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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of End of the Tether, by Joseph Conrad
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: End of the Tether
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #527]
+Last Updated: September 9, 2016]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK END OF THE TETHER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE END OF THE TETHER
+
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+For a long time after the course of the steamer _Sofala_ had been
+altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance
+of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sunrays
+seemed to fall violently upon the calm sea--seemed to shatter themselves
+upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapor
+of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady
+brightness.
+
+Captain Whalley did not look at it. When his Serang, approaching the
+roomy cane arm-chair which he filled capably, had informed him in a low
+voice that the course was to be altered, he had risen at once and had
+remained on his feet, face forward, while the head of his ship swung
+through a quarter of a circle. He had not uttered a single word, not
+even the word to steady the helm. It was the Serang, an elderly, alert,
+little Malay, with a very dark skin, who murmured the order to the
+helmsman. And then slowly Captain Whalley sat down again in the
+arm-chair on the bridge and fixed his eyes on the deck between his feet.
+
+He could not hope to see anything new upon this lane of the sea. He had
+been on these coasts for the last three years. From Low Cape to Malantan
+the distance was fifty miles, six hours’ steaming for the old ship with
+the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and
+by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with
+their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of
+the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber
+strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with
+it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures--the brimful
+estuary of a river. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water
+and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts
+black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way
+up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or
+more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever
+thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages.
+The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had
+not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful
+Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the
+captain’s watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for
+the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her
+courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to
+take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and
+steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing, and
+almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on
+the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by
+reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was--the precise
+spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster’s
+round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its
+people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross
+over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East.
+Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps
+the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the
+middle, or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with her mat sails
+flitting by silently--and the low land on the other side in sight
+at daylight. At noon the three palms of the next place of call, up a
+sluggish river. The only white man residing there was a retired young
+sailor, with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages.
+Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call, a deep bay with
+only a couple of houses on the beach. And so on, in and out, picking
+up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles’
+steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago of small islands up
+to a large native town at the end of the beat. There was a three days’
+rest for the old ship before he started her again in inverse order,
+seeing the same shores from another bearing, hearing the same voices
+in the same places, back again to the Sofala’s port of registry on
+the great highway to the East, where he would take up a berth nearly
+opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to
+start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a very
+enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise
+Dare-devil Harry--Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day.
+No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms,
+who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who
+had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new
+trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas,
+and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea, and
+forty out in the East (“a pretty thorough apprenticeship,” he used
+to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of
+shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to
+where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas.
+His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the
+Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a
+Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the
+celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and
+crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as
+it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time
+neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the
+officers of her Majesty’s steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a
+survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the
+enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone
+who cares may see, the “General Directory,” vol. ii. p. 410, begins the
+description of the “Malotu or Whalley Passage” with the words: “This
+advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the
+ship Condor,” &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels
+leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to
+April inclusive.
+
+This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing could rob him
+of this kind of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the
+breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new
+men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas
+and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant
+nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.
+
+In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his
+employers’ money and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law
+a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners,
+charterers, and underwriters. He had never lost a ship or consented to
+a shady transaction; and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the
+conditions that had gone to the making of his name. He had buried his
+wife (in the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to the man
+of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than an ample competence in the
+crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose
+downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake. And he was sixty-five
+years old.
+
+
+II
+
+
+His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed.
+He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking
+Corporation. Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert as
+his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had
+themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference
+between him and them was that he had lost his all. And yet not his all.
+There had remained to him from his lost fortune a very pretty little
+bark, Fair Maid, which he had bought to occupy his leisure of a retired
+sailor--“to play with,” as he expressed it himself.
+
+He had formally declared himself tired of the sea the year preceding his
+daughter’s marriage. But after the young couple had gone to settle in
+Melbourne he found out that he could not make himself happy on shore. He
+was too much of a merchant sea-captain for mere yachting to satisfy him.
+He wanted the illusion of affairs; and his acquisition of the Fair
+Maid preserved the continuity of his life. He introduced her to his
+acquaintances in various ports as “my last command.” When he grew too
+old to be trusted with a ship, he would lay her up and go ashore to be
+buried, leaving directions in his will to have the bark towed out and
+scuttled decently in deep water on the day of the funeral. His daughter
+would not grudge him the satisfaction of knowing that no stranger would
+handle his last command after him. With the fortune he was able to leave
+her, the value of a 500-ton bark was neither here nor there. All this
+would be said with a jocular twinkle in his eye: the vigorous old man
+had too much vitality for the sentimentalism of regret; and a little
+wistfully withal, because he was at home in life, taking a genuine
+pleasure in its feelings and its possessions; in the dignity of his
+reputation and his wealth, in his love for his daughter, and in his
+satisfaction with the ship--the plaything of his lonely leisure.
