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11 <h2>THE END OF THE TETHER</h2>
13 <p>By Joseph Conrad</p>
17 <p>For a long time after the course of the steamer <em>Sofala</em> had been
18 altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance
19 of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sunrays
20 seemed to fall violently upon the calm sea--seemed to shatter themselves
21 upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapor
22 of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady
25 <p>Captain Whalley did not look at it. When his Serang, approaching the
26 roomy cane arm-chair which he filled capably, had informed him in a low
27 voice that the course was to be altered, he had risen at once and had
28 remained on his feet, face forward, while the head of his ship swung
29 through a quarter of a circle. He had not uttered a single word, not
30 even the word to steady the helm. It was the Serang, an elderly, alert,
31 little Malay, with a very dark skin, who murmured the order to the
32 helmsman. And then slowly Captain Whalley sat down again in the
33 arm-chair on the bridge and fixed his eyes on the deck between his feet.</p>
35 <p>He could not hope to see anything new upon this lane of the sea. He had
36 been on these coasts for the last three years. From Low Cape to Malantan
37 the distance was fifty miles, six hours' steaming for the old ship with
38 the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and
39 by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with
40 their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of
41 the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber
42 strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with
43 it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures--the brimful
44 estuary of a river. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water
45 and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts
46 black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way
47 up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or
48 more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever
49 thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages.
50 The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had
51 not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful
52 Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the
53 captain's watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for
54 the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her
55 courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to
56 take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and
57 steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing, and
58 almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on
59 the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by
60 reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was--the precise
61 spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster's
62 round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its
63 people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross
64 over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East.
65 Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps
66 the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the
67 middle, or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with her mat sails
68 flitting by silently--and the low land on the other side in sight
69 at daylight. At noon the three palms of the next place of call, up a
70 sluggish river. The only white man residing there was a retired young
71 sailor, with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages.
72 Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call, a deep bay with
73 only a couple of houses on the beach. And so on, in and out, picking
74 up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles'
75 steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago of small islands up
76 to a large native town at the end of the beat. There was a three days'
77 rest for the old ship before he started her again in inverse order,
78 seeing the same shores from another bearing, hearing the same voices
79 in the same places, back again to the Sofala's port of registry on
80 the great highway to the East, where he would take up a berth nearly
81 opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to
82 start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a very
83 enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise
84 Dare-devil Harry--Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day.
85 No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms,
86 who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who
87 had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new
88 trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas,
89 and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea, and
90 forty out in the East ("a pretty thorough apprenticeship," he used
91 to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of
92 shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to
93 where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas.
94 His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the
95 Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a
96 Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the
97 celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and
98 crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as
99 it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time
100 neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the
101 officers of her Majesty's steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a
102 survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the
103 enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone
104 who cares may see, the "General Directory," vol. ii. p. 410, begins the
105 description of the "Malotu or Whalley Passage" with the words: "This
106 advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the
107 ship Condor," &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels
108 leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to
111 <p>This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing could rob him
112 of this kind of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the
113 breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new
114 men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas
115 and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant
116 nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.</p>
118 <p>In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his
119 employers' money and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law
120 a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners,
121 charterers, and underwriters. He had never lost a ship or consented to
122 a shady transaction; and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the
123 conditions that had gone to the making of his name. He had buried his
124 wife (in the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to the man
125 of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than an ample competence in the
126 crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose
127 downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake. And he was sixty-five
132 <p>His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed.
133 He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking
134 Corporation. Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert as
135 his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had
136 themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference
137 between him and them was that he had lost his all. And yet not his all.
138 There had remained to him from his lost fortune a very pretty little
139 bark, Fair Maid, which he had bought to occupy his leisure of a retired
140 sailor--"to play with," as he expressed it himself.</p>
142 <p>He had formally declared himself tired of the sea the year preceding his
143 daughter's marriage. But after the young couple had gone to settle in
144 Melbourne he found out that he could not make himself happy on shore. He
145 was too much of a merchant sea-captain for mere yachting to satisfy him.
