Chapter VI

The skipper’s face looked as if it were made out of rough mahogany insufficiently planed. His nose had been broken in a far-off fight, and had settled crookedly at an angle of forty-five degrees. Has slouching, heavily-built figure and somnolent eyes gave no hint of alertness, and yet no craft on the river escaped his appraising glance.

Hie gave his orders monosyllabically and without any air of authority.

They were only orders because fatalities lay on the other side of them.

Jim’s irritated fighting spirit found infinite repose in a master who made no claims beyond the obvious ones of common sense. He could obey and yet forfeit nothing of his self-respect.

Even the skipper’s bad language, when Jim failed to carry out successfully any of his new duties, was perfunctory and without malice. He could not do much to teach Jim the river lore beyond swearing, because he knew it like the back of his hand and had worked for forty years on a barge.

Everything that was new to Jim had faded into unconsciousness with the skipper.

He had long ago forgotten the reasons for his automatic skill, his rules were perfectly successful, but they were all rules of thumb.

In his bottomless mind there were no visible landmarks. He pushed his way through obstacles as if they were the incidents of dreams. Dangers were no more to him than awkward corners, and the river was the only personality he had definitely studied.

The skipper had very few dealings with his boys beyond seeing that they were fed, and keeping a jaundiced eye upon their carrying out his orders. He looked upon boys in the lump as a kind of tool which is often not where you expect to find it, and continually liable to go wrong. Some boys were more liable than others, and when they were below this shifting standard the skipper got rid of them.

His new boy was different. He was at first more like a half-drowned kitten than a boy. He had been badly handled, and was panicky and sometimes clumsy from fright—but he had none of the ordinary tricks of boys. When he understood his work he did it thoroughly and with method, and he did not fly into mischief the moment it was over.

When they were moored offshore he did not vanish for hours to play with other boys and leave on his skipper the burden of the barge; and finally, he did not tease the skipper’s dog—he made friends with him. The skipper vaguely observed all these things, but the last made the deepest impression upon him.

Cadger had never been known to make friends with a boy before. He instinctively and reasonably disliked them.

Boys had once tied a tin can to his tail and nearly driven him mad.

The skipper had rescued him at a critical moment; released his tail, carried him gently, all trembling and slobbery with panic, into a dark quiet place, given him a drink, a sense of mastership and well-being, and rounded off the affair with a bone. From that moment Cadger had chosen the skipper’s heel as the exact spot in the universe most suitable for a small yellow dog. He was not otherwise ferocious, but he would have disputed with a tiger his right to the skipper’s heel.

At first Cadger looked the other way at Jim’s approach, and stiffened with a curious and unnatural daintiness of step, but Jim passed by him without offence or menace.

No names or surreptitious stones were shied at Cadger by this stranger. His bones were not only left in his favourite corner, but fresh bones were sorted out from dishes and placed before him. He ended by doubting if Jim were a boy at all.

He made up his mind to investigate him more closely. He approached Jim gingerly with the intention of sniffing as he passed him; perhaps he would not quite sniff; something redolent of boy might reach him in time to prevent him from lowering his dignity to this direct approach.

But nothing revealing happened. Jim sat with unblinking eyes, gazing at a green bank.

Cadger decided to sniff. He came still closer. Jim did not turn his head. Cadger sat within reach of his hand, ready to leap away at the faintest threat, but there were no threats. It was a warm day, and by and by his attention relaxed; he slept.

When he woke up Jim’s hand was moving slowly and gratifyingly behind his ear. It was a hard hand, but it knew instinctively how to handle a dog.

It was not bitten; instead, after a momentary pause, a rough tongue touched it, the brief curled tail—a misplaced feature on the part of Cadger’s mother—wagged beneficently. Cadger had recognised a boy.

Cadger was never faithless to the skipper, but he enlarged his world. From henceforth he had another heel to follow, another human eye to watch; and though a man may fail to serve two masters it is well within the powers of a small yellow dog.

There were occasionally awkward moments when Cadger could not get his human beings to herd together nicely; when the skipper went off in one direction and Jim remained obstinately in another, and Cadger would have to make up a frantically conflicting mind as to where his allegiance was most due. But these crises were infrequent, and Cadger surmounted them successfully.

The skipper’s signal for Cadger was a growl. Jim expressed his need by a whistle. Mercifully, they had the sense to avoid making counter demonstrations at the same time. If the skipper growled, Jim withheld his whistle, and if Jim whistled it almost seemed as if the skipper purposely withheld his growl.

Few barges on the river showed less domestic friction.

It was the month of June, and all the life of the earth was new to Jim. He had been born in mean streets full of smoke and dirt, and then shut away in a building as solid and lifeless as a steel safe.

It was incredible to wake in the early mornings to the easy sliding motion of the barge, and to look into a free world brimming over with light.