+
+He had the cabin arranged in accordance with his simple ideal of comfort
+at sea. A big bookcase (he was a great reader) occupied one side of his
+stateroom; the portrait of his late wife, a flat bituminous oil-painting
+representing the profile and one long black ringlet of a young woman,
+faced his bed-place. Three chronometers ticked him to sleep and greeted
+him on waking with the tiny competition of their beats. He rose at five
+every day. The officer of the morning watch, drinking his early cup
+of coffee aft by the wheel, would hear through the wide orifice of the
+copper ventilators all the splashings, blowings, and splutterings of
+his captain’s toilet. These noises would be followed by a sustained
+deep murmur of the Lord’s Prayer recited in a loud earnest voice. Five
+minutes afterwards the head and shoulders of Captain Whalley emerged
+out of the companion-hatchway. Invariably he paused for a while on the
+stairs, looking all round at the horizon; upwards at the trim of the
+sails; inhaling deep draughts of the fresh air. Only then he would step
+out on the poop, acknowledging the hand raised to the peak of the cap
+with a majestic and benign “Good morning to you.” He walked the deck
+till eight scrupulously. Sometimes, not above twice a year, he had to
+use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip--a
+slight touch of rheumatism, he supposed. Otherwise he knew nothing of
+the ills of the flesh. At the ringing of the breakfast bell he went
+below to feed his canaries, wind up the chronometers, and take the
+head of the table. From there he had before his eyes the big carbon
+photographs of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies
+--his grandchildren--set in black frames into the maplewood bulkheads
+of the cuddy. After breakfast he dusted the glass over these portraits
+himself with a cloth, and brushed the oil painting of his wife with a
+plumate kept suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the heavy
+gold frame. Then with the door of his stateroom shut, he would sit down
+on the couch under the portrait to read a chapter out of a thick pocket
+Bible--her Bible. But on some days he only sat there for half an hour
+with his finger between the leaves and the closed book resting on his
+knees. Perhaps he had remembered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she
+used to be.
+
+She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too. It was like an
+article of faith with him that there never had been, and never could be,
+a brighter, cheerier home anywhere afloat or ashore than his home under
+the poop-deck of the Condor, with the big main cabin all white and gold,
+garlanded as if for a perpetual festival with an unfading wreath. She
+had decorated the center of every panel with a cluster of home flowers.
+It took her a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor of love.
+To him it had remained a marvel of painting, the highest achievement of
+taste and skill; and as to old Swinburne, his mate, every time he
+came down to his meals he stood transfixed with admiration before the
+progress of the work. You could almost smell these roses, he declared,
+sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded the
+saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made him somewhat less hearty
+than usual in tackling his food. But there was nothing of the sort to
+interfere with his enjoyment of her singing. “Mrs. Whalley is a regular
+out-and-out nightingale, sir,” he would pronounce with a judicial air
+after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the
+piece. In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear
+her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in
+the cabin. On the very day they got engaged he had written to London
+for the instrument; but they had been married for over a year before it
+reached them, coming out round the Cape. The big case made part of the
+first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor--an event that to
+the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as
+the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of
+solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its
+sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the
+ensign like a sailor’s wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read
+the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his
+voice. When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him
+with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten,
+impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red
+granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry.
+He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember
+much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sailor of the
+crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child
+out of one of her black skirts.
+
+He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish
+stream. It will break out and flow over a man’s troubles, it will close
+upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has
+gone to the bottom. And the world is not bad. People had been very
+kind to him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior partner
+in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of the Condor. It was she who
+volunteered to look after the little one, and in due course took her to
+England (something of a journey in those days, even by the overland
+mail route) with her own girls to finish her education. It was ten years
+before he saw her again.
+
+As a little child she had never been frightened of bad weather; she
+would beg to be taken up on deck in the bosom of his oilskin coat to
+watch the big seas hurling themselves upon the Condor. The swirl and
+crash of the waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless
+delight. “A good boy spoiled,” he used to say of her in joke. He had
+named her Ivy because of the sound of the word, and obscurely fascinated
+by a vague association of ideas. She had twined herself tightly round
+his heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as to a
+tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little, that in the nature
+of things she would probably elect to cling to someone else. But
+he loved life well enough for even that event to give him a certain
+satisfaction, apart from his more intimate feeling of loss.
+
+After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his loneliness, he
+hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for
+the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home. What made him
+dissatisfied there was not to see that she clung now to somebody else,
+but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination “a
+rather poor stick”--even in the matter of health. He disliked his
+son-in-law’s studied civility perhaps more than his method of
+handling the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage. But of his
+apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day of his departure, with
+the hall-door open already, holding her hands and looking steadily into
+her eyes, he had said, “You know, my dear, all I have is for you and the
+chicks. Mind you write to me openly.” She had answered him by an almost
+imperceptible movement of her head. She resembled her mother in
+the color of her eyes, and in character--and also in this, that she
+understood him without many words.