146 He wanted the illusion of affairs; and his acquisition of the Fair
147 Maid preserved the continuity of his life. He introduced her to his
148 acquaintances in various ports as "my last command." When he grew too
149 old to be trusted with a ship, he would lay her up and go ashore to be
150 buried, leaving directions in his will to have the bark towed out and
151 scuttled decently in deep water on the day of the funeral. His daughter
152 would not grudge him the satisfaction of knowing that no stranger would
153 handle his last command after him. With the fortune he was able to leave
154 her, the value of a 500-ton bark was neither here nor there. All this
155 would be said with a jocular twinkle in his eye: the vigorous old man
156 had too much vitality for the sentimentalism of regret; and a little
157 wistfully withal, because he was at home in life, taking a genuine
158 pleasure in its feelings and its possessions; in the dignity of his
159 reputation and his wealth, in his love for his daughter, and in his
160 satisfaction with the ship--the plaything of his lonely leisure.</p>
162 <p>He had the cabin arranged in accordance with his simple ideal of comfort
163 at sea. A big bookcase (he was a great reader) occupied one side of his
164 stateroom; the portrait of his late wife, a flat bituminous oil-painting
165 representing the profile and one long black ringlet of a young woman,
166 faced his bed-place. Three chronometers ticked him to sleep and greeted
167 him on waking with the tiny competition of their beats. He rose at five
168 every day. The officer of the morning watch, drinking his early cup
169 of coffee aft by the wheel, would hear through the wide orifice of the
170 copper ventilators all the splashings, blowings, and splutterings of
171 his captain's toilet. These noises would be followed by a sustained
172 deep murmur of the Lord's Prayer recited in a loud earnest voice. Five
173 minutes afterwards the head and shoulders of Captain Whalley emerged
174 out of the companion-hatchway. Invariably he paused for a while on the
175 stairs, looking all round at the horizon; upwards at the trim of the
176 sails; inhaling deep draughts of the fresh air. Only then he would step
177 out on the poop, acknowledging the hand raised to the peak of the cap
178 with a majestic and benign "Good morning to you." He walked the deck
179 till eight scrupulously. Sometimes, not above twice a year, he had to
180 use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip--a
181 slight touch of rheumatism, he supposed. Otherwise he knew nothing of
182 the ills of the flesh. At the ringing of the breakfast bell he went
183 below to feed his canaries, wind up the chronometers, and take the
184 head of the table. From there he had before his eyes the big carbon
185 photographs of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies
186 --his grandchildren--set in black frames into the maplewood bulkheads
187 of the cuddy. After breakfast he dusted the glass over these portraits
188 himself with a cloth, and brushed the oil painting of his wife with a
189 plumate kept suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the heavy
190 gold frame. Then with the door of his stateroom shut, he would sit down
191 on the couch under the portrait to read a chapter out of a thick pocket
192 Bible--her Bible. But on some days he only sat there for half an hour
193 with his finger between the leaves and the closed book resting on his
194 knees. Perhaps he had remembered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she
197 <p>She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too. It was like an
198 article of faith with him that there never had been, and never could be,
199 a brighter, cheerier home anywhere afloat or ashore than his home under
200 the poop-deck of the Condor, with the big main cabin all white and gold,
201 garlanded as if for a perpetual festival with an unfading wreath. She
202 had decorated the center of every panel with a cluster of home flowers.
203 It took her a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor of love.
204 To him it had remained a marvel of painting, the highest achievement of
205 taste and skill; and as to old Swinburne, his mate, every time he
206 came down to his meals he stood transfixed with admiration before the
207 progress of the work. You could almost smell these roses, he declared,
208 sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded the
209 saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made him somewhat less hearty
210 than usual in tackling his food. But there was nothing of the sort to
211 interfere with his enjoyment of her singing. "Mrs. Whalley is a regular
212 out-and-out nightingale, sir," he would pronounce with a judicial air
213 after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the
214 piece. In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear
215 her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in
216 the cabin. On the very day they got engaged he had written to London
217 for the instrument; but they had been married for over a year before it
218 reached them, coming out round the Cape. The big case made part of the
219 first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor--an event that to
220 the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as
221 the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of
222 solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its
223 sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the
224 ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read
225 the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his
226 voice. When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him
227 with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten,
228 impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red
229 granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry.
230 He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember
231 much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sailor of the
232 crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child
233 out of one of her black skirts.</p>
235 <p>He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish
236 stream. It will break out and flow over a man's troubles, it will close
237 upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has
238 gone to the bottom. And the world is not bad. People had been very
239 kind to him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior partner
240 in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of the Condor. It was she who
241 volunteered to look after the little one, and in due course took her to
242 England (something of a journey in those days, even by the overland
243 mail route) with her own girls to finish her education. It was ten years
244 before he saw her again.</p>
246 <p>As a little child she had never been frightened of bad weather; she
247 would beg to be taken up on deck in the bosom of his oilskin coat to
248 watch the big seas hurling themselves upon the Condor. The swirl and
249 crash of the waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless
250 delight. "A good boy spoiled," he used to say of her in joke. He had
251 named her Ivy because of the sound of the word, and obscurely fascinated
252 by a vague association of ideas. She had twined herself tightly round
253 his heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as to a
254 tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little, that in the nature
255 of things she would probably elect to cling to someone else. But
256 he loved life well enough for even that event to give him a certain
257 satisfaction, apart from his more intimate feeling of loss.</p>
259 <p>After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his loneliness, he
260 hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for
261 the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home. What made him
262 dissatisfied there was not to see that she clung now to somebody else,
263 but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination "a
264 rather poor stick"--even in the matter of health. He disliked his
265 son-in-law's studied civility perhaps more than his method of
266 handling the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage. But of his
267 apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day of his departure, with
268 the hall-door open already, holding her hands and looking steadily into
269 her eyes, he had said, "You know, my dear, all I have is for you and the
270 chicks. Mind you write to me openly." She had answered him by an almost
271 imperceptible movement of her head. She resembled her mother in
272 the color of her eyes, and in character--and also in this, that she
273 understood him without many words.</p>
275 <p>Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters made Captain
276 Whalley lift his white eye-brows. For the rest he considered he was
277 reaping the true reward of his life by being thus able to produce on
278 demand whatever was needed. He had not enjoyed himself so much in a
279 way since his wife had died. Characteristically enough his son-in-law's
280 punctuality in failure caused him at a distance to feel a sort of
281 kindness towards the man. The fellow was so perpetually being jammed on
282 a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation would be
283 manifestly unfair. No, no! He knew well what that meant. It was bad
284 luck. His own had been simply marvelous, but he had seen in his life too
285 many good men--seamen and others--go under with the sheer weight of bad
286 luck not to recognize the fatal signs. For all that, he was cogitating
287 on the best way of tying up very strictly every penny he had to leave,
288 when, with a preliminary rumble of rumors (whose first sound reached
289 him in Shanghai as it happened), the shock of the big failure came;
290 and, after passing through the phases of stupor, of incredulity, of
291 indignation, he had to accept the fact that he had nothing to speak of
294 <p>Upon that, as if he had only waited for this catastrophe, the unlucky
295 man, away there in Melbourne, gave up his unprofitable game, and sat
296 down--in an invalid's bath-chair at that too. "He will never walk
297 again," wrote the wife. For the first time in his life Captain Whalley
298 was a bit staggered.</p>
300 <p>The Fair Maid had to go to work in bitter earnest now. It was no longer
301 a matter of preserving alive the memory of Dare-devil Harry Whalley in
302 the Eastern Seas, or of keeping an old man in pocket-money and clothes,
303 with, perhaps, a bill for a few hundred first-class cigars thrown in at
304 the end of the year. He would have to buckle-to, and keep her going hard
305 on a scant allowance of gilt for the ginger-bread scrolls at her stem
308 <p>This necessity opened his eyes to the fundamental changes of the world.
