Part 4

Stephen answered him without petulance this time. "John, old man--for God's sake, see it through ... we _must_ get on, and I can't do it without you.... I'm awfully sorry.... It's got to be done...." The appeal in his voice succeeded as an irritable outburst could not have done.

John Egerton braced himself again. In his own mind he recognized the practical wisdom of using the boat. He said with a great weariness, "Come on then."

It was a long and difficult business getting that body into the boat. A flight of wooden steps led down from the wall to the water, and from there the boat--a small motor-boat, half-dinghy, half-canoe--had to be hauled in with a boathook for Stephen to step acrobatically into her and unfasten the moorings. Then she had to be paddled close up under the wall and fastened lightly to the steps. While Stephen was doing this a tug swished by, with a black string of barges clinging clumsily astern. The red eye of her port-light glared banefully across the water. John felt that the man in that tug must guess infallibly what work he was at. A solitary lantern in the stern of the sternmost barge flickered about the single figure standing at the tiller. He could see the face of the man, turned unmistakably towards him.

She was travelling fast, and Stephen cursed as her wash took hold of his little boat and tossed her up and banged her against the wall and the rickety steps. John, leaning anxiously over, could hear his muttered execrations as he fended her off.

Then there was a hot, whispered argument--on the best way of getting the body down, Stephen standing swaying in the boat, with his face upturned, like some ridiculous moonlight lover, John flinging down assertions and reasonings in a forced whisper which broke now and then into a harsh undertone. Stephen thought it should be carted down the steps. John, with an aching objection to further prolonged contact with the thing, said it should be lowered with a rope. "Haven't you a bit of rope?" he reiterated--"a bit of rope--much the best."

Sick of argument, Stephen fumbled with wild mutterings in his locker, and brought out in a muddle of oil-cans and tools a length of stout cord. Together they made a rough bight about Emily's middle, together lifted her to the flat stone parapet of the wall.

When she was there a dog barked suspiciously in Hammerton Terrace; another echoed him along The Chase. The two men crouched against the wall in a tense and ridiculous agitation.

Through all these emergencies and arguments and muffled objurgations there stirred in John's mind ironical recollections of passages in detective stories, where dead bodies were constantly being transported with facility and dispatch in any desired direction. It seemed so easy in the books, it was so damnably difficult in practice--or so they were finding it.

And always there was the menace of Margery's return; she must be back soon, she would certainly come out into the garden on a night like this....

When they had the body stretched flat and ready on the wall, Stephen went back into the boat. It had sidled down below the steps, and had to be hauled back. The tide was maddeningly strong. Stephen urged the boat with imprecations under the wall. To keep it there he must hold on stoutly with a boathook, and could give little help to John in the detested task of lowering the sack. John's hands were clammy with sweat like the hands of a gross man. He gripped the rope with a desperate energy and thrust Emily gently over the side. The rope dragged and scraped across the parapet; the body swayed in the moonlight with a preposterous see-saw motion. When it was half-way to the water, they heard a tug puffing rhythmically towards them--somewhere beyond the Island. It was not yet in sight, but a resistless unreasoning panic immediately invaded them. Stephen, with one free hand, clawed recklessly at an edge of sacking; John, in a furious effort to quicken the descent of Emily, lost altogether his control of the rope. The rope slipped swiftly through his moist and impotent palms. Emily, with an intimidating bump and a wooden clatter of sculls, fell ponderously into the boat and lay sprawled across the gunwale. A sibilant "Damned fool!" slid up the wall from Stephen, almost overbalanced by the sudden descent of the body. The two men waited with an elaborate assumption of innocence while the tug fussed past, their hearts pounding absurdly. Then, before the wash had come, John Egerton stepped gingerly down the creaking steps, and they pushed out into the rolling reflection of the moon. The nose of the boat lifted steeply on the oily swell of the tug's wash, and the head of Emily slipped down with a thump over the thwart, her feet still projecting obliquely over the side; John Egerton pulled them in. He looked back with a new disquiet at the still and silvery houses of Hammerton Terrace, at the dim shrubberies along The Chase. There were lights in some of the houses. Out there under the public moon he felt very visible and suspect--a naked feeling.

He heard a remote mutter from Stephen, paddling in the bows: "Too many of these damned tugs!" and another: "This filthy _moon_!" They were working slowly against the tide between the Island and the mainland of The Chase. Stephen's plan was to round the top of the Island, cross the river, and get rid of Emily in the shadows of the other side, drifting down with the tide.

Even in the narrow channel by the bank the tide was exasperating, and paddling the boat, heavy with the engine, was slow work and strenuous. But the engine would be too noisy. And it was an uncertain starter.

Stephen said at last, "Hell! get out the sculls!"

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."

A yellow face lifted slowly. "What is it?"

"There was some one watching on the Bridge ... two men."

Stephen sighed with a profound weariness.

"It can't be helped," he said.

A dreadful paralysis seemed to have succeeded the heavy strain. He looked as the men used to look after a long spell in the line, sitting at last in a dingy billet--played out.