+
+Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters made Captain
+Whalley lift his white eye-brows. For the rest he considered he was
+reaping the true reward of his life by being thus able to produce on
+demand whatever was needed. He had not enjoyed himself so much in a
+way since his wife had died. Characteristically enough his son-in-law’s
+punctuality in failure caused him at a distance to feel a sort of
+kindness towards the man. The fellow was so perpetually being jammed on
+a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation would be
+manifestly unfair. No, no! He knew well what that meant. It was bad
+luck. His own had been simply marvelous, but he had seen in his life too
+many good men--seamen and others--go under with the sheer weight of bad
+luck not to recognize the fatal signs. For all that, he was cogitating
+on the best way of tying up very strictly every penny he had to leave,
+when, with a preliminary rumble of rumors (whose first sound reached
+him in Shanghai as it happened), the shock of the big failure came;
+and, after passing through the phases of stupor, of incredulity, of
+indignation, he had to accept the fact that he had nothing to speak of
+to leave.
+
+Upon that, as if he had only waited for this catastrophe, the unlucky
+man, away there in Melbourne, gave up his unprofitable game, and sat
+down--in an invalid’s bath-chair at that too. “He will never walk
+again,” wrote the wife. For the first time in his life Captain Whalley
+was a bit staggered.
+
+The Fair Maid had to go to work in bitter earnest now. It was no longer
+a matter of preserving alive the memory of Dare-devil Harry Whalley in
+the Eastern Seas, or of keeping an old man in pocket-money and clothes,
+with, perhaps, a bill for a few hundred first-class cigars thrown in at
+the end of the year. He would have to buckle-to, and keep her going hard
+on a scant allowance of gilt for the ginger-bread scrolls at her stem
+and stern.
+
+This necessity opened his eyes to the fundamental changes of the world.
+Of his past only the familiar names remained, here and there, but
+the things and the men, as he had known them, were gone. The name of
+Gardner, Patteson, & Co. was still displayed on the walls of warehouses
+by the waterside, on the brass plates and window-panes in the business
+quarters of more than one Eastern port, but there was no longer a
+Gardner or a Patteson in the firm. There was no longer for Captain
+Whalley an arm-chair and a welcome in the private office, with a bit of
+business ready to be put in the way of an old friend, for the sake of
+bygone services. The husbands of the Gardner girls sat behind the desks
+in that room where, long after he had left the employ, he had kept his
+right of entrance in the old man’s time. Their ships now had yellow
+funnels with black tops, and a time-table of appointed routes like a
+confounded service of tramways. The winds of December and June were all
+one to them; their captains (excellent young men he doubted not) were,
+to be sure, familiar with Whalley Island, because of late years the
+Government had established a white fixed light on the north end (with
+a red danger sector over the Condor Reef), but most of them would have
+been extremely surprised to hear that a flesh-and-blood Whalley still
+existed--an old man going about the world trying to pick up a cargo here
+and there for his little bark.
+
+And everywhere it was the same. Departed the men who would have nodded
+appreciatively at the mention of his name, and would have thought
+themselves bound in honor to do something for Dare-devil Harry Whalley.
+Departed the opportunities which he would have known how to seize; and
+gone with them the white-winged flock of clippers that lived in the
+boisterous uncertain life of the winds, skimming big fortunes out of
+the foam of the sea. In a world that pared down the profits to an
+irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count its disengaged
+tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean charters were snapped up
+by cable three months in advance, there were no chances of fortune for
+an individual wandering haphazard with a little bark--hardly indeed any
+room to exist.
+
+He found it more difficult from year to year. He suffered greatly from
+the smallness of remittances he was able to send his daughter. Meantime
+he had given up good cigars, and even in the matter of inferior cheroots
+limited himself to six a day. He never told her of his difficulties, and
+she never enlarged upon her struggle to live. Their confidence in each
+other needed no explanations, and their perfect understanding endured
+without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would have been shocked
+if she had taken it into her head to thank him in so many words, but
+he found it perfectly natural that she should tell him she needed two
+hundred pounds.
+
+He had come in with the Fair Maid in ballast to look for a freight in
+the Sofala’s port of registry, and her letter met him there. Its tenor
+was that it was no use mincing matters. Her only resource was in opening
+a boarding-house, for which the prospects, she judged, were good. Good
+enough, at any rate, to make her tell him frankly that with two hundred
+pounds she could make a start. He had torn the envelope open, hastily,
+on deck, where it was handed to him by the ship-chandler’s runner, who
+had brought his mail at the moment of anchoring. For the second time
+in his life he was appalled, and remained stock-still at the cabin door
+with the paper trembling between his fingers. Open a boarding-house! Two
+hundred pounds for a start! The only resource! And he did not know where
+to lay his hands on two hundred pence.