309 Of his past only the familiar names remained, here and there, but
310 the things and the men, as he had known them, were gone. The name of
311 Gardner, Patteson, & Co. was still displayed on the walls of warehouses
312 by the waterside, on the brass plates and window-panes in the business
313 quarters of more than one Eastern port, but there was no longer a
314 Gardner or a Patteson in the firm. There was no longer for Captain
315 Whalley an arm-chair and a welcome in the private office, with a bit of
316 business ready to be put in the way of an old friend, for the sake of
317 bygone services. The husbands of the Gardner girls sat behind the desks
318 in that room where, long after he had left the employ, he had kept his
319 right of entrance in the old man's time. Their ships now had yellow
320 funnels with black tops, and a time-table of appointed routes like a
321 confounded service of tramways. The winds of December and June were all
322 one to them; their captains (excellent young men he doubted not) were,
323 to be sure, familiar with Whalley Island, because of late years the
324 Government had established a white fixed light on the north end (with
325 a red danger sector over the Condor Reef), but most of them would have
326 been extremely surprised to hear that a flesh-and-blood Whalley still
327 existed--an old man going about the world trying to pick up a cargo here
328 and there for his little bark.</p>
330 <p>And everywhere it was the same. Departed the men who would have nodded
331 appreciatively at the mention of his name, and would have thought
332 themselves bound in honor to do something for Dare-devil Harry Whalley.
333 Departed the opportunities which he would have known how to seize; and
334 gone with them the white-winged flock of clippers that lived in the
335 boisterous uncertain life of the winds, skimming big fortunes out of
336 the foam of the sea. In a world that pared down the profits to an
337 irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count its disengaged
338 tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean charters were snapped up
339 by cable three months in advance, there were no chances of fortune for
340 an individual wandering haphazard with a little bark--hardly indeed any
343 <p>He found it more difficult from year to year. He suffered greatly from
344 the smallness of remittances he was able to send his daughter. Meantime
345 he had given up good cigars, and even in the matter of inferior cheroots
346 limited himself to six a day. He never told her of his difficulties, and
347 she never enlarged upon her struggle to live. Their confidence in each
348 other needed no explanations, and their perfect understanding endured
349 without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would have been shocked
350 if she had taken it into her head to thank him in so many words, but
351 he found it perfectly natural that she should tell him she needed two
354 <p>He had come in with the Fair Maid in ballast to look for a freight in
355 the Sofala's port of registry, and her letter met him there. Its tenor
356 was that it was no use mincing matters. Her only resource was in opening
357 a boarding-house, for which the prospects, she judged, were good. Good
358 enough, at any rate, to make her tell him frankly that with two hundred
359 pounds she could make a start. He had torn the envelope open, hastily,
360 on deck, where it was handed to him by the ship-chandler's runner, who
361 had brought his mail at the moment of anchoring. For the second time
362 in his life he was appalled, and remained stock-still at the cabin door
363 with the paper trembling between his fingers. Open a boarding-house! Two
364 hundred pounds for a start! The only resource! And he did not know where
365 to lay his hands on two hundred pence.</p>
367 <p>All that night Captain Whalley walked the poop of his anchored ship, as
368 though he had been about to close with the land in thick weather, and
369 uncertain of his position after a run of many gray days without a sight
370 of sun, moon, or stars. The black night twinkled with the guiding lights
371 of seamen and the steady straight lines of lights on shore; and all
372 around the Fair Maid the riding lights of ships cast trembling trails
373 upon the water of the roadstead. Captain Whalley saw not a gleam
374 anywhere till the dawn broke and he found out that his clothing was
375 soaked through with the heavy dew.</p>
377 <p>His ship was awake. He stopped short, stroked his wet beard, and
378 descended the poop ladder backwards, with tired feet. At the sight
379 of him the chief officer, lounging about sleepily on the quarterdeck,
380 remained open-mouthed in the middle of a great early-morning yawn.</p>
382 <p>"Good morning to you," pronounced Captain Whalley solemnly, passing into
383 the cabin. But he checked himself in the doorway, and without looking
384 back, "By the bye," he said, "there should be an empty wooden case put
385 away in the lazarette. It has not been broken up--has it?"</p>
387 <p>The mate shut his mouth, and then asked as if dazed, "What empty case,
390 <p>"A big flat packing-case belonging to that painting in my room. Let it
391 be taken up on deck and tell the carpenter to look it over. I may want
392 to use it before long."</p>
394 <p>The chief officer did not stir a limb till he had heard the door of the
395 captain's state-room slam within the cuddy. Then he beckoned aft the
396 second mate with his forefinger to tell him that there was something "in
399 <p>When the bell rang Captain Whalley's authoritative voice boomed out
400 through a closed door, "Sit down and don't wait for me." And his
401 impressed officers took their places, exchanging looks and whispers
402 across the table. What! No breakfast? And after apparently knocking
403 about all night on deck, too! Clearly, there was something in the wind.
