4 <link rel="stylesheet" href="../resources/css/base.css" />
9 <p>For a long time after the course of the steamer <em>Sofala</em> had been
10 altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance
11 of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sunrays
12 seemed to fall violently upon the calm sea--seemed to shatter themselves
13 upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapor
14 of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady
17 <p>Captain Whalley did not look at it. When his Serang, approaching the
18 roomy cane arm-chair which he filled capably, had informed him in a low
19 voice that the course was to be altered, he had risen at once and had
20 remained on his feet, face forward, while the head of his ship swung
21 through a quarter of a circle. He had not uttered a single word, not
22 even the word to steady the helm. It was the Serang, an elderly, alert,
23 little Malay, with a very dark skin, who murmured the order to the
24 helmsman. And then slowly Captain Whalley sat down again in the
25 arm-chair on the bridge and fixed his eyes on the deck between his feet.</p>
27 <p>He could not hope to see anything new upon this lane of the sea. He had
28 been on these coasts for the last three years. From Low Cape to Malantan
29 the distance was fifty miles, six hours' steaming for the old ship with
30 the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and
31 by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with
32 their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of
33 the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber
34 strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with
35 it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures--the brimful
36 estuary of a river. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water
37 and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts
38 black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way
39 up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or
40 more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever
41 thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages.
42 The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had
43 not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful
44 Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the
45 captain's watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for
46 the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her
47 courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to
48 take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and
49 steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing, and
50 almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on
51 the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by
52 reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was--the precise
53 spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster's
54 round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its
55 people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross
56 over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East.
57 Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps
58 the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the
59 middle, or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with her mat sails
60 flitting by silently--and the low land on the other side in sight
61 at daylight. At noon the three palms of the next place of call, up a
62 sluggish river. The only white man residing there was a retired young
63 sailor, with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages.
64 Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call, a deep bay with
65 only a couple of houses on the beach. And so on, in and out, picking
66 up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles'
67 steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago of small islands up
68 to a large native town at the end of the beat. There was a three days'
69 rest for the old ship before he started her again in inverse order,
70 seeing the same shores from another bearing, hearing the same voices
71 in the same places, back again to the Sofala's port of registry on
72 the great highway to the East, where he would take up a berth nearly
73 opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to
74 start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a very
75 enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise
76 Dare-devil Harry--Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day.
77 No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms,
78 who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who
79 had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new
80 trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas,
81 and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea, and
82 forty out in the East ("a pretty thorough apprenticeship," he used
83 to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of
84 shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to
85 where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas.
86 His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the
87 Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a
88 Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the
89 celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and
90 crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as
91 it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time
92 neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the
93 officers of her Majesty's steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a
94 survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the
95 enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone
96 who cares may see, the "General Directory," vol. ii. p. 410, begins the
97 description of the "Malotu or Whalley Passage" with the words: "This
98 advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the
99 ship Condor," &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels
100 leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to
103 <p>This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing could rob him
104 of this kind of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the
105 breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new
106 men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas
107 and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant
108 nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.</p>
110 <p>In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his
111 employers' money and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law
112 a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners,
113 charterers, and underwriters. He had never lost a ship or consented to
114 a shady transaction; and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the
115 conditions that had gone to the making of his name. He had buried his
116 wife (in the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to the man
117 of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than an ample competence in the
118 crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose
119 downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake. And he was sixty-five
122 <p>His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed.
123 He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking
124 Corporation. Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert as
125 his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had
126 themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference
127 between him and them was that he had lost his all. And yet not his all.
128 There had remained to him from his lost fortune a very pretty little
129 bark, Fair Maid, which he had bought to occupy his leisure of a retired
130 sailor--"to play with," as he expressed it himself.</p>
132 <p>He had formally declared himself tired of the sea the year preceding his
133 daughter's marriage. But after the young couple had gone to settle in
134 Melbourne he found out that he could not make himself happy on shore. He
135 was too much of a merchant sea-captain for mere yachting to satisfy him.
