"How far?" signalled Hughie"s lips.
"Length--and--a--half," replied c.o.x. "Less," he added, peering ahead.
They were half-way up the Long Reach now. In another minute or two they would be at the Railway Bridge, beyond which hard-pressed boats are popularly supposed to be safe.
"Tell "em--going--quicken," gurgled Hughie, "if can."
c.o.x nodded, rather doubtfully, and Hughie ground his teeth. If only this accursed noise on the bank would cease, even for five seconds, Dishy would get a chance to make the crew hear. As it was, the ever-increasing crowd, rolling up fresh adherents like a s...o...b..ll, made that feat almost an impossibility.
But the c.o.xswain was a man of experience and resource. Just as the boat pa.s.sed under the Railway Bridge itself there was a momentary silence, for the crew were shut off from their supporters by some intervening balks of timber. Dishy seized the opportunity.
"Be ready to quicken," he yelled. "Now! Oh, well done!"
The crew had heard him, and what was more, they had obeyed him. Stroke in the All Saints boat suddenly realised that the oncoming foe had quickened to thirty-five or six, and that the interval between the two boats had shrunk to something under a length. He spurted in his turn, and his men spurted with him, but their length of stroke grew proportionately shorter, and the pace of the boat did not increase. St.
Benedict"s were holding their advantage.
"Half a length," said Dishy, in response to an agonised interrogation from Hughie"s right eyebrow.
Suddenly above the tumult there rang out two reverberating revolver-shots. A stout clergyman, whooping like a Choctaw, was tearing along the right bank of the river, which was practically clear of spectators, with his weapon smoking in his hand. Dishy"s voice rose to a scream.
"Look out--be ready! _Only_ six feet!"
And now the musical gentleman who was rowing bow felt the boat lift unsteadily under him. A wave rolled across the canvas decking behind him, and he felt a splash of water on his back.
"Washing us off!" was his comment. "Glory, glory! Another verse"ll do it. Now then, all together,--
"_What though the spicy breezes Blow soft, o"er Ceylon"s--_"
Bang! bang! bang! bang!
The great service revolver rang out. The nose of the Benedictine boat, half submerged in a boiling flood, suddenly sprang to within three feet of the All Saints rudder.
"_Now_, you men!" Mr. Dishart-Watson"s wizened and saturnine countenance shrank suddenly and alarmingly to a mere rim surrounding his mouth.
"Just _ten_ more! _One--two--_"
Like St. Francis of a.s.sisi, "Of all his body he made a tongue." He counted the strokes in tones that overtopped all the roars of encouragement and apprehension arising from the now hopelessly mixed-up mob of Benedictine and All Saints men that raged alongside. Hughie Marrable quickened and quickened, and his crew responded st.u.r.dily.
Faster and faster grew the stroke, and more and more pertinaciously did the nose of the Benedictine boat plough its way through the turbid waves emitted by the twitching rudder in front. Never had they travelled like this. Six was rowing like a man possessed. Four had ceased to encourage himself, and was plugging automatically with his chest open and his eyes shut. Bow may or may not have been singing: he was certainly rowing.
There was a world of rolling and splashing, for the All Saints c.o.xswain was manipulating his rudder very skilfully, and ever and again the aggressive nose of the Benedictine boat was sent staggering back by a rolling buffeting wave. But there was no stopping the Benedictines.
Suddenly Dishy gave vent to a final cataclysmic bellow.
"You"re overlapping!"
They were almost at Charon"s Grind. The c.o.xswain"s lank body stiffened in its little seat, and Hughie saw him lean hard over and haul on to the right-hand rudder-line.
"Last three strokes! Now, you devils! _Plug! plug!
pl_--Aa--a--ee--ooh--ee--easy all! Oh, well rowed, well rowed, well rowed!"
There was a lurch and a b.u.mp.
"Done it!--"_Bows down to wood and stone_,"" gasped Bow.
The eight men let go their oars and tumbled forward on to their stretchers, and listened, with their heads and hearts bursting, to the din that raged on the bank.
It was a fine confused moment.
In the boat itself c.o.x was vainly endeavouring to shake hands with Stroke, who lay doubled up over his oar, with his head right down on the bottom of the boat, oblivious to everything save the blessed fact that he need not row any more. Consciousness that he had taken his crew to the Head of the River was yet to come. At the other end Bow, with his head clasped between his knees, was croaking half-hysterically to himself, "Two bars too soon, Hughie! Oh, my aunt, we"ve gone Head! Two bars too soon!"
On the towpath every one was shouting and shaking hands with indiscriminate _bonhomie_,--this was one of those occasions upon which even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer,--and everybody, with one exception, seemed to be ringing a bell or blowing a trumpet.