404 In the skylight above their heads, bowed earnestly over the plates,
405 three wire cages rocked and rattled to the restless jumping of the
406 hungry canaries; and they could detect the sounds of their "old
407 man's" deliberate movements within his state-room. Captain Whalley was
408 methodically winding up the chronometers, dusting the portrait of
409 his late wife, getting a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making
410 himself ready in his punctilious unhurried manner to go ashore. He could
411 not have swallowed a single mouthful of food that morning. He had made
412 up his mind to sell the Fair Maid.</p>
416 <p>Just at that time the Japanese were casting far and wide for ships
417 of European build, and he had no difficulty in finding a purchaser, a
418 speculator who drove a hard bargain, but paid cash down for the Fair
419 Maid, with a view to a profitable resale. Thus it came about that
420 Captain Whalley found himself on a certain afternoon descending the
421 steps of one of the most important post-offices of the East with a slip
422 of bluish paper in his hand. This was the receipt of a registered letter
423 enclosing a draft for two hundred pounds, and addressed to Melbourne.
424 Captain Whalley pushed the paper into his waistcoat-pocket, took his
425 stick from under his arm, and walked down the street.</p>
427 <p>It was a recently opened and untidy thoroughfare with rudimentary
428 side-walks and a soft layer of dust cushioning the whole width of
429 the road. One end touched the slummy street of Chinese shops near the
430 harbor, the other drove straight on, without houses, for a couple of
431 miles, through patches of jungle-like vegetation, to the yard gates
432 of the new Consolidated Docks Company. The crude frontages of the new
433 Government buildings alternated with the blank fencing of vacant plots,
434 and the view of the sky seemed to give an added spaciousness to the
435 broad vista. It was empty and shunned by natives after business
436 hours, as though they had expected to see one of the tigers from the
437 neighborhood of the New Waterworks on the hill coming at a loping canter
438 down the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Captain Whalley
439 was not dwarfed by the solitude of the grandly planned street. He
440 had too fine a presence for that. He was only a lonely figure walking
441 purposefully, with a great white beard like a pilgrim, and with a thick
442 stick that resembled a weapon. On one side the new Courts of Justice had
443 a low and unadorned portico of squat columns half concealed by a few old
444 trees left in the approach. On the other the pavilion wings of the
445 new Colonial Treasury came out to the line of the street. But Captain
446 Whalley, who had now no ship and no home, remembered in passing that
447 on that very site when he first came out from England there had stood a
448 fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal
449 creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness
450 without any docks or waterworks.</p>
452 <p>No ship--no home. And his poor Ivy away there had no home either. A
453 boarding-house is no sort of home though it may get you a living. His
454 feelings were horribly rasped by the idea of the boarding-house. In his
455 rank of life he had that truly aristocratic temperament characterized by
456 a scorn of vulgar gentility and by prejudiced views as to the derogatory
457 nature of certain occupations. For his own part he had always preferred
458 sailing merchant ships (which is a straightforward occupation) to buying
459 and selling merchandise, of which the essence is to get the better of
460 somebody in a bargain--an undignified trial of wits at best. His father
461 had been Colonel Whalley (retired) of the H. E. I. Company's service,
462 with very slender means besides his pension, but with distinguished
463 connections. He could remember as a boy how frequently waiters at the
464 inns, country tradesmen and small people of that sort, used to "My lord"
465 the old warrior on the strength of his appearance.</p>
467 <p>Captain Whalley himself (he would have entered the Navy if his father
468 had not died before he was fourteen) had something of a grand air which
469 would have suited an old and glorious admiral; but he became lost like
470 a straw in the eddy of a brook amongst the swarm of brown and yellow
471 humanity filling a thoroughfare, that by contrast with the vast and
472 empty avenue he had left seemed as narrow as a lane and absolutely
473 riotous with life. The walls of the houses were blue; the shops of the
474 Chinamen yawned like cavernous lairs; heaps of nondescript merchandise
475 overflowed the gloom of the long range of arcades, and the fiery
476 serenity of sunset took the middle of the street from end to end with a
477 glow like the reflection of a fire. It fell on the bright colors and the
478 dark faces of the bare-footed crowd, on the pallid yellow backs of the
479 half-naked jostling coolies, on the accouterments of a tall Sikh trooper
480 with a parted beard and fierce mustaches on sentry before the gate of
481 the police compound. Looming very big above the heads in a red haze of
482 dust, the tightly packed car of the cable tramway navigated cautiously
483 up the human stream, with the incessant blare of its horn, in the manner
484 of a steamer groping in a fog.</p>
486 <p>Captain Whalley emerged like a diver on the other side, and in the
487 desert shade between the walls of closed warehouses removed his hat to