+
+All that night Captain Whalley walked the poop of his anchored ship, as
+though he had been about to close with the land in thick weather, and
+uncertain of his position after a run of many gray days without a sight
+of sun, moon, or stars. The black night twinkled with the guiding lights
+of seamen and the steady straight lines of lights on shore; and all
+around the Fair Maid the riding lights of ships cast trembling trails
+upon the water of the roadstead. Captain Whalley saw not a gleam
+anywhere till the dawn broke and he found out that his clothing was
+soaked through with the heavy dew.
+
+His ship was awake. He stopped short, stroked his wet beard, and
+descended the poop ladder backwards, with tired feet. At the sight
+of him the chief officer, lounging about sleepily on the quarterdeck,
+remained open-mouthed in the middle of a great early-morning yawn.
+
+“Good morning to you,” pronounced Captain Whalley solemnly, passing into
+the cabin. But he checked himself in the doorway, and without looking
+back, “By the bye,” he said, “there should be an empty wooden case put
+away in the lazarette. It has not been broken up--has it?”
+
+The mate shut his mouth, and then asked as if dazed, “What empty case,
+sir?”
+
+“A big flat packing-case belonging to that painting in my room. Let it
+be taken up on deck and tell the carpenter to look it over. I may want
+to use it before long.”
+
+The chief officer did not stir a limb till he had heard the door of the
+captain’s state-room slam within the cuddy. Then he beckoned aft the
+second mate with his forefinger to tell him that there was something “in
+the wind.”
+
+When the bell rang Captain Whalley’s authoritative voice boomed out
+through a closed door, “Sit down and don’t wait for me.” And his
+impressed officers took their places, exchanging looks and whispers
+across the table. What! No breakfast? And after apparently knocking
+about all night on deck, too! Clearly, there was something in the wind.
+In the skylight above their heads, bowed earnestly over the plates,
+three wire cages rocked and rattled to the restless jumping of the
+hungry canaries; and they could detect the sounds of their “old
+man’s” deliberate movements within his state-room. Captain Whalley was
+methodically winding up the chronometers, dusting the portrait of
+his late wife, getting a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making
+himself ready in his punctilious unhurried manner to go ashore. He could
+not have swallowed a single mouthful of food that morning. He had made
+up his mind to sell the Fair Maid.
+
+
+III
+
+
+Just at that time the Japanese were casting far and wide for ships
+of European build, and he had no difficulty in finding a purchaser, a
+speculator who drove a hard bargain, but paid cash down for the Fair
+Maid, with a view to a profitable resale. Thus it came about that
+Captain Whalley found himself on a certain afternoon descending the
+steps of one of the most important post-offices of the East with a slip
+of bluish paper in his hand. This was the receipt of a registered letter
+enclosing a draft for two hundred pounds, and addressed to Melbourne.
+Captain Whalley pushed the paper into his waistcoat-pocket, took his
+stick from under his arm, and walked down the street.
+
+It was a recently opened and untidy thoroughfare with rudimentary
+side-walks and a soft layer of dust cushioning the whole width of
+the road. One end touched the slummy street of Chinese shops near the
+harbor, the other drove straight on, without houses, for a couple of
+miles, through patches of jungle-like vegetation, to the yard gates
+of the new Consolidated Docks Company. The crude frontages of the new
+Government buildings alternated with the blank fencing of vacant plots,
+and the view of the sky seemed to give an added spaciousness to the
+broad vista. It was empty and shunned by natives after business
+hours, as though they had expected to see one of the tigers from the
+neighborhood of the New Waterworks on the hill coming at a loping canter
+down the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Captain Whalley
+was not dwarfed by the solitude of the grandly planned street. He
+had too fine a presence for that. He was only a lonely figure walking
+purposefully, with a great white beard like a pilgrim, and with a thick
+stick that resembled a weapon. On one side the new Courts of Justice had
+a low and unadorned portico of squat columns half concealed by a few old
+trees left in the approach. On the other the pavilion wings of the
+new Colonial Treasury came out to the line of the street. But Captain
+Whalley, who had now no ship and no home, remembered in passing that
+on that very site when he first came out from England there had stood a
+fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal
+creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness
+without any docks or waterworks.