John Egerton took the sculls and turned the boat round. The boat moved stiffly, with a steady gurgle at the bows; the noiseless tide swung violently by; the oars creaked complainingly.

"This _tide_ ..." muttered John.

Stephen Byrne raised his head. "The tide's going out," he said stupidly.

IV

Margery Byrne walked home very happily from the Underground Station at Stamford Brook, The ticket collector uttered a reverent "Good night, mum"; the policeman at the corner of St. Peter's Square brightened suddenly at her and saluted with the imperishable manner of past military service. The world was very kind and friendly, she felt. But that was the usual manner of the world to Margery Byrne. The world invariably looked at her as it passed her in the street. The male world invariably looked again. The mannerless male world usually looked back. The shameless male world stared at her in Tubes and manoeuvred obviously for commanding positions. But that part of the world, having secured its positions, was generally either disappointed or abashed. There was an aspect of fragility and virtue about her which stirred in the bold and shameless male the almost atrophied instincts of chivalry and protection. After a little they ceased to stare, but opened doors for her with a conscious knighthood. There are women who make a man feel evil at the sight of them. Margery made a man feel good.

But this aspect of fragility was without any suggestion of feebleness. It was just that she was slight and fair, and her face small and her features intensely delicate and refined. She had a rarefied look--as if all flaws and imperfections and superfluities had been somehow chemically removed, leaving only the essential stamina and grace. For she had stamina. She walked with an easy un-urban swing, and she could walk a long way. Her lips were little and slightly anæmic, but firm. There was an evident will in the determined and perfectly proportioned chin. The nose was small but admirably straight and set very close above the mouth. Only her large blue eyes seemed a little out of proportion, but these suggested a warm sympathy which the smallness of her features might otherwise have concealed. Her head, balanced attractively on straight white shoulders, was covered gloriously, if a little thinly, with hair of a light gold, an indescribable tint not often encountered outside the world of books. But such, in fact, was Margery's hair. Her skin also was of a colour and texture not to be painted in words--it had that indefinable quality for which there has been discovered no better name than transparent. And this pale, almost colourless quality of complexion completed the effect of fragility, of physical refinement.

It was still and sultry in St. Peter's Square. The old moon hung above the church and lit up the ridiculous stone eagles on the decayed and pompous houses on Margery's right. "Like lecterns," she thought, for the thousandth time.

The houses were square and semi-detached, two in one; a life-size eagle perched over every porch, its neck screwed tragically towards its sister-eagle craning sympathetically on the neighbouring porch, seeking apparently for ever a never-to-be-attained communion. What sort of people lived there, Margery wondered, and why? So far from town and no view of the river, no special attraction. The people of The Chase always wondered in this way as they walked through St. Peter's Square. The problems of who lived in it and why were permanently insoluble since nobody who lived in The Chase knew anybody who lived in the Square. They knew each other, and that was enough. They knew it was worth while travelling a long way if you lived in The Chase, because of the river, the views, the openness, and the fine old rambling, rickety houses. But why should any one live in an inland square with eagles over the front doors?

Margery did not know. And she had other things to think of. Tomorrow she must speak seriously to Emily. Emily, like all these young women, had started excellently, but was becoming slack. And impertinent, sometimes. But one must be careful. Just now was not the time to frighten her away. Then Trueman's man was coming for the curtains in the morning; they must be got ready. And there was a mountain of needlework to be done. And she must run through Stephen's clothes again--before she was too ill for it. Only a month more now, perhaps less. That was a blessing. She was not frightened this time--not like the first time, with little Joan--that _had_ been rather terrifying--not knowing quite what it was like. But it was a long, interminable business; for such ages, it seemed, you had to "be careful," not play tennis, or go out to dinner just when you wanted to. You felt a fool sometimes, inventing reasons for not doing things, when of course there was only one reason. And so ugly--especially in London ... going about in shops ... and Tubes.

Never mind. It was worth it. And afterwards....

Margery cast her mind deliciously forward to that "afterwards." They would all go away somewhere, her dear Stephen and Joan and a new and adorable little Stephen. She was determined that it should be a boy this time. That was what Stephen wanted, and what he wanted, within reason, he should have. He deserved it, the dear man. Really, he was becoming an amazingly perfect husband. Becoming, yes--for just at first he had been difficult. But that was during the war; they had seen so little of each other--and he was always worried, overworked. But now they had really "settled down," the horrid war was done with, and he had been too wonderfully delightful and nice to her. Lately especially. Much more considerate and helpful and--and, yes, demonstrative. She felt more sure of him. She was appalled, sometimes, to think how essential he was to her, how frightfully dependent she had become on the existence of this one man, met quite by chance, or what was called chance, at somebody else's house. If anything should happen now--Even the children would be a poor consolation.

But nothing would happen. He would go on being more and more delicious and successful; she would go on being happy and proud, watching eagerly the maturement of her ambitions for him. Even now she was intensely proud of him--though, of course, it would never do to let him suspect it.