488 cool his brow. A certain disrepute attached to the calling of a
489 landlady of a boarding-house. These women were said to be rapacious,
490 unscrupulous, untruthful; and though he contemned no class of his
491 fellow-creatures--God forbid!--these were suspicions to which it was
492 unseemly that a Whalley should lay herself open. He had not expostulated
493 with her, however. He was confident she shared his feelings; he was
494 sorry for her; he trusted her judgment; he considered it a merciful
495 dispensation that he could help her once more,--but in his aristocratic
496 heart of hearts he would have found it more easy to reconcile himself to
497 the idea of her turning seamstress. Vaguely he remembered reading years
498 ago a touching piece called the "Song of the Shirt." It was all very
499 well making songs about poor women. The granddaughter of Colonel
500 Whalley, the landlady of a boarding-house! Pooh! He replaced his hat,
501 dived into two pockets, and stopping a moment to apply a flaring match
502 to the end of a cheap cheroot, blew an embittered cloud of smoke at a
503 world that could hold such surprises.</p>
505 <p>Of one thing he was certain--that she was the own child of a clever
506 mother. Now he had got over the wrench of parting with his ship, he
507 perceived clearly that such a step had been unavoidable. Perhaps he had
508 been growing aware of it all along with an unconfessed knowledge. But
509 she, far away there, must have had an intuitive perception of it, with
510 the pluck to face that truth and the courage to speak out--all the
511 qualities which had made her mother a woman of such excellent counsel.</p>
513 <p>It would have had to come to that in the end! It was fortunate she had
514 forced his hand. In another year or two it would have been an utterly
515 barren sale. To keep the ship going he had been involving himself deeper
516 every year. He was defenseless before the insidious work of adversity,
517 to whose more open assaults he could present a firm front; like a
518 cliff that stands unmoved the open battering of the sea, with a lofty
519 ignorance of the treacherous backwash undermining its base. As it was,
520 every liability satisfied, her request answered, and owing no man a
521 penny, there remained to him from the proceeds a sum of five hundred
522 pounds put away safely. In addition he had upon his person some forty
523 odd dollars--enough to pay his hotel bill, providing he did not linger
524 too long in the modest bedroom where he had taken refuge.</p>
526 <p>Scantily furnished, and with a waxed floor, it opened into one of
527 the side-verandas. The straggling building of bricks, as airy as a
528 bird-cage, resounded with the incessant flapping of rattan screens
529 worried by the wind between the white-washed square pillars of the
530 sea-front. The rooms were lofty, a ripple of sunshine flowed over the
531 ceilings; and the periodical invasions of tourists from some passenger
532 steamer in the harbor flitted through the wind-swept dusk of the
533 apartments with the tumult of their unfamiliar voices and impermanent
534 presences, like relays of migratory shades condemned to speed headlong
535 round the earth without leaving a trace. The babble of their irruptions
536 ebbed out as suddenly as it had arisen; the draughty corridors and
537 the long chairs of the verandas knew their sight-seeing hurry or
538 their prostrate repose no more; and Captain Whalley, substantial and
539 dignified, left well-nigh alone in the vast hotel by each light-hearted
540 skurry, felt more and more like a stranded tourist with no aim in view,
541 like a forlorn traveler without a home. In the solitude of his room he
542 smoked thoughtfully, gazing at the two sea-chests which held all that he
543 could call his own in this world. A thick roll of charts in a sheath
544 of sailcloth leaned in a corner; the flat packing-case containing the
545 portrait in oils and the three carbon photographs had been pushed under
546 the bed. He was tired of discussing terms, of assisting at surveys, of
547 all the routine of the business. What to the other parties was merely
548 the sale of a ship was to him a momentous event involving a radically
549 new view of existence. He knew that after this ship there would be no
550 other; and the hopes of his youth, the exercise of his abilities, every
551 feeling and achievement of his manhood, had been indissolubly connected
552 with ships. He had served ships; he had owned ships; and even the years
553 of his actual retirement from the sea had been made bearable by the idea
554 that he had only to stretch out his hand full of money to get a ship. He
555 had been at liberty to feel as though he were the owner of all the
556 ships in the world. The selling of this one was weary work; but when
557 she passed from him at last, when he signed the last receipt, it was as
558 though all the ships had gone out of the world together, leaving him on
559 the shore of inaccessible oceans with seven hundred pounds in his hands.</p>
561 <p>Striding firmly, without haste, along the quay, Captain Whalley averted
562 his glances from the familiar roadstead. Two generations of seamen born
563 since his first day at sea stood between him and all these ships at the
564 anchorage. His own was sold, and he had been asking himself, What next?</p>
566 <p>From the feeling of loneliness, of inward emptiness,--and of loss
567 too, as if his very soul had been taken out of him forcibly,--there had
568 sprung at first a desire to start right off and join his daughter.
