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London River by H. M. Tomlinson

H >> H. M. Tomlinson >> London River




Our wooden shelter, the wheel-house, is ten feet above the deck, with
windows through which I could look at the night, and imagine the rest. I
had, to support me, the mono-syllabic skipper and a helmsman with nothing
to say. I saw one of them when, drawing hard on his pipe, its glow
outlined a bodyless face. The wheel chains rattled in their channels.
There was a clang when a sea wrenched the rudder. I clung to a
window-strap, flung back to look upwards through a window which the ship
abruptly placed above my head, then thrown forward to see wreaths of
water speeding below like ghosts. The stars jolted back and forth in
wide arcs. There were explosions at the bows, and the ship trembled and
hesitated. Occasionally the skipper split the darkness with a rocket,
and we gazed round the night for an answer. The night had no answer to
give. We were probably nearing the North Pole. About midnight, the
silent helmsman put away his pipe, as a preliminary to answering a
foolish question of mine, and said, "Sometimes it happens. It's bound
to. You can see for ye'self. They're little things, these trawlers.
Just about last Christmas--wasn't it about Christmas-time, Skipper?--the
_Mavis_ left the fleet to go home. Boilers wrong. There was one of our
hands, Jim Budge, who was laid up, and he reckoned he'd better get home
quick. So he joined her. We were off the Tail of the Dogger, and it
blew that night. Next morning Jim's mate swore Jim's bunk had been laid
in. It was wet. He said the _Mavis_ had gone. I could see the bunk was
wet all right, but what are ventilators for? Chance it, the _Mavis_
never got home. A big sea to flood the engine-room, and there she goes."


5

After the next daybreak time stood still--or rather, I refused to note
its passage. For that morning I made out the skipper, drenched with
spray, and his eyes bloodshot, no doubt through weariness and the
weather, watching me from the saloon doorway. I did not ask any
questions, but pretended I was merely turning in my sleep. It is
probably better not to ask the man who has succeeded in losing you where
you are, particularly when his eyes are bloodshot and he is wondering
what the deuce he shall do about it. And greater caution still is
required when his reproachful silence gives you the idea that he thinks
you a touch of ill-luck in his enterprise. My companions, I believe,
regretted I had not been omitted. I tried, therefore, to be
inconspicuous, and went up to seclude myself at the back of the boat on
the poop, there to understudy a dog which is sorry it did it. Not
adverse fate itself could show a more misanthropic aspect than the empty
overcast waste around us. It was useless to appeal to it. It did
vouchsafe us one ship that morning, a German trawler with a fir tree
lashed to her deck, ready for Christmas morning, I suppose, when perhaps
they would tie herrings to its twigs. But she was no good to us. And
the grey animosity granted us three others during the afternoon, and they
were equally useless, for they had not sighted our fleet for a week. All
that interested me was the way the lookout on the bridge picked out a
mark, which I could not see, for it was obscured where sea and sky were
the same murk, and called it a ship. Long before I could properly
discern it, the look-out behaved as though he knew all about it. But it
was never the sign we wanted. We had changed our course so often that I
was beginning to believe that nobody aboard could make a nearer guess at
our position than the giddy victim in blindman's-buff. A sextant was
never used. Apparently these fishermen found their way about on a little
mental arithmetic compounded of speed, time, and the course. That leaves
a large margin for error. So if they felt doubtful they got a plummet,
greased it, and dipped it overboard. When it was hauled up they
inspected whatever might be sticking to the tallow, and at once announced
our position. At first I felt sceptical. It was as though one who had
got lost with you in London might pick up a stone in an unknown
thoroughfare, and straightway announce the name of that street. That
would be rather clever. But I discovered my fishermen could do something
like it.

