"To-morrow, then," said Chase. "Meet me at the entrance to Billingsgate Market at half-past eleven. It will take you forty-eight hours with ordinary luck to reach the Dogger Bank. Of course, if there's a fog in the Thames the time will be longer. And I warn you, living is rough on a fish-carrier."
"I don't mind that," said Warrisden, with a smile. He went away with a light heart, and that night wrote a letter to Pamela, telling her of his interview with Mr. Chase. The new road seemed after all likely to prove a smooth one. As he wrote, every now and then a steamboat hooted from the river, and the rain pattered upon his window. He flung it up and looked out. There was no fog to-night, only the rain fell, and fell gently. He prayed that there might be no fog upon the Thames to-morrow.
Mr. Chase, too, heard the rain that night. He sat in his armchair listening to it with a decanter at his elbow half filled with a liquid like brown sherry. At times he poured a little into his glass and drank it slowly, crouching over his fire. Somewhere in the darkness of the North Sea Tony Stretton was hidden. Very likely at this moment he was standing upon the deck of his trawler with his hands upon the spokes of the wheel, and his eyes peering forward through the rain, keeping his long night-watch while the light from the binnacle struck upwards upon the lines of his face. Mr. Chase sat late in a muse. But before he went to bed he locked the decanter and the glass away in a private cupboard, and took the key with him into his bedroom.
CHAPTER XI
[ON THE DOGGER BANK]
The City of Bristol swung out of the huddle of boats off Billingsgate Wharf at one o'clock on the next afternoon. Mr. Chase, who stood upon the quay amongst the porters and white-jacketed salesmen, turned away with an episcopal wave of the hand. Warrisden leaned over the rail of the steamer's bridge, between the captain and the pilot, and shouted a reply. The City of Bristol, fish-cutter of 300 tons, was a boat built for speed, long and narrow, sitting low on the water, with an upstanding forecastle forward, a small saloon in the stern, and a tiny cabin for the captain under the bridge on deck. She sidled out into the fair way and went forward upon her slow, intricate journey to the sea. Below the Tower she took her place in the long, single file of ships winding between the mud banks, and changed it as occasion served; now she edged up by a string of barges, now in a clear broad space she made a spurt and took the lead of a barquantine, which swam in indolence, with bare masts, behind a tug; and at times she stopped altogether, like a carriage blocked in Piccadilly. The screw thrashed the water, ceased, and struck again with a suggestion of petulance at the obstacles which barred the boat's way. Warrisden, too, chafed upon the bridge. A question pressed continually upon his mind--"Would Stretton return?" He had discovered where Stretton was to be found. The tall grey spire of Stepney Church rose from behind an inlet thick with masts, upon the left; he was already on his way to find him. But the critical moment was yet to come. He had still to use his arguments; and as he stood watching the shipping with indifferent eyes the arguments appeared most weak and unpersuasive. Stretton's father was dying, it was true. The son's return was no doubt a natural obligation. But would the natural obligation hold when the father was unnatural? Those months in New York had revealed one quality in Tony Stretton, at all events; he could persist. The very name of the trawler in which he was at work seemed to Warrisden of a bad augury for his success--the Perseverance!
Greenwich, with its hill of grass, slipped behind on the right; at the Albert Docks a huge Peninsular and Oriental steamer, deck towering above deck, swung into the line; the high chimneys of the cement works on the Essex flats began to stand out against the pale grey sky, each one crowned with white smoke like a tuft of wool; the barges, under their big brown sprit-sails, now tacked this way and that across a wider stream; the village of Greenhithe and the white portholes of the Worcester showed upon the right.
"Would Stretton return?" The question revolved in Warrisden's mind as the propeller revolved in the thick brown water. The fortunes of four people hung upon the answer, and no answer could be given until a night, and a day, and another night had passed, until he saw the Blue Fleet tossing far away upon the Dogger Bank. Suppose that the answer were "No!" He imagined Pamela sinking back into lassitude, narrowing to that selfishness which she, no less than he, foresaw; looking on again at the world's show with the lack-lustre indifference of the very old.
At Gravesend the City of Bristol dropped her pilot, a little, white-bearded, wizened man, who all the way down the river, balancing himself upon the top-rail of the bridge, like some nautical Blondin, had run from side to side the while he exchanged greetings with the anchored ships; and just opposite to Tilbury Fort, with its scanty fringe of trees, she ran alongside of a hulk and took in a load of coal.
"We'll go down and have tea while they are loading her," said the captain.