136 He wanted the illusion of affairs; and his acquisition of the Fair
137 Maid preserved the continuity of his life. He introduced her to his
138 acquaintances in various ports as "my last command." When he grew too
139 old to be trusted with a ship, he would lay her up and go ashore to be
140 buried, leaving directions in his will to have the bark towed out and
141 scuttled decently in deep water on the day of the funeral. His daughter
142 would not grudge him the satisfaction of knowing that no stranger would
143 handle his last command after him. With the fortune he was able to leave
144 her, the value of a 500-ton bark was neither here nor there. All this
145 would be said with a jocular twinkle in his eye: the vigorous old man
146 had too much vitality for the sentimentalism of regret; and a little
147 wistfully withal, because he was at home in life, taking a genuine
148 pleasure in its feelings and its possessions; in the dignity of his
149 reputation and his wealth, in his love for his daughter, and in his
150 satisfaction with the ship--the plaything of his lonely leisure.</p>
152 <p>He had the cabin arranged in accordance with his simple ideal of comfort
153 at sea. A big bookcase (he was a great reader) occupied one side of his
154 stateroom; the portrait of his late wife, a flat bituminous oil-painting
155 representing the profile and one long black ringlet of a young woman,
156 faced his bed-place. Three chronometers ticked him to sleep and greeted
157 him on waking with the tiny competition of their beats. He rose at five
158 every day. The officer of the morning watch, drinking his early cup
159 of coffee aft by the wheel, would hear through the wide orifice of the
160 copper ventilators all the splashings, blowings, and splutterings of
161 his captain's toilet. These noises would be followed by a sustained
162 deep murmur of the Lord's Prayer recited in a loud earnest voice. Five
163 minutes afterwards the head and shoulders of Captain Whalley emerged
164 out of the companion-hatchway. Invariably he paused for a while on the
165 stairs, looking all round at the horizon; upwards at the trim of the
166 sails; inhaling deep draughts of the fresh air. Only then he would step
167 out on the poop, acknowledging the hand raised to the peak of the cap
168 with a majestic and benign "Good morning to you." He walked the deck
169 till eight scrupulously. Sometimes, not above twice a year, he had to
170 use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip--a
171 slight touch of rheumatism, he supposed. Otherwise he knew nothing of
172 the ills of the flesh. At the ringing of the breakfast bell he went
173 below to feed his canaries, wind up the chronometers, and take the
174 head of the table. From there he had before his eyes the big carbon
175 photographs of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies
176 --his grandchildren--set in black frames into the maplewood bulkheads
177 of the cuddy. After breakfast he dusted the glass over these portraits
178 himself with a cloth, and brushed the oil painting of his wife with a
179 plumate kept suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the heavy
180 gold frame. Then with the door of his stateroom shut, he would sit down
181 on the couch under the portrait to read a chapter out of a thick pocket
182 Bible--her Bible. But on some days he only sat there for half an hour
183 with his finger between the leaves and the closed book resting on his
184 knees. Perhaps he had remembered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she
187 <p>She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too. It was like an
188 article of faith with him that there never had been, and never could be,
189 a brighter, cheerier home anywhere afloat or ashore than his home under
190 the poop-deck of the Condor, with the big main cabin all white and gold,
191 garlanded as if for a perpetual festival with an unfading wreath. She
192 had decorated the center of every panel with a cluster of home flowers.
193 It took her a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor of love.
194 To him it had remained a marvel of painting, the highest achievement of
195 taste and skill; and as to old Swinburne, his mate, every time he
196 came down to his meals he stood transfixed with admiration before the
197 progress of the work. You could almost smell these roses, he declared,
198 sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded the
199 saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made him somewhat less hearty
200 than usual in tackling his food. But there was nothing of the sort to
201 interfere with his enjoyment of her singing. "Mrs. Whalley is a regular
202 out-and-out nightingale, sir," he would pronounce with a judicial air
203 after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the
204 piece. In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear
205 her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in
206 the cabin. On the very day they got engaged he had written to London
207 for the instrument; but they had been married for over a year before it
208 reached them, coming out round the Cape. The big case made part of the
209 first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor--an event that to
210 the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as
211 the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of
212 solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its
213 sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the
214 ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read
215 the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his
216 voice. When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him
217 with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten,
218 impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red
219 granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry.
