The House by the River

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 seesaw motion. When it was halfway 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 oilcans, 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 screwdriver. “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 halfway over, the chunk-chunk of a motorboat 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 motorboat 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