The _Elizabeth_ had a small cabin and no ventilation worth mentioning, and as the atmosphere grew thicker, in self-defence I lit my pipe.

Then I tried again.

'Well, yer see, mister, it's this 'ere way. You wants to buy the barge, and if I says she's all right you buys 'er, and I lose my job; and if I says she ain't all right I gits into trouble with my guvnor.'

'Quite so,' I said, 'but the survey will show whether she is sound or not, and I want to save the expense of having a survey at all if she isn't sound. If I do have her surveyed and she is sound your owner will sell her anyhow. So you may just as well tell me.'

'D'yer mind saying all that over again?' remarked the skipper.

I did so, and the pair helped themselves to gin once more. 'What I says is this,' said the lady, 'this is very fine gin and a very fine barge.'

'Yus, the gin's all right, and so's the barge,' said the skipper, adopting the brilliant formula. 'I can't say fairer'n that, can I?'

The situation was becoming hopeless and my anger was rising, so I said curtly, dropping diplomacy, 'What I want to know is, does she leak, is she sound, what has she been carrying, where has she been trading to?'

"Can't say, mister. This's our first trip in 'er," said the skipper.

"Fine gin and fine barge," repeated the woman.

We fled.

The second barge we visited was a good-looking craft, built for some special work, but she lacked the depth in her hold which we required for our furniture.

The third barge, the _Will Arding_, lay off deep-loaded in the fairway waiting for the tide to berth. The skipper was not on board, but a longsh.o.r.eman in search of a drink gave me a list of public-houses where he might be found.

At the first three public-houses knots of grimy mariners had either just seen George or were expecting him every minute, and if I would wait one of them would find him. At the fourth public-house the same offer was made, and in despair I accepted it.

It required more moral courage than I possessed to wait with thirsty sailors, their mugs ostentatiously empty, without ordering drinks all round; yet, as I expected, the huntsman returned in a few minutes puffing and blowing--which physical distress was instantaneously cured by sixpence--to say that George was nowhere to be found.

With a gambler's throw, I tried one public-house not on my list, and George was not there; but as usual there were those who knew where to find him if the gentleman would wait.

I never met George, and, judging by his friends, I did not want to; though, to be just, he might have been blamelessly at home all this time with his family. And there, as a matter of fact, he very likely was, for I learned later, what everyone else knew and I might have suspected, that he had been paid off, as this was the _Will Arding's_ last trip before being sold.

We wandered back to the waterside and stood gazing at the slimy foresh.o.r.e, the barges and lighters driving up on the muddy tide, the tugs fussing up and down, their bow-waves making the only specks of white in the gloomy scene, the bleak sooty warehouses, and the wharfs with their cranes like long black arms waving against the sky. We were declining rapidly into depression, when I saw emerging from the shadow of the bridge a stackie in charge of a tug.

How clean and dainty she looked, like a fresh country maid marketing in a slum! Her fragrant stack of hay brought to us a whiff of the country whence she had come, and a vision of great stretches of marshland dotted with cattle, and hayricks sheltered behind sea-walls waiting for red-sailed barges to take them away.

The tug slackened speed; the stack-barge was being dropped. She seemed familiar, and as she came nearer I saw her name, the _Annie_. Joe Applegate, the skipper, a trusted friend of ours, was at the wheel.

How pleased I was now that I had spent those fruitless half-hours looking for George!

"Ain't that a fair masterpiece a seein' yaou here, sir!" shouted Joe in good Ess.e.x that raised our spirits like a bar of cheerful music.

"And haow's them little ould booeys?"

He had come with 70 tons of hay for the London County Council horses.

We were doubly glad to look on his honest face when he came on sh.o.r.e and told us that he knew the _Will Arding_ well and had traded to this wharf for years.

"Yes, yes, sir; knaowed her these twenty years. She belongs to a friend of my guvnor's, and were built by 'is father at Sittingbourne, and 'as allus been well kep' up by 'is son. She'd be gettin' on for forty, I reckon, and a course she ain't same as a new barge, but she'll last your lifetime if you're on'y goin' to live in she and goo a pugglin' abaout on her same as summer-time and that. She'll 'ave a cargo of cement aboard naow--90 to 95 tons she mostly carry, and I ain't never heard of 'er spoiling a bag yet. She's got a good const.i.tution, she 'as, but none the more for that yaou can watch she unloaded to-morrer if yaou've a mind to, and ef she suits yaour purpose ave 'er surveyed arterwards."

The Mate asked about her character.

"She ain't never bin in trouble but once, that I knaows on, and then she were run into by a ketch and got three timbers bruk on 'er port bow. No, no, sir; there ain't nawthen agin that little ould thing."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAULING A BARGE TO HER BERTH]

We seemed to be on the right tack at last. Having learned what more we could, we prepared to come to grips with the owner.

CHAPTER VI

"Sail on! nor fear to breast the sea, Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee!"