220 He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember
221 much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sailor of the
222 crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child
223 out of one of her black skirts.</p>
225 <p>He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish
226 stream. It will break out and flow over a man's troubles, it will close
227 upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has
228 gone to the bottom. And the world is not bad. People had been very
229 kind to him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior partner
230 in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of the Condor. It was she who
231 volunteered to look after the little one, and in due course took her to
232 England (something of a journey in those days, even by the overland
233 mail route) with her own girls to finish her education. It was ten years
234 before he saw her again.</p>
236 <p>As a little child she had never been frightened of bad weather; she
237 would beg to be taken up on deck in the bosom of his oilskin coat to
238 watch the big seas hurling themselves upon the Condor. The swirl and
239 crash of the waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless
240 delight. "A good boy spoiled," he used to say of her in joke. He had
241 named her Ivy because of the sound of the word, and obscurely fascinated
242 by a vague association of ideas. She had twined herself tightly round
243 his heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as to a
244 tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little, that in the nature
245 of things she would probably elect to cling to someone else. But
246 he loved life well enough for even that event to give him a certain
247 satisfaction, apart from his more intimate feeling of loss.</p>
249 <p>After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his loneliness, he
250 hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for
251 the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home. What made him
252 dissatisfied there was not to see that she clung now to somebody else,
253 but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination "a
254 rather poor stick"--even in the matter of health. He disliked his
255 son-in-law's studied civility perhaps more than his method of
256 handling the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage. But of his
257 apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day of his departure, with
258 the hall-door open already, holding her hands and looking steadily into
259 her eyes, he had said, "You know, my dear, all I have is for you and the
260 chicks. Mind you write to me openly." She had answered him by an almost
261 imperceptible movement of her head. She resembled her mother in
262 the color of her eyes, and in character--and also in this, that she
263 understood him without many words.</p>
265 <p>Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters made Captain
266 Whalley lift his white eye-brows. For the rest he considered he was
267 reaping the true reward of his life by being thus able to produce on
268 demand whatever was needed. He had not enjoyed himself so much in a
269 way since his wife had died. Characteristically enough his son-in-law's
270 punctuality in failure caused him at a distance to feel a sort of
271 kindness towards the man. The fellow was so perpetually being jammed on
272 a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation would be
273 manifestly unfair. No, no! He knew well what that meant. It was bad
274 luck. His own had been simply marvelous, but he had seen in his life too
275 many good men--seamen and others--go under with the sheer weight of bad
276 luck not to recognize the fatal signs. For all that, he was cogitating
277 on the best way of tying up very strictly every penny he had to leave,
278 when, with a preliminary rumble of rumors (whose first sound reached
279 him in Shanghai as it happened), the shock of the big failure came;
280 and, after passing through the phases of stupor, of incredulity, of
281 indignation, he had to accept the fact that he had nothing to speak of
284 <p>Upon that, as if he had only waited for this catastrophe, the unlucky
285 man, away there in Melbourne, gave up his unprofitable game, and sat
286 down--in an invalid's bath-chair at that too. "He will never walk
287 again," wrote the wife. For the first time in his life Captain Whalley
288 was a bit staggered.</p>
290 <p>The Fair Maid had to go to work in bitter earnest now. It was no longer
291 a matter of preserving alive the memory of Dare-devil Harry Whalley in
292 the Eastern Seas, or of keeping an old man in pocket-money and clothes,
293 with, perhaps, a bill for a few hundred first-class cigars thrown in at
294 the end of the year. He would have to buckle-to, and keep her going hard
295 on a scant allowance of gilt for the ginger-bread scrolls at her stem
298 <p>This necessity opened his eyes to the fundamental changes of the world.
299 Of his past only the familiar names remained, here and there, but
300 the things and the men, as he had known them, were gone. The name of
301 Gardner, Patteson, & Co. was still displayed on the walls of warehouses
302 by the waterside, on the brass plates and window-panes in the business
303 quarters of more than one Eastern port, but there was no longer a
304 Gardner or a Patteson in the firm. There was no longer for Captain
305 Whalley an arm-chair and a welcome in the private office, with a bit of
306 business ready to be put in the way of an old friend, for the sake of
307 bygone services. The husbands of the Gardner girls sat behind the desks
308 in that room where, long after he had left the employ, he had kept his
309 right of entrance in the old man's time. Their ships now had yellow
310 funnels with black tops, and a time-table of appointed routes like a
311 confounded service of tramways. The winds of December and June were all
312 one to them; their captains (excellent young men he doubted not) were,
313 to be sure, familiar with Whalley Island, because of late years the
314 Government had established a white fixed light on the north end (with
315 a red danger sector over the Condor Reef), but most of them would have
316 been extremely surprised to hear that a flesh-and-blood Whalley still
317 existed--an old man going about the world trying to pick up a cargo here
318 and there for his little bark.</p>
320 <p>And everywhere it was the same. Departed the men who would have nodded
321 appreciatively at the mention of his name, and would have thought
322 themselves bound in honor to do something for Dare-devil Harry Whalley.