The exception was supplied by a trio of young gentlemen, two of whom held an enormous Chinese gong suspended between them, while a third smote the same unceasingly with a mallet, and cried aloud the name of Marrable. It must be recorded here, to his honour, that the smiter bore upon his forehead an enormous and highly coloured bruise, suggestive of sudden contact with, say, a bedroom-door.
On the opposite bank of the river, a stout, middle-aged, and apparently demented Clerk in Holy Orders was dancing the Cachuca.
BOOK TWO
_FORt.i.tER IN RE_
CHAPTER VI
KNIGHT-ERRANTRY _a LA MODE_
If all good Americans go to Paris when they die, it may safely be predicted that all the bad ones will be booked through to Coney Island.
So much may be inferred from the regularity and zeal with which the Toughs, Hoboes, Bowery Boys, and other fearful wildfowl of the New York proletariat, accompanied by the corresponding females of the species, betake themselves every Sabbath by trolley-car or steamer to this haunt of ancient peace (which, by the way, is not to all appearances an island and harbours no conies).
Take Margate and Douglas and Blackpool, and pile them into an untidy heap; throw in a dozen Fun-Cities from Olympia and half a score of World"s Fairs from the Agricultural Hall; add some of the less reputable features of Earl"s Court and Neuilly Fair; include a race-course of the baser sort; case the whole in wood, and people it with sallow gentlemen in striped jerseys and ladies answering exclusively to such names as Hattie, Sadie, and Mamie, reared up apparently upon an exclusive diet of peanuts and clam-chowder; keep the whole mult.i.tude duly controlled and disciplined by a police force which, if appearances go for anything, has been recruited entirely from the criminal cla.s.ses; and you will be able faintly to realise what Coney Island can do when it tries on a fine Sunday in summer.
So thought Hughie Marrable. He had been wandering round the world for nine years now; but not even a previous acquaintance with the Devil Dancers of Ceylon, the unhallowed revels of Port Said, or the refinements of a Central African Witch-Hunt (with full tom-tom accompaniment), had quite prepared him for this. Still, it was part and parcel of Life, and Life was what he had left England to see.
He had arrived in New York from San Francisco two days ago. But let it not be imagined that he had been conveyed thither by any Grand-Trunk-Ocean-to-Ocean-Limited, or other refinement of an effete modernity. His transcontinental journey had occupied just three years.
Since the day on which he steamed through the Golden Gate on a tramp-freighter from Yokohama he had been working his way eastward by easy stages, acquiring experience (as Jimmy Marrable had directed) of the manner in which the other half of the world lives. Incidentally he had mixed c.o.c.ktails behind a Nevada bar; learned to fire a revolver without taking it out of his pocket; accompanied a freight train over the Rockies in the capacity of a.s.sistant brakeman--his duties being chiefly confined to standing by with a coupling-pin, to discourage the enterprise of those gentlemen of the road who proposed to travel without tickets; and once, in a Southern State, he had been privileged to be present at that enn.o.bling spectacle to which the brightest nation on earth occasionally treats the representatives of an older civilisation--the lynching of a negro.
In a few days Hughie would sail for England, on board the mighty Apulia.
It was not often that he travelled in such ostentatious luxury: the primitive man in him leaned towards something damp and precarious on board a sailing-ship or a collier; but he happened to know that the Apulia intended going for the ocean record this trip; and since the third engineer happened to be a friend of his, Hughie had decided that four-and-a-half days and nights down among the humming turbines and the spirits that controlled them would be cheap at the price of an expensively upholstered state-room many decks above, in which he would leave his baggage and occasionally sleep.
For all that he had cast a regretful eye only that very morning on a battered little tramp-steamer which was loading up with cargo alongside a wharf at Hoboken--due to sail for Europe, so a stevedore told him, in about two days" time.
To-morrow he was to be taken yachting in New York harbour by an old P.
and O. acquaintance, whom he had faithfully "looked up," in accordance with a two-year-old promise, at his city office that morning. In the evening, at the invitation of an American actor to whom he had once been of service in Calcutta, he was to dine at the Lambs" Club,--the New York equivalent of the Garrick and Green Room, with a dash of the Eccentric thrown in,--and the next day he was to pay a flying visit to Atlantic City.
Meanwhile he was putting in a few off-hours at Coney Island. He had watched the islanders bathing, had witnessed a display of highly--not to say epileptically--Animated Pictures, had spent half-an-hour in an open _cafe-chantant_, where a bevy of tired-looking girls in short skirts pranced about with mechanical abandon at the back of the small stage, shouting the chorus of a ditty which a wheezy lady (who looked like the mother of all chorus-girls) was singing at the front; and had declined a pressing invitation from the keeper of an Anatomical Museum to step inside and "have a dollar"s worth for a dime."