Great Expectations
we were in among the tiers of shipping. Here were the Leith, Aberdeen,
and Glasgow steamers, loading and unloading goods, and looking
immensely high out of the water as we passed alongside; here, were
colliers by the score and score, with the coal-whippers plunging off
stages on deck, as counterweights to measures of coal swinging up,
which were then rattled over the side into barges; here, at her
moorings was to-morrow’s steamer for Rotterdam, of which we took good
notice; and here to-morrow’s for Hamburg, under whose bowsprit we
crossed. And now I, sitting in the stern, could see, with a faster
beating heart, Mill Pond Bank and Mill Pond stairs.
“Is he there?” said Herbert.
“Not yet.”
“Right! He was not to come down till he saw us. Can you see his
signal?”
“Not well from here; but I think I see it.—Now I see him! Pull both.
Easy, Herbert. Oars!”
We touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and he was on board,
and we were off again. He had a boat-cloak with him, and a black canvas
bag; and he looked as like a river-pilot as my heart could have wished.
“Dear boy!” he said, putting his arm on my shoulder, as he took his
seat. “Faithful dear boy, well done. Thankye, thankye!”
Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty
chain-cables frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for the
moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood and
shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under the
figure-head of the _John of Sunderland_ making a speech to the winds
(as is done by many Johns), and the _Betsy of Yarmouth_ with a firm
formality of bosom and her knobby eyes starting two inches out of her
head; in and out, hammers going in ship-builders’ yards, saws going at
timber, clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in leaky
ships, capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible
sea-creatures roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent
lightermen, in and out,—out at last upon the clearer river, where the
ships’ boys might take their fenders in, no longer fishing in troubled
waters with them over the side, and where the festooned sails might fly
out to the wind.
At the stairs where we had taken him abroad, and ever since, I had
looked warily for any token of our being suspected. I had seen none. We
certainly had not been, and at that time as certainly we were not
either attended or followed by any boat. If we had been waited on by
any boat, I should have run in to shore, and have obliged her to go on,
or to make her purpose evident. But we held our own without any
appearance of molestation.
He had his boat-cloak on him, and looked, as I have said, a natural
part of the scene. It was remarkable (but perhaps the wretched life he
had led accounted for it) that he was the least anxious of any of us.
He was not indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live to see his
gentleman one of the best of gentlemen in a foreign country; he was not
disposed to be passive or resigned, as I understood it; but he had no
notion of meeting danger half way. When it came upon him, he confronted
it, but it must come before he troubled himself.
“If you knowed, dear boy,” he said to me, “what it is to sit here
alonger my dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day
betwixt four walls, you’d envy me. But you don’t know what it is.”
“I think I know the delights of freedom,” I answered.
“Ah,” said he, shaking his head gravely. “But you don’t know it equal
to me. You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, to know it
equal to me,—but I ain’t a-going to be low.”
It occurred to me as inconsistent, that, for any mastering idea, he
should have endangered his freedom, and even his life. But I reflected
that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart from all the
habit of his existence to be to him what it would be to another man. I
was not far out, since he said, after smoking a little:—
“You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder, t’other side the world, I
was always a looking to this side; and it come flat to be there, for
all I was a growing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch, and Magwitch could
come, and Magwitch could go, and nobody’s head would be troubled about
him. They ain’t so easy concerning me here, dear boy,—wouldn’t be,
leastwise, if they knowed where I was.”
“If all goes well,” said I, “you will be perfectly free and safe again
within a few hours.”
“Well,” he returned, drawing a long breath, “I hope so.”
“And think so?”
He dipped his hand in the water over the boat’s gunwale, and said,
smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me:—
“Ay, I s’pose I think so, dear boy. We’d be puzzled to be more quiet
and easy-going than we are at present. But—it’s a flowing so soft and
pleasant through the water, p’raps, as makes me think it—I was a
thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the
bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this
river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can’t no more hold their tide
than I can hold this. And it’s run through my fingers and gone, you
see!” holding up his dripping hand.
“But for your face I should think you were a little despondent,” said
I.
“Not a bit on it, dear boy! It comes of flowing on so quiet, and of
that there rippling at the boat’s head making a sort of a Sunday tune.
Maybe I’m a growing a trifle old besides.”