569 "Here are the last pence," he would say to her; "take them, my dear. And
570 here's your old father: you must take him too."</p>
572 <p>His soul recoiled, as if afraid of what lay hidden at the bottom of
573 this impulse. Give up! Never! When one is thoroughly weary all sorts of
574 nonsense come into one's head. A pretty gift it would have been for a
575 poor woman--this seven hundred pounds with the incumbrance of a hale old
576 fellow more than likely to last for years and years to come. Was he not
577 as fit to die in harness as any of the youngsters in charge of these
578 anchored ships out yonder? He was as solid now as ever he had been. But
579 as to who would give him work to do, that was another matter. Were he,
580 with his appearance and antecedents, to go about looking for a junior's
581 berth, people, he was afraid, would not take him seriously; or else if
582 he succeeded in impressing them, he would maybe obtain their pity, which
583 would be like stripping yourself naked to be kicked. He was not anxious
584 to give himself away for less than nothing. He had no use for anybody's
585 pity. On the other hand, a command--the only thing he could try for with
586 due regard for common decency--was not likely to be lying in wait
587 for him at the corner of the next street. Commands don't go a-begging
588 nowadays. Ever since he had come ashore to carry out the business of
589 the sale he had kept his ears open, but had heard no hint of one being
590 vacant in the port. And even if there had been one, his successful past
591 itself stood in his way. He had been his own employer too long. The only
592 credential he could produce was the testimony of his whole life. What
593 better recommendation could anyone require? But vaguely he felt that
594 the unique document would be looked upon as an archaic curiosity of the
595 Eastern waters, a screed traced in obsolete words--in a half-forgotten
600 <p>Revolving these thoughts, he strolled on near the railings of the quay,
601 broad-chested, without a stoop, as though his big shoulders had never
602 felt the burden of the loads that must be carried between the cradle
603 and the grave. No single betraying fold or line of care disfigured the
604 reposeful modeling of his face. It was full and untanned; and the upper
605 part emerged, massively quiet, out of the downward flow of silvery hair,
606 with the striking delicacy of its clear complexion and the powerful
607 width of the forehead. The first cast of his glance fell on you candid
608 and swift, like a boy's; but because of the ragged snowy thatch of the
609 eyebrows the affability of his attention acquired the character of a
610 dark and searching scrutiny. With age he had put on flesh a little, had
611 increased his girth like an old tree presenting no symptoms of decay;
612 and even the opulent, lustrous ripple of white hairs upon his chest
613 seemed an attribute of unquenchable vitality and vigor.</p>
615 <p>Once rather proud of his great bodily strength, and even of his personal
616 appearance, conscious of his worth, and firm in his rectitude, there had
617 remained to him, like the heritage of departed prosperity, the tranquil
618 bearing of a man who had proved himself fit in every sort of way for the
619 life of his choice. He strode on squarely under the projecting brim of
620 an ancient Panama hat. It had a low crown, a crease through its whole
621 diameter, a narrow black ribbon. Imperishable and a little discolored,
622 this headgear made it easy to pick him out from afar on thronged wharves
623 and in the busy streets. He had never adopted the comparatively modern
624 fashion of pipeclayed cork helmets. He disliked the form; and he hoped
625 he could manage to keep a cool head to the end of his life without all
626 these contrivances for hygienic ventilation. His hair was cropped close,
627 his linen always of immaculate whiteness; a suit of thin gray flannel,
628 worn threadbare but scrupulously brushed, floated about his burly limbs,
629 adding to his bulk by the looseness of its cut. The years had mellowed
630 the good-humored, imperturbable audacity of his prime into a temper
631 carelessly serene; and the leisurely tapping of his iron-shod stick
632 accompanied his footfalls with a self-confident sound on the flagstones.
633 It was impossible to connect such a fine presence and this unruffled
634 aspect with the belittling troubles of poverty; the man's whole
635 existence appeared to pass before you, facile and large, in the freedom
636 of means as ample as the clothing of his body.</p>
638 <p>The irrational dread of having to break into his five hundred pounds for
639 personal expenses in the hotel disturbed the steady poise of his mind.
640 There was no time to lose. The bill was running up. He nourished the
641 hope that this five hundred would perhaps be the means, if everything
642 else failed, of obtaining some work which, keeping his body and soul
643 together (not a matter of great outlay), would enable him to be of use
644 to his daughter. To his mind it was her own money which he employed, as
645 it were, in backing her father and solely for her benefit. Once at work,
646 he would help her with the greater part of his earnings; he was good for
647 many years yet, and this boarding-house business, he argued to himself,
648 whatever the prospects, could not be much of a gold-mine from the first
649 start. But what work? He was ready to lay hold of anything in an honest
650 way so that it came quickly to his hand; because the five hundred pounds
651 must be preserved intact for eventual use. That was the great point.
652 With the entire five hundred one felt a substance at one's back; but
653 it seemed to him that should he let it dwindle to four-fifty or even
654 four-eighty, all the efficiency would be gone out of the money, as though
655 there were some magic power in the round figure. But what sort of work?</p>
657 <p>Confronted by that haunting question as by an uneasy ghost, for whom he
658 had no exorcising formula, Captain Whalley stopped short on the apex
659 of a small bridge spanning steeply the bed of a canalized creek with
660 granite shores. Moored between the square blocks a seagoing Malay prau
661 floated half hidden under the arch of masonry, with her spars lowered
662 down, without a sound of life on board, and covered from stem to stern
663 with a ridge of palm-leaf mats. He had left behind him the overheated
664 pavements bordered by the stone frontages that, like the sheer face of
665 cliffs, followed the sweep of the quays; and an unconfined spaciousness
666 of orderly and sylvan aspect opened before him its wide plots of rolled
667 grass, like pieces of green carpet smoothly pegged out, its long ranges
668 of trees lined up in colossal porticos of dark shafts roofed with a
669 vault of branches.</p>
671 <p>Some of these avenues ended at the sea. It was a terraced shore; and
672 beyond, upon the level expanse, profound and glistening like the gaze
673 of a dark-blue eye, an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself
674 indefinitely through the gap between a couple of verdant twin islets.