The owner of the _Will Arding_, whom we met the next day, was a kindly simple man who told us all we needed to know about the vessel. We had prepared ourselves to cope with a coper of the worst kind; but we were soon disarmed, and that not to our detriment. He told us that the barge had just finished her contract, and as, in his opinion, the days of small barges were over, except in good times, he was going to sell her, as she was barely paying her way. He showed us the record of her trips, the cargoes she had carried, the places she had traded to, and the repairs done to her from time to time.

He was so agreeable that the Mate hesitated to ask about her character, but her sense of duty prevailed. One collision, in which she was not to blame, and two fingers off the hand of one of her mates, appeared to be the only blots on an otherwise stainless career.

Joe Applegate had already told us of the collision, though not of the fingers, and I hoped that the Mate would be satisfied. And she was, when she had learned that the fingers had been lost in the least ominous manner in which fingers conceivably could be lost.

Two days later we received a message that the _Will Arding_ had unloaded, and was lying at Greenwich ready for us to examine her.

A more gloomy February day for our visit could hardly have been; the wind was light and easterly, and a cold drizzle fell through the fog.

The damp, however, did not touch our spirits. Even our bodies were warmed by excitement. The owner met us in his yard, and we tried to a.s.sume an indifference which probably did not deceive him.

The tide had ebbed some way, leaving the gravelly foresh.o.r.e covered with black slime, and there, half afloat, half resting on the ground, and gently rocking to the wash of a pa.s.sing tug, lay the _Will Arding_, with a slight cant outwards. Her annual overhaul was due in a month, the owner told us, thus explaining the condition of her paint and tar. She had been sailed to Greenwich by odd hands who had not even troubled to wash her down. Certainly she was looking her worst, but the eye of faith already saw the splendours of her resurrection.

As we went on board, the owner told us he had given instructions for one of the plugs to be lifted and water let in. The water was mixed with creosote to sweeten the bilge. It was as well that he told us this, for what we saw when we descended into the hold might have daunted Caesar. Some of the hatches were left on, and under these we took cover from the rain in the long dirty hold. She was still rocking slightly, and on the lee side black bilge water was slopping disconsolately backwards and forwards across the floor. A strong smell of creosote and smells of cement and other cargoes scarcely to be determined competed for recognition in our nostrils. The _Will Arding_ seemed to have come down in the world; and this was the fact, for lately she had been sailed by men who can always be hired in the open market, but who do not look after their barges as the better cla.s.s of skippers do. The best skippers had all taken up with the more modern cla.s.s of large barges. The barges we had known in the country had always been scrupulously clean and tidy below. It was perhaps fortunate that our experience in the gin-drinker's cabin had revealed to us another world, and thus in some sense deadened the shock of what we saw now.

We pa.s.sed to the cabin aft, and one glance told us that the grimy mariners of the public-houses had truly been the friends of the late skipper George. To say that the cabin was dirty and stuffy is to say nothing. Even the paint was greasy, and a stale smell, indescribable but unforgettable, hung in the air. George and his mate had left their bedding, presumably as not worth taking away. No doubt they were right.

Some old clothes, a half-empty tin of condensed milk, stale mustard in an egg-cup, some kind of grease in a frying-pan, two mugs with the dregs of beer in them, lay about; and on the floor there were broken boots and old socks.

Returning to the hold, we took all the measurements necessary for our present purpose. We found that though the _Will Arding_ had not as much headroom under her decks as we should have liked, she had enough for our piano, which was the tallest piece of furniture we intended to have on board. Moreover, we knew that barges of that size seldom have more headroom.

Still undepressed, if sobered by the prospect of the work to be done before we could possibly live on board, we went on sh.o.r.e to discuss the price with the owner. It was a most unpolemical discussion, and ended in my undertaking to buy the _Will Arding_ for 140 subject to the surveyor's report. We agreed upon a surveyor, and the owner gave orders for the vessel to be put on the blocks at the next tide.

From this time forward the owner was unreservedly our friend, and we dreaded lest our prize should be s.n.a.t.c.hed from us at the last moment by the untoward judgment of the surveyor. The owner fortified our courage by a.s.suring us he had done all the annual overhauls and repairs for many years, and therefore it was hardly possible that the survey would reveal anything that could not easily be put right.

Whatever the surveyor suggested he would do, whether we bought the barge or not.

We could only await the surveyor's report as patiently as might be, and having bade the owner good-bye, we took one more look at the _Will Arding_ with I hardly know what thoughts in our minds. She had canted over still further, and looked more dingy than ever in the growing dusk as she sat in a foreground of slime. Behind her on the wonderful old river, now hurrying its fastest seawards in muddy eddies, two of her sisters, their sails just drawing, glided noiselessly past and were received into the enveloping gloom, where the drizzle shut in the horizon and sky and water met indistinguishably.

Then we returned to London.

At last--as it seemed, though it was only three days later--the surveyor's report arrived. All was well with the _Will Arding_, and she was, in the surveyor's private opinion, worth all the money we were giving for her. The only defects worth speaking of were a sprung topmast and three damaged ribs forward, but these had been strengthened by 'floating' ribs alongside.

We hurried to Greenwich and paid a deposit on the price.