Our skipper no longer appeared at meals. He was on the bridge day and
night. He acted quite well a pose of complete indifference, and said no
more than: "This has not happened to me for years." He repeated this
slowly at reasonable intervals. But he had lost the nimble impulse to
chat about little things, and also his look of peering and innocent
curiosity. As now he did not come to our table, the others spoke of
Billingsgate carriers, such as ours, which had driven about the Dogger
till there was no more in the bunkers than would take them to Hull to get
more coal. From the way they spoke I gathered they would crawl into
port, in such circumstances, without flags, and without singing. This
gave my first trip an appearance I had never expected. Imagination,
which is clearly of little help in geography, had always pictured the
Dogger as a sea where you could hail another trawler as you would a cab
in London. A vessel might reasonably expect to find there a fish-trunk
it had left behind. But here we were with our ship plunging round the
compass merely expectant of luck, and each wave looking exactly like the
others,

But at last we had them. We spoke a rival fleet of trawlers. Their
admiral cried through a speaking-trumpet that he had left "ours" at six
that morning twenty miles NNE., steaming west. It was then eleven
o'clock. Hopefully the _Windhover_ put about. We held on for three
hours at full speed, but saw nothing but the same waves. The skipper
then rather violently addressed the Dogger, and said he was going below.
The mate asked what course he should steer. "Take the damned ship where
you like," said the skipper. "I'm going to sleep." He was away ten
minutes. He reappeared, and resumed his silent parade of the bridge.
The helmsman grinned at the mate. By then the wind had fallen, the seas
were more deliberate; there came a suffusion of thin sunlight,
insufficient and too late to expand our outlook, for the night began to
fill the hollows of the Dogger almost at once, and soon there was nothing
to be seen but the glimmer of breaking waves.


6

There is nothing to be done with an adventure which has become a misprise
than to enjoy it that way instead. What did I care when they complained
at breakfast of the waste of rockets the night before? What did that
matter to me when the skylight above our morning coffee was open at last,
really open? Fine weather for December! Across that patch of blue,
which was a peep into eternity, I saw drift a bird as white as sanctity.
And did it matter if the imprints on our tablecloth of negroes' thumbs
were more numerous and patent than ever, in such a light? Not in the
least. For I myself had long since given up washing, as a laborious and
unsatisfactory process, and was then cutting up cake tobacco with the
rapture of an acolyte preparing the incense. If this was what was meant
by getting lost on the Dogger, then the method, if only its magic could
be formulated, would make the fortunes of the professional fakirs of
happiness in the capitals of the rich. Yet mornings of such a quality
cannot be purchased, nor even claimed as the reward of virtue.

On deck it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic. The wind
was steady and generous. The warm sunlight danced. I should not have
been surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the
greatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek,
smiling with approval of the scene below--melancholy approval, for we
would remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale and
sickly when Paul, that argumentative zealot, came to provide a world,
already thinking more of industry and State politics than of the gods,
with a hard-wearing theology which would last till Manchester came. For
the _Windhover_ had drifted into a time and place as innocent of man's
highest achievements as is joy of death. The wind and sea were chanting.
The riding of the ship kept time to that measure. The vault was
turquoise, and the moving floor was cobalt. The white islands of the
Olympians were in the sky.

Hour after hour our lonely black atom moved over that vast floor, with
nothing in sight, of course, in a day that had been left over from
earth's earlier and more innocent time, till a little cloud formed in the
north. That cloud did not rise. It blew towards us straight over the
seas, rigid and formless; becoming at last a barque under full sail,
heading east of south of us. She was, when at a distance, a baffling
mass of canvas, from which a square-sail occasionally heliographed. She
got abeam of us. Before the clippers have quite gone, it is proper to
give grace for the privilege of having seen one, superlative as the ship
of romance, and in such a time and place. She was a cloud that, when it
mounted the horizon like the others, instead of floating into the
meridian, moved over the seas to us, an immutable billow of luminous mist
blown forward on the wind. She might have risen at any moment. Her
green hull had the sheer of a sea hollow. Her bows pressed continually
onward, like the crest of a wave curving forward to break, but held, as
though enchanted. Sometimes, when her white mass heeled from us under
the pressure of the wind, a red light flashed from her submerged body.
She passed silently, a shining phantom, and at last vanished, as phantoms
do.


7

When the boots, exploded on the saloon floor by the petulant mate, woke
me, it was three of a morning which, for my part, was not in the almanac.
"We're bewitched," the mate said, climbing over me into his cupboard. "I
never thought I should want to see our fleet so much."

"Aye," remarked the chief engineer, who came shuffling in then for some
sleep, "ye'll find that fleet quick, or the stokers are giving orders.
D'ye think a ship is driven by the man at the wheel? No' that I want to
smell Hull."