675 The masts and spars of a few ships far away, hull down in the outer
676 roads, sprang straight from the water in a fine maze of rosy lines
677 penciled on the clear shadow of the eastern board. Captain Whalley gave
678 them a long glance. The ship, once his own, was anchored out there. It
679 was staggering to think that it was open to him no longer to take a boat
680 at the jetty and get himself pulled off to her when the evening came. To
681 no ship. Perhaps never more. Before the sale was concluded, and till the
682 purchase-money had been paid, he had spent daily some time on board the
683 Fair Maid. The money had been paid this very morning, and now, all at
684 once, there was positively no ship that he could go on board of when he
685 liked; no ship that would need his presence in order to do her work--to
686 live. It seemed an incredible state of affairs, something too bizarre
687 to last. And the sea was full of craft of all sorts. There was that prau
688 lying so still swathed in her shroud of sewn palm-leaves--she too had
689 her indispensable man. They lived through each other, this Malay he had
690 never seen, and this high-sterned thing of no size that seemed to be
691 resting after a long journey. And of all the ships in sight, near and
692 far, each was provided with a man, the man without whom the finest ship
693 is a dead thing, a floating and purposeless log.</p>
695 <p>After his one glance at the roadstead he went on, since there was
696 nothing to turn back for, and the time must be got through somehow. The
697 avenues of big trees ran straight over the Esplanade, cutting each other
698 at diverse angles, columnar below and luxuriant above. The interlaced
699 boughs high up there seemed to slumber; not a leaf stirred overhead:
700 and the reedy cast-iron lampposts in the middle of the road, gilt like
701 scepters, diminished in a long perspective, with their globes of white
702 porcelain atop, resembling a barbarous decoration of ostriches' eggs
703 displayed in a row. The flaming sky kindled a tiny crimson spark upon
704 the glistening surface of each glassy shell.</p>
706 <p>With his chin sunk a little, his hands behind his back, and the end of
707 his stick marking the gravel with a faint wavering line at his heels,
708 Captain Whalley reflected that if a ship without a man was like a body
709 without a soul, a sailor without a ship was of not much more account
710 in this world than an aimless log adrift upon the sea. The log might be
711 sound enough by itself, tough of fiber, and hard to destroy--but what of
712 that! And a sudden sense of irremediable idleness weighted his feet like
715 <p>A succession of open carriages came bowling along the newly opened
716 sea-road. You could see across the wide grass-plots the discs of
717 vibration made by the spokes. The bright domes of the parasols swayed
718 lightly outwards like full-blown blossoms on the rim of a vase; and
719 the quiet sheet of dark-blue water, crossed by a bar of purple, made a
720 background for the spinning wheels and the high action of the horses,
721 whilst the turbaned heads of the Indian servants elevated above the line
722 of the sea horizon glided rapidly on the paler blue of the sky. In an
723 open space near the little bridge each turn-out trotted smartly in a
724 wide curve away from the sunset; then pulling up sharp, entered the main
725 alley in a long slow-moving file with the great red stillness of the sky
726 at the back. The trunks of mighty trees stood all touched with red on
727 the same side, the air seemed aflame under the high foliage, the
728 very ground under the hoofs of the horses was red. The wheels turned
729 solemnly; one after another the sunshades drooped, folding their colors
730 like gorgeous flowers shutting their petals at the end of the day. In
731 the whole half-mile of human beings no voice uttered a distinct word,
732 only a faint thudding noise went on mingled with slight jingling sounds,
733 and the motionless heads and shoulders of men and women sitting in
734 couples emerged stolidly above the lowered hoods--as if wooden. But one
735 carriage and pair coming late did not join the line.</p>
737 <p>It fled along in a noiseless roll; but on entering the avenue one of the
738 dark bays snorted, arching his neck and shying against the steel-tipped
739 pole; a flake of foam fell from the bit upon the point of a satiny
740 shoulder, and the dusky face of the coachman leaned forward at once over
741 the hands taking a fresh grip of the reins. It was a long dark-green
742 landau, having a dignified and buoyant motion between the sharply
743 curved C-springs, and a sort of strictly official majesty in its supreme
744 elegance. It seemed more roomy than is usual, its horses seemed slightly
745 bigger, the appointments a shade more perfect, the servants perched
746 somewhat higher on the box. The dresses of three women--two young
747 and pretty, and one, handsome, large, of mature age--seemed to fill
748 completely the shallow body of the carriage. The fourth face was that
749 of a man, heavy lidded, distinguished and sallow, with a somber, thick,
750 iron-gray imperial and mustaches, which somehow had the air of solid
751 appendages. His Excellency--</p>
753 <p>The rapid motion of that one equipage made all the others appear utterly
754 inferior, blighted, and reduced to crawl painfully at a snail's pace.