323 Departed the opportunities which he would have known how to seize; and
324 gone with them the white-winged flock of clippers that lived in the
325 boisterous uncertain life of the winds, skimming big fortunes out of
326 the foam of the sea. In a world that pared down the profits to an
327 irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count its disengaged
328 tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean charters were snapped up
329 by cable three months in advance, there were no chances of fortune for
330 an individual wandering haphazard with a little bark--hardly indeed any
333 <p>He found it more difficult from year to year. He suffered greatly from
334 the smallness of remittances he was able to send his daughter. Meantime
335 he had given up good cigars, and even in the matter of inferior cheroots
336 limited himself to six a day. He never told her of his difficulties, and
337 she never enlarged upon her struggle to live. Their confidence in each
338 other needed no explanations, and their perfect understanding endured
339 without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would have been shocked
340 if she had taken it into her head to thank him in so many words, but
341 he found it perfectly natural that she should tell him she needed two
344 <p>He had come in with the Fair Maid in ballast to look for a freight in
345 the Sofala's port of registry, and her letter met him there. Its tenor
346 was that it was no use mincing matters. Her only resource was in opening
347 a boarding-house, for which the prospects, she judged, were good. Good
348 enough, at any rate, to make her tell him frankly that with two hundred
349 pounds she could make a start. He had torn the envelope open, hastily,
350 on deck, where it was handed to him by the ship-chandler's runner, who
351 had brought his mail at the moment of anchoring. For the second time
352 in his life he was appalled, and remained stock-still at the cabin door
353 with the paper trembling between his fingers. Open a boarding-house! Two
354 hundred pounds for a start! The only resource! And he did not know where
355 to lay his hands on two hundred pence.</p>
357 <p>All that night Captain Whalley walked the poop of his anchored ship, as
358 though he had been about to close with the land in thick weather, and
359 uncertain of his position after a run of many gray days without a sight
360 of sun, moon, or stars. The black night twinkled with the guiding lights
361 of seamen and the steady straight lines of lights on shore; and all
362 around the Fair Maid the riding lights of ships cast trembling trails
363 upon the water of the roadstead. Captain Whalley saw not a gleam
364 anywhere till the dawn broke and he found out that his clothing was
365 soaked through with the heavy dew.</p>
367 <p>His ship was awake. He stopped short, stroked his wet beard, and
368 descended the poop ladder backwards, with tired feet. At the sight
369 of him the chief officer, lounging about sleepily on the quarterdeck,
370 remained open-mouthed in the middle of a great early-morning yawn.</p>
372 <p>"Good morning to you," pronounced Captain Whalley solemnly, passing into
373 the cabin. But he checked himself in the doorway, and without looking
374 back, "By the bye," he said, "there should be an empty wooden case put
375 away in the lazarette. It has not been broken up--has it?"</p>
377 <p>The mate shut his mouth, and then asked as if dazed, "What empty case,
380 <p>"A big flat packing-case belonging to that painting in my room. Let it
381 be taken up on deck and tell the carpenter to look it over. I may want
382 to use it before long."</p>
384 <p>The chief officer did not stir a limb till he had heard the door of the
385 captain's state-room slam within the cuddy. Then he beckoned aft the
386 second mate with his forefinger to tell him that there was something "in
389 <p>When the bell rang Captain Whalley's authoritative voice boomed out
390 through a closed door, "Sit down and don't wait for me." And his
391 impressed officers took their places, exchanging looks and whispers
392 across the table. What! No breakfast? And after apparently knocking
393 about all night on deck, too! Clearly, there was something in the wind.
394 In the skylight above their heads, bowed earnestly over the plates,
395 three wire cages rocked and rattled to the restless jumping of the
396 hungry canaries; and they could detect the sounds of their "old
397 man's" deliberate movements within his state-room. Captain Whalley was
398 methodically winding up the chronometers, dusting the portrait of
399 his late wife, getting a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making
400 himself ready in his punctilious unhurried manner to go ashore. He could
401 not have swallowed a single mouthful of food that morning. He had made
402 up his mind to sell the Fair Maid.</p>
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