.
Then he looked round; the boat seemed to be drifting very fast. On his
right were the boat-houses, a dark huddle of boats clinging to the rafts
in front of them. The boat-houses were next to the Bridge.
He looked back and up, with a new fear. The long span of the suspension
bridge hung almost above them. A bus rumbled ominously above. Two
persons were standing on the footpath against the parapet, looking down
at the boat. He could see the pale blobs of their faces. One of them had
a Panama hat.
The boat shot into the dark under the Bridge.
John leaned forward. "Stephen," he whispered--"Stephen." There was no
answer. John touched his knee. "Stephen."