He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of
face, and sat as composed and contented as if we were already out of
England. Yet he was as submissive to a word of advice as if he had been
in constant terror; for, when we ran ashore to get some bottles of beer
into the boat, and he was stepping out, I hinted that I thought he
would be safest where he was, and he said. “Do you, dear boy?” and
quietly sat down again.
The air felt cold upon the river, but it was a bright day, and the
sunshine was very cheering. The tide ran strong, I took care to lose
none of it, and our steady stroke carried us on thoroughly well. By
imperceptible degrees, as the tide ran out, we lost more and more of
the nearer woods and hills, and dropped lower and lower between the
muddy banks, but the tide was yet with us when we were off Gravesend.
As our charge was wrapped in his cloak, I purposely passed within a
boat or two’s length of the floating Custom House, and so out to catch
the stream, alongside of two emigrant ships, and under the bows of a
large transport with troops on the forecastle looking down at us. And
soon the tide began to slacken, and the craft lying at anchor to swing,
and presently they had all swung round, and the ships that were taking
advantage of the new tide to get up to the Pool began to crowd upon us
in a fleet, and we kept under the shore, as much out of the strength of
the tide now as we could, standing carefully off from low shallows and
mudbanks.
Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her drive
with the tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an hour’s rest
proved full as much as they wanted. We got ashore among some slippery
stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about. It
was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a dim
horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great
floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed
stranded and still. For now the last of the fleet of ships was round
the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge,
straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some
ballast-lighters, shaped like a child’s first rude imitation of a boat,
lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles
stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes
stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red
landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage
and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was
stagnation and mud.
We pushed off again, and made what way we could. It was much harder
work now, but Herbert and Startop persevered, and rowed and rowed and
rowed until the sun went down. By that time the river had lifted us a
little, so that we could see above the bank. There was the red sun, on
the low level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into
black; and there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were
the rising grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life,
save here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull.
As the night was fast falling, and as the moon, being past the full,
would not rise early, we held a little council; a short one, for
clearly our course was to lie by at the first lonely tavern we could
find. So, they plied their oars once more, and I looked out for
anything like a house. Thus we held on, speaking little, for four or
five dull miles. It was very cold, and, a collier coming by us, with
her galley-fire smoking and flaring, looked like a comfortable home.
The night was as dark by this time as it would be until morning; and
what light we had, seemed to come more from the river than the sky, as
the oars in their dipping struck at a few reflected stars.
At this dismal time we were evidently all possessed by the idea that we
were followed. As the tide made, it flapped heavily at irregular
intervals against the shore; and whenever such a sound came, one or
other of us was sure to start, and look in that direction. Here and
there, the set of the current had worn down the bank into a little
creek, and we were all suspicious of such places, and eyed them
nervously. Sometimes, “What was that ripple?” one of us would say in a
low voice. Or another, “Is that a boat yonder?” And afterwards we would
fall into a dead silence, and I would sit impatiently thinking with
what an unusual amount of noise the oars worked in the thowels.
At length we descried a light and a roof, and presently afterwards ran
alongside a little causeway made of stones that had been picked up hard
by. Leaving the rest in the boat, I stepped ashore, and found the light
to be in a window of a public-house. It was a dirty place enough, and I
dare say not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good
fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various
liquors to drink. Also, there were two double-bedded rooms,—“such as
they were,” the landlord said. No other company was in the house than
the landlord, his wife, and a grizzled male creature, the “Jack” of the
little causeway, who was as slimy and smeary as if he had been
low-water mark too.
With this assistant, I went down to the boat again, and we all came
ashore, and brought out the oars, and rudder and boat-hook, and all
else, and hauled her up for the night. We made a very good meal by the
kitchen fire, and then apportioned the bedrooms: Herbert and Startop
were to occupy one; I and our charge the other. We found the air as
carefully excluded from both, as if air were fatal to life; and there
were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the beds than I should have
thought the family possessed. But we considered ourselves well off,
notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not have found.
While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the
Jack—who was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of shoes
on, which he had exhibited while we were eating our eggs and bacon, as
interesting relics that he had taken a few days ago from the feet of a
drowned seaman washed ashore—asked me if we had seen a four-oared
galley going up with the tide? When I told him No, he said she must
have gone down then, and yet she “took up too,” when she left there.