+
+No ship--no home. And his poor Ivy away there had no home either. A
+boarding-house is no sort of home though it may get you a living. His
+feelings were horribly rasped by the idea of the boarding-house. In his
+rank of life he had that truly aristocratic temperament characterized by
+a scorn of vulgar gentility and by prejudiced views as to the derogatory
+nature of certain occupations. For his own part he had always preferred
+sailing merchant ships (which is a straightforward occupation) to buying
+and selling merchandise, of which the essence is to get the better of
+somebody in a bargain--an undignified trial of wits at best. His father
+had been Colonel Whalley (retired) of the H. E. I. Company’s service,
+with very slender means besides his pension, but with distinguished
+connections. He could remember as a boy how frequently waiters at the
+inns, country tradesmen and small people of that sort, used to “My lord”
+ the old warrior on the strength of his appearance.
+
+Captain Whalley himself (he would have entered the Navy if his father
+had not died before he was fourteen) had something of a grand air which
+would have suited an old and glorious admiral; but he became lost like
+a straw in the eddy of a brook amongst the swarm of brown and yellow
+humanity filling a thoroughfare, that by contrast with the vast and
+empty avenue he had left seemed as narrow as a lane and absolutely
+riotous with life. The walls of the houses were blue; the shops of the
+Chinamen yawned like cavernous lairs; heaps of nondescript merchandise
+overflowed the gloom of the long range of arcades, and the fiery
+serenity of sunset took the middle of the street from end to end with a
+glow like the reflection of a fire. It fell on the bright colors and the
+dark faces of the bare-footed crowd, on the pallid yellow backs of the
+half-naked jostling coolies, on the accouterments of a tall Sikh trooper
+with a parted beard and fierce mustaches on sentry before the gate of
+the police compound. Looming very big above the heads in a red haze of
+dust, the tightly packed car of the cable tramway navigated cautiously
+up the human stream, with the incessant blare of its horn, in the manner
+of a steamer groping in a fog.
+
+Captain Whalley emerged like a diver on the other side, and in the
+desert shade between the walls of closed warehouses removed his hat to
+cool his brow. A certain disrepute attached to the calling of a
+landlady of a boarding-house. These women were said to be rapacious,
+unscrupulous, untruthful; and though he contemned no class of his
+fellow-creatures--God forbid!--these were suspicions to which it was
+unseemly that a Whalley should lay herself open. He had not expostulated
+with her, however. He was confident she shared his feelings; he was
+sorry for her; he trusted her judgment; he considered it a merciful
+dispensation that he could help her once more,--but in his aristocratic
+heart of hearts he would have found it more easy to reconcile himself to
+the idea of her turning seamstress. Vaguely he remembered reading years
+ago a touching piece called the “Song of the Shirt.” It was all very
+well making songs about poor women. The granddaughter of Colonel
+Whalley, the landlady of a boarding-house! Pooh! He replaced his hat,
+dived into two pockets, and stopping a moment to apply a flaring match
+to the end of a cheap cheroot, blew an embittered cloud of smoke at a
+world that could hold such surprises.
+
+Of one thing he was certain--that she was the own child of a clever
+mother. Now he had got over the wrench of parting with his ship, he
+perceived clearly that such a step had been unavoidable. Perhaps he had
+been growing aware of it all along with an unconfessed knowledge. But
+she, far away there, must have had an intuitive perception of it, with
+the pluck to face that truth and the courage to speak out--all the
+qualities which had made her mother a woman of such excellent counsel.
+
+It would have had to come to that in the end! It was fortunate she had
+forced his hand. In another year or two it would have been an utterly
+barren sale. To keep the ship going he had been involving himself deeper
+every year. He was defenseless before the insidious work of adversity,
+to whose more open assaults he could present a firm front; like a
+cliff that stands unmoved the open battering of the sea, with a lofty
+ignorance of the treacherous backwash undermining its base. As it was,
+every liability satisfied, her request answered, and owing no man a
+penny, there remained to him from the proceeds a sum of five hundred
+pounds put away safely. In addition he had upon his person some forty
+odd dollars--enough to pay his hotel bill, providing he did not linger
+too long in the modest bedroom where he had taken refuge.