A kick of the ship overturned the fireshovel, and I woke again to look
with surprise at so small a cause of a terrible sound, and was leaving
the shovel to its fate when it came to life, and began to crawl
stealthily over the floor. It was an imperative duty to rise and
imprison it. When that was forgotten the steward arrived, and roused me
to watch the method of setting a breakfast-table at sea; but I had seen
all that before, and climbed out of the saloon. There are moments in a
life afloat when the kennel and chain of the house-dog appear to have
their merits. The same wash was still racing past outside, and the ship
moving along. The halyards were shaking in the cold. The funnel was
still abruptly rocking. A sailor was painting the starboard stanchions.
A stoker was going forward off duty, in his shirt and trousers,
indifferent to the cruel wind which bulged and quivered his thin rags.
The skipper was on the bridge, his hands in the pockets of his flapping
overcoat, still searching the distance for what was not there. A train
of gulls was weaving about over our wake. A derelict fish-trunk floated
close to us, with a great black-backed gull perched on it. He cocked up
one eye at me when he drew level, crouched for flight, but perhaps saw on
my face the reason why I prefer working tomorrow, and contemptuously
stayed where he was. Then I noticed the skipper looking back at the
bird. He nodded to it, and cried: "There goes a milestone. The fleet is
about somewhere." I danced with caution along the treacherous deck,
where one day that voyage a sea picked up two men and stranded them on
top of the engine-room casing, and got up with the master. He had just
ordered the ship to be put over to a trawler in sight. With the seas so
swift and ponderous I completely forgot the cold wind in watching the two
lively ships being manoeuvred till they were within earshot. When the
engines were stopped the steering had to be nicely calculated, or erratic
waves brought them dangerously close, or else took them out of call. Our
new friend had not seen "our lot," but had left a fleet with an unknown
house-flag ten miles astern. We surged forward again.

We steamed for two hours, and then the pattern of a trawler's smoke was
seen ahead traced on a band of greenish brilliance which divided the sea
from the sky. Almost at once other faint tracings multiplied there. In
a few minutes we could make out plainly within that livid narrow outlet
between the sea and the heavy clouds a concourse of midget ships.

"There they are," breathed the skipper after a quick inspection through
his glasses.

In half an hour we were in the midst of a fleet of fifty little steamers,
just too late to take our place as carrier to them for London's daily
market. As we steamed in, another carrier, which had left London after
us, hoisted her signal pennant, and took over that job.

While still our ship was under way, boats put out from the surrounding
trawlers, and converged on us for our outward cargo, the empty
fish-trunks. That intense band of light which had first betrayed the
smoke of the fleet eroded upwards into the low, slaty roof of nimbus till
the gloom was dissolved to the zenith. The incubus vanished; the sun
flooded us. At last only white feathers were left in the sky. I felt I
had known and loved these trawlers for years. All round us were ships'
boats, riding those sweeping seas in a gyrating and delirious lunacy; and
in each were two jovial fishermen, who shouted separate reasons to our
skipper for "the week off" he had taken.

These boats came at us like a swarm of assailants, swooping downhill on
us, swerving, recoiling, and falling away, rising swiftly above us again
for a charge, and then careering at us with abandon on the next declivity
of glass. A boat would hesitate above us, poised and rocking on the
snowy ridge of an upheaval, and vanish as the _Windhover_ canted away.
Then we rolled towards her, and there she was below us, in a smooth and
transient hollow. Watching for their chances, snatched out of luck by
skill and audacity, our men fed the clamorous boats with empties; the
boxes often fell just at the moment when the open boat was snatched away,
and then were swept off. The shouted jokes were broadened and
strengthened to fit that riot and uproar. This sudden robust life,
following the routine of our subdued company on its lonely and
disappointed vigils in a deserted sea, the cheery men countering and
mocking aloud the sly tricks of their erratic craft, a multitude of masts
and smoking funnels around us swaying in various arcs against a
triumphant sky, the clamorous desperation of clouds of wheeling
kittiwakes, herring-gulls, black-backed gulls and gannets, and all in
that pour of hard and crystalline northern sunlight, was as though the
creative word had been spoken only five minutes before. We, and all
this, had just come. I wanted to laugh and cheer.