755 The landau distanced the whole file in a sort of sustained rush; the
756 features of the occupant whirling out of sight left behind an impression
757 of fixed stares and impassive vacancy; and after it had vanished in full
758 flight as it were, notwithstanding the long line of vehicles hugging the
759 curb at a walk, the whole lofty vista of the avenue seemed to lie open
760 and emptied of life in the enlarged impression of an august solitude.</p>
762 <p>Captain Whalley had lifted his head to look, and his mind, disturbed in
763 its meditation, turned with wonder (as men's minds will do) to matters
764 of no importance. It struck him that it was to this port, where he had
765 just sold his last ship, that he had come with the very first he had
766 ever owned, and with his head full of a plan for opening a new trade
767 with a distant part of the Archipelago. The then governor had given
768 him no end of encouragement. No Excellency he--this Mr. Denham--this
769 governor with his jacket off; a man who tended night and day, so to
770 speak, the growing prosperity of the settlement with the self-forgetful
771 devotion of a nurse for a child she loves; a lone bachelor who lived as
772 in a camp with the few servants and his three dogs in what was called
773 then the Government Bungalow: a low-roofed structure on the half-cleared
774 slope of a hill, with a new flagstaff in front and a police orderly on
775 the veranda. He remembered toiling up that hill under a heavy sun for
776 his audience; the unfurnished aspect of the cool shaded room; the long
777 table covered at one end with piles of papers, and with two guns, a
778 brass telescope, a small bottle of oil with a feather stuck in the neck
779 at the other--and the flattering attention given to him by the man in
780 power. It was an undertaking full of risk he had come to expound, but a
781 twenty minutes' talk in the Government Bungalow on the hill had made it
782 go smoothly from the start. And as he was retiring Mr. Denham, already
783 seated before the papers, called out after him, "Next month the Dido
784 starts for a cruise that way, and I shall request her captain officially
785 to give you a look in and see how you get on." The Dido was one of the
786 smart frigates on the China station--and five-and-thirty years make a
787 big slice of time. Five-and-thirty years ago an enterprise like his had
788 for the colony enough importance to be looked after by a Queen's ship.
789 A big slice of time. Individuals were of some account then. Men like
790 himself; men, too, like poor Evans, for instance, with his red face,
791 his coal-black whiskers, and his restless eyes, who had set up the first
792 patent slip for repairing small ships, on the edge of the forest, in
793 a lonely bay three miles up the coast. Mr. Denham had encouraged that
794 enterprise too, and yet somehow poor Evans had ended by dying at
795 home deucedly hard up. His son, they said, was squeezing oil out of
796 cocoa-nuts for a living on some God-forsaken islet of the Indian Ocean;
797 but it was from that patent slip in a lonely wooded bay that had sprung
798 the workshops of the Consolidated Docks Company, with its three
799 graving basins carved out of solid rock, its wharves, its jetties,
800 its electric-light plant, its steam-power houses--with its gigantic
801 sheer-legs, fit to lift the heaviest weight ever carried afloat, and
802 whose head could be seen like the top of a queer white monument peeping
803 over bushy points of land and sandy promontories, as you approached the
804 New Harbor from the west.</p>
806 <p>There had been a time when men counted: there were not so many carriages
807 in the colony then, though Mr. Denham, he fancied, had a buggy. And
808 Captain Whalley seemed to be swept out of the great avenue by the swirl
809 of a mental backwash. He remembered muddy shores, a harbor without
810 quays, the one solitary wooden pier (but that was a public work) jutting
811 out crookedly, the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught
812 fire mysteriously and smoldered for days, so that amazed ships came
813 into a roadstead full of sulphurous smoke, and the sun hung blood-red
814 at midday. He remembered the things, the faces, and something more
815 besides--like the faint flavor of a cup quaffed to the bottom, like a
816 subtle sparkle of the air that was not to be found in the atmosphere of
819 <p>In this evocation, swift and full of detail like a flash of magnesium
820 light into the niches of a dark memorial hall, Captain Whalley
821 contemplated things once important, the efforts of small men, the growth
822 of a great place, but now robbed of all consequence by the greatness
823 of accomplished facts, by hopes greater still; and they gave him for a
824 moment such an almost physical grip upon time, such a comprehension of
825 our unchangeable feelings, that he stopped short, struck the ground with
826 his stick, and ejaculated mentally, "What the devil am I doing here!" He
827 seemed lost in a sort of surprise; but he heard his name called out in
828 wheezy tones once, twice--and turned on his heels slowly.</p>
830 <p>He beheld then, waddling towards him autocratically, a man of an
831 old-fashioned and gouty aspect, with hair as white as his own, but with
832 shaved, florid cheeks, wearing a necktie--almost a neckcloth--whose
833 stiff ends projected far beyond his chin; with round legs, round arms,
834 a round body, a round face--generally producing the effect of his short
835 figure having been distended by means of an air-pump as much as the
836 seams of his clothing would stand. This was the Master-Attendant of the
837 port. A master-attendant is a superior sort of harbor-master; a person,
838 out in the East, of some consequence in his sphere; a Government
839 official, a magistrate for the waters of the port, and possessed of vast
840 but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes.
841 This particular Master-Attendant was reported to consider it miserably
842 inadequate, on the ground that it did not include the power of life
843 and death. This was a jocular exaggeration. Captain Eliott was fairly
844 satisfied with his position, and nursed no inconsiderable sense of such
845 power as he had. His conceited and tyrannical disposition did not allow
846 him to let it dwindle in his hands for want of use. The uproarious,
847 choleric frankness of his comments on people's character and conduct
848 caused him to be feared at bottom; though in conversation many pretended
849 not to mind him in the least, others would only smile sourly at the
850 mention of his name, and there were even some who dared to pronounce him
851 "a meddlesome old ruffian." But for almost all of them one of Captain
852 Eliott's outbreaks was nearly as distasteful to face as a chance of
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