+
+Scantily furnished, and with a waxed floor, it opened into one of
+the side-verandas. The straggling building of bricks, as airy as a
+bird-cage, resounded with the incessant flapping of rattan screens
+worried by the wind between the white-washed square pillars of the
+sea-front. The rooms were lofty, a ripple of sunshine flowed over the
+ceilings; and the periodical invasions of tourists from some passenger
+steamer in the harbor flitted through the wind-swept dusk of the
+apartments with the tumult of their unfamiliar voices and impermanent
+presences, like relays of migratory shades condemned to speed headlong
+round the earth without leaving a trace. The babble of their irruptions
+ebbed out as suddenly as it had arisen; the draughty corridors and
+the long chairs of the verandas knew their sight-seeing hurry or
+their prostrate repose no more; and Captain Whalley, substantial and
+dignified, left well-nigh alone in the vast hotel by each light-hearted
+skurry, felt more and more like a stranded tourist with no aim in view,
+like a forlorn traveler without a home. In the solitude of his room he
+smoked thoughtfully, gazing at the two sea-chests which held all that he
+could call his own in this world. A thick roll of charts in a sheath
+of sailcloth leaned in a corner; the flat packing-case containing the
+portrait in oils and the three carbon photographs had been pushed under
+the bed. He was tired of discussing terms, of assisting at surveys, of
+all the routine of the business. What to the other parties was merely
+the sale of a ship was to him a momentous event involving a radically
+new view of existence. He knew that after this ship there would be no
+other; and the hopes of his youth, the exercise of his abilities, every
+feeling and achievement of his manhood, had been indissolubly connected
+with ships. He had served ships; he had owned ships; and even the years
+of his actual retirement from the sea had been made bearable by the idea
+that he had only to stretch out his hand full of money to get a ship. He
+had been at liberty to feel as though he were the owner of all the
+ships in the world. The selling of this one was weary work; but when
+she passed from him at last, when he signed the last receipt, it was as
+though all the ships had gone out of the world together, leaving him on
+the shore of inaccessible oceans with seven hundred pounds in his hands.
+
+Striding firmly, without haste, along the quay, Captain Whalley averted
+his glances from the familiar roadstead. Two generations of seamen born
+since his first day at sea stood between him and all these ships at the
+anchorage. His own was sold, and he had been asking himself, What next?
+
+From the feeling of loneliness, of inward emptiness,--and of loss
+too, as if his very soul had been taken out of him forcibly,--there had
+sprung at first a desire to start right off and join his daughter.
+“Here are the last pence,” he would say to her; “take them, my dear. And
+here’s your old father: you must take him too.”
+
+His soul recoiled, as if afraid of what lay hidden at the bottom of
+this impulse. Give up! Never! When one is thoroughly weary all sorts of
+nonsense come into one’s head. A pretty gift it would have been for a
+poor woman--this seven hundred pounds with the incumbrance of a hale old
+fellow more than likely to last for years and years to come. Was he not
+as fit to die in harness as any of the youngsters in charge of these
+anchored ships out yonder? He was as solid now as ever he had been. But
+as to who would give him work to do, that was another matter. Were he,
+with his appearance and antecedents, to go about looking for a junior’s
+berth, people, he was afraid, would not take him seriously; or else if
+he succeeded in impressing them, he would maybe obtain their pity, which
+would be like stripping yourself naked to be kicked. He was not anxious
+to give himself away for less than nothing. He had no use for anybody’s
+pity. On the other hand, a command--the only thing he could try for with
+due regard for common decency--was not likely to be lying in wait
+for him at the corner of the next street. Commands don’t go a-begging
+nowadays. Ever since he had come ashore to carry out the business of
+the sale he had kept his ears open, but had heard no hint of one being
+vacant in the port. And even if there had been one, his successful past
+itself stood in his way. He had been his own employer too long. The only
+credential he could produce was the testimony of his whole life. What
+better recommendation could anyone require? But vaguely he felt that
+the unique document would be looked upon as an archaic curiosity of the
+Eastern waters, a screed traced in obsolete words--in a half-forgotten
+language.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Revolving these thoughts, he strolled on near the railings of the quay,
+broad-chested, without a stoop, as though his big shoulders had never
+felt the burden of the loads that must be carried between the cradle
+and the grave. No single betraying fold or line of care disfigured the
+reposeful modeling of his face. It was full and untanned; and the upper
+part emerged, massively quiet, out of the downward flow of silvery hair,
+with the striking delicacy of its clear complexion and the powerful
+width of the forehead. The first cast of his glance fell on you candid
+and swift, like a boy’s; but because of the ragged snowy thatch of the
+eyebrows the affability of his attention acquired the character of a
+dark and searching scrutiny. With age he had put on flesh a little, had
+increased his girth like an old tree presenting no symptoms of decay;
+and even the opulent, lustrous ripple of white hairs upon his chest
+seemed an attribute of unquenchable vitality and vigor.
+
+Once rather proud of his great bodily strength, and even of his personal
+appearance, conscious of his worth, and firm in his rectitude, there had
+remained to him, like the heritage of departed prosperity, the tranquil
+bearing of a man who had proved himself fit in every sort of way for the
+life of his choice. He strode on squarely under the projecting brim of
+an ancient Panama hat. It had a low crown, a crease through its whole
+diameter, a narrow black ribbon. Imperishable and a little discolored,
+this headgear made it easy to pick him out from afar on thronged wharves
+and in the busy streets. He had never adopted the comparatively modern
+fashion of pipeclayed cork helmets. He disliked the form; and he hoped
+he could manage to keep a cool head to the end of his life without all
+these contrivances for hygienic ventilation. His hair was cropped close,
+his linen always of immaculate whiteness; a suit of thin gray flannel,
+worn threadbare but scrupulously brushed, floated about his burly limbs,
+adding to his bulk by the looseness of its cut. The years had mellowed
+the good-humored, imperturbable audacity of his prime into a temper
+carelessly serene; and the leisurely tapping of his iron-shod stick
+accompanied his footfalls with a self-confident sound on the flagstones.