It was an astounding thing, this literary triumph. Secretly, she admitted, she had never had enormous faith in his poetical powers. She had liked his work because it was his. And being the daughter of a mildly literary man, she had developed a serious critical faculty capable of generously appraising any artistic effort of real sincerity and promise. But she had seldom thought of Stephen's poetry in terms of the market, of public favour and material reward. Certainly she had not married him as "a poet" or even "a writer." But that only made his meteoric success more dazzling and delightful. Sometimes it was almost impossible to realize, she found, that this young man she had married was the same Stephen Byrne whose name was everywhere--on the bookstalls, in the publishers' advertisements, in literary articles in any paper you picked up; that all over the country men and women were buying and reading and re-reading and quoting and discussing bits of poetry which _her_ husband had scribbled down on odd bits of paper at her own house. It was astounding. Margery was passing the small houses at the end of the Square, the homes of clerks and shop-people and superior artisans. She glanced at a group of wives, garrulously taking the air at a doorway, and almost pitied them because _their_ husbands' names were never before the public. It seemed awful, now, to be absolutely obscure.

No. She didn't think that really. After all, it was an "extra," this fame. It had nothing to do with her marrying Stephen; it would have nothing to do with her happiness with Stephen. It was a kind of matrimonial windfall. What really mattered was Stephen himself, and Margery herself, and the way in which they fitted together. What, she really--yes, _adored_--there was no other word--was himself, his black hair and his twinkling smile, his laugh and jolliness and funny little ways. And his character. That, of course, was the foundation of it all. A dear and excellent character. Other men, even the best of them, did horrid things sometimes. Stephen, she knew, with all his faults--a little selfish, perhaps--conceited? no, but self-centred, rather--would never do anything mean or degrading or treacherous. She could trust him absolutely. He would certainly never disgrace her as some men did disgrace their wives--women, drink, and so on. "The soul of honour"--that was the phrase.... That, again, was a marvellous piece of fortune, that out of a world of peccant questionable men she should have been allowed to appropriate a man like Stephen, so nearly perfect and secure. No wonder she had this consuming, this frightening sense of adoration, sometimes. But she tried to suppress that. It was dangerous. "Thou shalt not bow down ..."

Margery smiled secretly and turned her latch-key in the lock.

In the hall she noticed immediately Stephen's hat on the peg, and was glad that he was home. She walked through with her letters to the garden, and looked out over the wall. The boat was gone, and she was faintly disappointed. Far down the river she fancied she saw it, a dirty whiteness, and resisted an impulse to call to Stephen. It must be nice on the river tonight. The rabbits rustled stealthily in the corner; a faint unpleasant smell hung about their home. She looked absently at the rabbit Paul, his nose twitching endlessly in the moonlight, and went in to bed.

When she had undressed she leaned for a long time out of the high window looking at the night. Across the river lay the broad reservoirs of the water company, and the first houses were half a mile away; so that from the window on a night like this you looked over seemingly endless stretches of gleaming water; strangers coming there at night-time wondered at the wide spaciousness of this obscure corner of London. You could imagine yourself easily in some Oriental city. Hammersmith and Chiswick and Barnes wore a romantic coat of shadow and silver. The carved reflections of the small trees on the other bank were so nearly like reflected rows of palms. The far-off outline of factories against the sky had the awe and mystery of mosques. In the remote murmur of London traffic there was the note, at once lazy and sinister, treacherous and reposeful, of an Eastern town. And now when no tugs went by and nothing stirred, the silent river, rushing smoothly into the black heart of London, had for Margery something of the sombre majesty of the Nile, hinting at dark unnameable things, passion and death and furtive cruelties, and all that sense of secrecy and crime which clings to the river-side of great cities, the world over.

Margery wondered idly how much of all that talk about the Thames was true; whether horrible things were still done secretly beside her beloved river, hidden and condoned by the river, carried away to the sea.... Down in the docks, no doubt.... Wapping and so on.

The prosaic thumping of a tug broke the spell of Margery's imagination. She looked up and down for Stephen's boat, a faint crossness in her mind because of his lateness. She got into bed. She was sleepy, but she would read and doze a little till he came in.

She woke first drowsily to the hollow sound of oars clattering in a boat, a murmur of low voices and subdued splashings ... Stephen mooring the boat ... how late he was.

A long while afterwards, it seemed, she woke again: Stephen was creaking cautiously up the stairs. She felt that he was peeping at her round the door, murmured sleepily, "How late you are," dimly comprehended his soft excuses ... something about the tide ... caught by the tide ... engine went wrong ... of course ... always did ... raised her head with a vast effort to be kissed ... a very delicate and reverent kiss ... remembered to ask if Cook was back ... mustn't lock the front door ... half heard a deep "Good night, my darling, go to sleep" ... and drifted luxuriously to sleep again, to comfortable dreams of Stephen, dreams of babies ... moonlight ... especial editions ... palm trees and water--peaceful, silvery water.