8

There is, we know, a pleasure more refined to be got from looking at a
chart than from any impeccable modern map. Maps today are losing their
attraction, for they permit of no escape, even to fancy. Maps do not
allow us to forget that there are established and well-ordered
governments up to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, waiting to restrict, to
tax, and to punish us, and that their police patrol the tropical forests.
But consider the legends on a chart even of the North Sea, of the world
beneath the fathoms--the _Silver Pits_, the _Dowsing Ground_, the _Leman
Bank_, the _Great Fisher Ground_, the _Horn Reef_, the _Witch Ground_,
and the _Great Dogger Bank_! Strange, that indefinable implication of a
word! I remember that, when a child, I was awake one night listening to
a grandfather's clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, and a
brother sat up in bed and whispered: "Look, the Star in the East." I
turned, and one bright eye of the night was staring through the window.
Heaven knows into what profundity of ancestral darkness my brothers
whisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, but an awe, or a fear, was
wakened in me which was not mine, for I remember I could not explain it,
even though, at the time, the anxious direct question was put to me. Nor
can I now. It would puzzle a psycho-analyst most assured of the right
system for indexing secret human motives to disengage one shadow from
another in an ancestral darkness. That is why I merely put down here the
names to be found on a chart of the North Sea, and say no more about it,
being sure they will mean nothing except to those to whom they mean
something. Those words, like certain moonbeams, which stir in us that
not ourselves which makes for righteousness, or lunacy, combine only by
chance. The combination which unlocks the secret cannot be stated, or it
would not work. When there is a fortuitous coincidence of the magic
factors, the result is as remarkable to us as it is to those who think
they know us. When I used to stand on London's foreshore, gazing to what
was beyond our street lamps, the names on the chart had a meaning for me
which is outside the usual methods of human communication. The Dogger
Bank!

Here then it was, yet still to be seen only by faith. It was like Mrs.
Harris. I had the luck to discover that I should lose nothing through my
visit; and every traveller knows how much he gains when the place he has
wished to visit allows him to take away from it no less than what he
brought with him. The Bank was twenty fathoms under us. We saw it
proved at times when a little fine white sand came up, or fleshy yellow
fingers, called sponge by the men, which showed we were over the pastures
of the haddock. That was all we saw of a foundered region of prehistoric
Europe, where once there was a ridge in the valley of that lost river to
which the Rhine and Thames were tributaries. Our forefathers,
prospecting that attractive and remunerative plateau of the Dogger, on
their pilgrimage to begin making our England what it is, caught deer
where we were netting cod. I almost shuddered at the thought, as though
even then I felt the trawl of another race of men, who had strangely
forgotten all our noble deeds and precious memories, catching in the ruin
of St. Stephen's Tower, and the strangers, unaware of what august relic
was beneath them, cursing that obstruction to their progress. Anyhow, we
should have the laugh of them there; but these aeons of time are
desperate waters into which to sink one's thought. It sinks out of
sight. It goes down to dark nothing.

Well, it happened to be the sun of my day just then, and our time for
catching cod, with the reasonable hope, too, that we should find the city
still under St. Stephen's Tower when we got back, as a place to sell our
catch.

Our empty boxes were discharged. Led by the admiral, the
_Windhover_--with the rest of the fleet--lowered her trawl, and went
dipping slowly and quietly over the hills, towing her sunken net. The
admiral of a fishing-fleet is a great man. All is in his hands. He
chooses the grounds. Our admiral, it was whispered to me, was the wizard
of the north. The abundant fish-pastures were revealed to him in his
dreams. It was my last evening on the Bank. The day had been
wonderfully fine for winter and a sea that is notoriously evil. At
twilight the wind dropped, the heave of the waters decreased. The
scattered fleet, gliding through the hush, carried red, green, and white
planets. The ships which lay in the western glow were black and simple
shapes. Those to the east of us were remarkable with a chromatic
prominence, and you thought, while watching them, that till that moment
you had not really seen them. Presently the moon cleared the edge of the
sea, a segment of frozen light, and moored to our stern with a quivering,
ghostly line.