+It was impossible to connect such a fine presence and this unruffled
+aspect with the belittling troubles of poverty; the man’s whole
+existence appeared to pass before you, facile and large, in the freedom
+of means as ample as the clothing of his body.
+
+The irrational dread of having to break into his five hundred pounds for
+personal expenses in the hotel disturbed the steady poise of his mind.
+There was no time to lose. The bill was running up. He nourished the
+hope that this five hundred would perhaps be the means, if everything
+else failed, of obtaining some work which, keeping his body and soul
+together (not a matter of great outlay), would enable him to be of use
+to his daughter. To his mind it was her own money which he employed, as
+it were, in backing her father and solely for her benefit. Once at work,
+he would help her with the greater part of his earnings; he was good for
+many years yet, and this boarding-house business, he argued to himself,
+whatever the prospects, could not be much of a gold-mine from the first
+start. But what work? He was ready to lay hold of anything in an honest
+way so that it came quickly to his hand; because the five hundred pounds
+must be preserved intact for eventual use. That was the great point.
+With the entire five hundred one felt a substance at one’s back; but
+it seemed to him that should he let it dwindle to four-fifty or even
+four-eighty, all the efficiency would be gone out of the money, as though
+there were some magic power in the round figure. But what sort of work?
+
+Confronted by that haunting question as by an uneasy ghost, for whom he
+had no exorcising formula, Captain Whalley stopped short on the apex
+of a small bridge spanning steeply the bed of a canalized creek with
+granite shores. Moored between the square blocks a seagoing Malay prau
+floated half hidden under the arch of masonry, with her spars lowered
+down, without a sound of life on board, and covered from stem to stern
+with a ridge of palm-leaf mats. He had left behind him the overheated
+pavements bordered by the stone frontages that, like the sheer face of
+cliffs, followed the sweep of the quays; and an unconfined spaciousness
+of orderly and sylvan aspect opened before him its wide plots of rolled
+grass, like pieces of green carpet smoothly pegged out, its long ranges
+of trees lined up in colossal porticos of dark shafts roofed with a
+vault of branches.
+
+Some of these avenues ended at the sea. It was a terraced shore; and
+beyond, upon the level expanse, profound and glistening like the gaze
+of a dark-blue eye, an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself
+indefinitely through the gap between a couple of verdant twin islets.
+The masts and spars of a few ships far away, hull down in the outer
+roads, sprang straight from the water in a fine maze of rosy lines
+penciled on the clear shadow of the eastern board. Captain Whalley gave
+them a long glance. The ship, once his own, was anchored out there. It
+was staggering to think that it was open to him no longer to take a boat
+at the jetty and get himself pulled off to her when the evening came. To
+no ship. Perhaps never more. Before the sale was concluded, and till the
+purchase-money had been paid, he had spent daily some time on board the
+Fair Maid. The money had been paid this very morning, and now, all at
+once, there was positively no ship that he could go on board of when he
+liked; no ship that would need his presence in order to do her work--to
+live. It seemed an incredible state of affairs, something too bizarre
+to last. And the sea was full of craft of all sorts. There was that prau
+lying so still swathed in her shroud of sewn palm-leaves--she too had
+her indispensable man. They lived through each other, this Malay he had
+never seen, and this high-sterned thing of no size that seemed to be
+resting after a long journey. And of all the ships in sight, near and
+far, each was provided with a man, the man without whom the finest ship
+is a dead thing, a floating and purposeless log.
+
+After his one glance at the roadstead he went on, since there was
+nothing to turn back for, and the time must be got through somehow. The
+avenues of big trees ran straight over the Esplanade, cutting each other
+at diverse angles, columnar below and luxuriant above. The interlaced
+boughs high up there seemed to slumber; not a leaf stirred overhead:
+and the reedy cast-iron lampposts in the middle of the road, gilt like
+scepters, diminished in a long perspective, with their globes of white
+porcelain atop, resembling a barbarous decoration of ostriches’ eggs
+displayed in a row. The flaming sky kindled a tiny crimson spark upon
+the glistening surface of each glassy shell.