A buttercup field by the waterside came upon Jim as suddenly as an act of creation, the thick, wet green of the grass loosened to let the light of the flowers through—each cup a glistening yellow world. The elms above the little cups broke in a mist of green parted by sudden breezes, and the sunbeams fell through in shifting showers of gold.

Heavy coral buds and high pink loose strife lined the river banks; the bulrushes whispered incessant secrets; meadow-sweet wound deep down to the water’s edge, spreading its fragrance far and wide.

Blue forget-me-nots burned in ardent patches of colour under cool green reeds, and flat-headed, wide, white cups of water-lilies floated out serenely upon the surface of the stream.

All the boy’s stunned senses were alive and filled themselves with what he saw.

He had been for years like some menaced sea anemone cramped into a perpetual ball. Now at last the menace was removed; and like the sea anemone when it realises that only its own element surrounds it, Jim’s whole being expanded to meet the friendly tide.

He pushed out in all directions, tentatively tasting his freedom.

He had no sense of equilibrium. Everything he fell into astonished him.

He did many clumsy and awkward things, but on the whole no cruel ones. He had a rough common sense which showed an aptitude for dealing with fact, and a strong feeling of compassion which showed a deeper aptitude for dealing with human beings. His errors were the leniently regarded waterside errors of getting drunk and fighting.

Whenever the barge moved near his old home Jim found his shadowed history again—a careless taunt stirred his heart like fire, and he returned to the barge covered with blood and bruises.

His great physical strength made him a dangerous opponent, but he was often set upon by half a dozen boys together.

He met these attacks fiercely and without complaints, and by and by they ceased. But not the memory of being attacked.

Farther down the river the world knew nothing of Jim, but he did not take advantage of their ignorance. He was morose to strangers. It seemed to Jim that human justice did not know when to stop. It invented punishments that had no relation to crimes, and when they were over it was dissatisfied with its own inventions and forgot to ratify them by forgiveness. Jim would not make friends with people who, if they knew his history, would look askance at him.

He took the edges of crowds and listened without comment to the fiery talk of public houses.

His head was a jumble of ideas and instincts; he was like a prisoner from an underground dungeon who, when he comes out into the day, stumbles and is drunk with light.

He caught at socialism raw, and thirsted for revolution.

The wrongs of the world were as plain to Jim as the strength of his hands, and he felt there should be a direct correspondence between the two. He saw the gaps in human mercy and he wanted to be used to stop them.

But though his mind was full of hard and angry questions, his sensations were more and more peaceful and normal. The life of the barge and of nature beat down his inward ferocity. Something strangely like a sense of happiness pervaded him.

The badinage of river-craft is very infectious, and though Jim never laughed aloud, the spirit of laughter touched him. He developed a power of repartee, egged on by the skipper. His heavy mouth took an ironic twist, his hard eyes lit with occasional sparks of laughter and friendliness. They were an astonishing pair of eyes, dark-blue and very open, and they gazed out upon the world and man searchingly and without surrender.

Jim’s world was narrow but it was deep. He loved his parson with reverence, his skipper with indulgence, Cadger with protective companionableness.

He had no Sunday clothes, but he had a cap with a brim and a cap without, and when he went to see Arthur Atkinson he wore the cap with a brim.

Jim put the skipper to bed when he was drunk, and he caught water-rats on the river banks with Cadger every Sunday. His outer life was complete, but something else soon began to stir in him.

He found his inner life again, the life he had had in his early childhood, behind the blind efficiency of his fists; but it was deeper now and more unquiet. Jim was not sure what he wanted; it was not the girls upon the river banks, though they came into his dreams and confused his mind with new sensations. He had not the courage to make a directer approach to them than dreams—he was afraid they might taunt him with being a murderer, and he could not knock them down if they did.

Besides, he was proud and had no money—almost all the girls he could think of expected glasses of beer or ices. Jim was too young to be indiscriminate, and lovely girls in muslin frocks despised boys without Sunday clothes. His dreams went farther than his instincts.

It was six o’clock and the sunlight lay faint and pink upon the silvery dew-drenched fields.

Jim left the barge and strolled down the towing-path under the shifting sunbeams. His eyes rested vaguely on a weeping-willow across the stream, when something splendid and vivid, which made him hold his breath for an instant, darted out upon the river.

He could not see plainly what it was. It passed in a flash, but he saw that it had wings, and was blue.

It was like watching a sapphire tossed from bank to bank in the sun; only this creature was more alive and more entrancing than any jewel.

For a long time Jim never moved. His stirred senses settled slowly over the vision.

Public houses and curses, water-rats and riverside baths, were not disturbed by his vision, but they were less real to Jim afterward than the blue wing of a bird.

They belonged to the order of things he knew and could deal with; but beauty stood for the world he did not know—and craved with all the force of his being to master and to understand.