Coloured rockets sailed upwards from the admiral when he changed his mind
and his course, and then the city of mobile streets altered its plan, and
rewove its constellation. At midnight white flares burned forward on all
the boats. The trawls were to be hauled. Our steam-winch began to bang
its cogs in the heavy work of lifting the net. All hands assembled to
see what would be our luck. The light sent a silver lane through the
night, and men broke through the black walls of that brilliant separation
of the darkness, and vanished on the other side. Leaning overside, I
could see the pocket of our trawl drawing near, still some fathoms deep,
a phosphorescent and flashing cloud. It came inboard, and was suspended
over the deck, a bulging mass, its bottom was unfastened, and out gushed
our catch, slithering over the deck, convulsive in the scuppers. The
mass of blubber and plasm pulsed with an elfish glow.


9

We were homeward bound. The flat sea was dazzling with reflected
sunshine, and a shade had to be erected over the binnacle for the man at
the wheel. It might have been June, yet we had but few days to
Christmas. The noon ceiling was a frail blue, where gauze was suspended
in motionless loops and folds. The track of the sun was incandescent
silver. A few sailing vessels idled in the North Channel, their sails
slack; but we could not see a steamer in what is one of the world's
busiest fairways. We ran on a level keel, and there was no movement but
the tremor of the engines. We should catch the tide at the Shipwash, and
go up on it to Billingsgate and be home by midnight. How foolish it is
to portion your future, at sea!

It was when I was arranging what I should do in the later hours of that
day, when we were at Billingsgate, that the skipper, staring round the
North Channel, said to me: "It looks as though London had been wiped out
since we left it. Where's the ships?"

The Maplin watched us pass with its red eye. We raised all the lights
true and clear. I went below, and we were talking of London, and the
last trains, when the engine-room telegraph gave us a great shock. "Stop
her!" we heard the watch cry below.

I don't know how we got on deck. There were too many on the companion
ladder at the same time. While we were struggling upwards we heard that
frantic bell ring often enough to drive the engine-room people
distracted. I got to the ship's side in time to see a liner's bulk glide
by. She would have been invisible but for her strata of lights. She was
just beyond our touch. A figure on her, high over us, came to her rail,
distinct in the blur of the light of a cabin behind him, and shouted at
us. I remember very well what he said, but it is forbidden to put down
such words here. The man at our wheel paid no attention to him, that
danger being now past, and so of no importance. He continued to spin the
spokes desperately, because, though we could not see the ships about us,
we could hear everywhere the alarm of their bells. We had run at eleven
knots into a bank of fog which seemed full of ships. The moon was
looking now over the top of the wall of fog, yet the _Windhover_, which,
with engines reversed, seemed to be going ahead with frightful velocity,
drove into an opacity in which there was nothing but the warning sounds
of a great fear of us. I imagined in the dark the loom of impending
bodies, and straining overside in an effort to make them out, listening
to the murmur of the stream, nervously fanned the fog with my hat in a
ridiculous effort to clear it. Twice across our bows perilous shadows
arose, sprinkled with stars, yet by some luck they drifted silently by
us, and the impact we expected and were braced for was not felt.

I don't know how long it was before the _Windhover_ lost way, but we
anchored at last, and our own bell began to ring. When our unseen
neighbours heard the humming of our exhaust, their frantic appeal
subsided, and only now and then they gave their bells a shaking, perhaps
to find whether we answered from the same place. There was an absolute
silence at last, as though all had crept stealthily away, having left us,
lost and solitary, in the fog. We felt confident there would be a
clearance soon, so but shrouded our navigation lights. But the rampart
of fog grew higher, veiled the moon, blotted it out, expunged the last
and highest star. We were imprisoned. We lay till morning, and there
was only the fog, and ourselves, and a bell-buoy somewhere which tolled
dolefully.

And morning was but a weak infiltration into our prison. A steadfast
inspection was necessary to mark even the dead water overside. The River
was the same colour as the fog. For a fortnight we had been without
rest. We had become used to a little home which was unstable, and
sometimes delirious, and a sky that was always falling, and an earth that
rose to meet the collapse. Here we were on a dead level, still and
silent, with the men whispering, and one felt inclined to reel with
giddiness. We were fixed to a dumb, unseen river of a world that was
blind.

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