+
+With his chin sunk a little, his hands behind his back, and the end of
+his stick marking the gravel with a faint wavering line at his heels,
+Captain Whalley reflected that if a ship without a man was like a body
+without a soul, a sailor without a ship was of not much more account
+in this world than an aimless log adrift upon the sea. The log might be
+sound enough by itself, tough of fiber, and hard to destroy--but what of
+that! And a sudden sense of irremediable idleness weighted his feet like
+a great fatigue.
+
+A succession of open carriages came bowling along the newly opened
+sea-road. You could see across the wide grass-plots the discs of
+vibration made by the spokes. The bright domes of the parasols swayed
+lightly outwards like full-blown blossoms on the rim of a vase; and
+the quiet sheet of dark-blue water, crossed by a bar of purple, made a
+background for the spinning wheels and the high action of the horses,
+whilst the turbaned heads of the Indian servants elevated above the line
+of the sea horizon glided rapidly on the paler blue of the sky. In an
+open space near the little bridge each turn-out trotted smartly in a
+wide curve away from the sunset; then pulling up sharp, entered the main
+alley in a long slow-moving file with the great red stillness of the sky
+at the back. The trunks of mighty trees stood all touched with red on
+the same side, the air seemed aflame under the high foliage, the
+very ground under the hoofs of the horses was red. The wheels turned
+solemnly; one after another the sunshades drooped, folding their colors
+like gorgeous flowers shutting their petals at the end of the day. In
+the whole half-mile of human beings no voice uttered a distinct word,
+only a faint thudding noise went on mingled with slight jingling sounds,
+and the motionless heads and shoulders of men and women sitting in
+couples emerged stolidly above the lowered hoods--as if wooden. But one
+carriage and pair coming late did not join the line.
+
+It fled along in a noiseless roll; but on entering the avenue one of the
+dark bays snorted, arching his neck and shying against the steel-tipped
+pole; a flake of foam fell from the bit upon the point of a satiny
+shoulder, and the dusky face of the coachman leaned forward at once over
+the hands taking a fresh grip of the reins. It was a long dark-green
+landau, having a dignified and buoyant motion between the sharply
+curved C-springs, and a sort of strictly official majesty in its supreme
+elegance. It seemed more roomy than is usual, its horses seemed slightly
+bigger, the appointments a shade more perfect, the servants perched
+somewhat higher on the box. The dresses of three women--two young
+and pretty, and one, handsome, large, of mature age--seemed to fill
+completely the shallow body of the carriage. The fourth face was that
+of a man, heavy lidded, distinguished and sallow, with a somber, thick,
+iron-gray imperial and mustaches, which somehow had the air of solid
+appendages. His Excellency--
+
+The rapid motion of that one equipage made all the others appear utterly
+inferior, blighted, and reduced to crawl painfully at a snail’s pace.
+The landau distanced the whole file in a sort of sustained rush; the
+features of the occupant whirling out of sight left behind an impression
+of fixed stares and impassive vacancy; and after it had vanished in full
+flight as it were, notwithstanding the long line of vehicles hugging the
+curb at a walk, the whole lofty vista of the avenue seemed to lie open
+and emptied of life in the enlarged impression of an august solitude.
+
+Captain Whalley had lifted his head to look, and his mind, disturbed in
+its meditation, turned with wonder (as men’s minds will do) to matters
+of no importance. It struck him that it was to this port, where he had
+just sold his last ship, that he had come with the very first he had
+ever owned, and with his head full of a plan for opening a new trade
+with a distant part of the Archipelago. The then governor had given
+him no end of encouragement. No Excellency he--this Mr. Denham--this
+governor with his jacket off; a man who tended night and day, so to
+speak, the growing prosperity of the settlement with the self-forgetful
+devotion of a nurse for a child she loves; a lone bachelor who lived as
+in a camp with the few servants and his three dogs in what was called
+then the Government Bungalow: a low-roofed structure on the half-cleared
+slope of a hill, with a new flagstaff in front and a police orderly on
+the veranda. He remembered toiling up that hill under a heavy sun for
+his audience; the unfurnished aspect of the cool shaded room; the long
+table covered at one end with piles of papers, and with two guns, a
+brass telescope, a small bottle of oil with a feather stuck in the neck
+at the other--and the flattering attention given to him by the man in
+power. It was an undertaking full of risk he had come to expound, but a
+twenty minutes’ talk in the Government Bungalow on the hill had made it
+go smoothly from the start. And as he was retiring Mr. Denham, already
+seated before the papers, called out after him, “Next month the Dido
+starts for a cruise that way, and I shall request her captain officially
+to give you a look in and see how you get on.” The Dido was one of the
+smart frigates on the China station--and five-and-thirty years make a
+big slice of time. Five-and-thirty years ago an enterprise like his had
+for the colony enough importance to be looked after by a Queen’s ship.
+A big slice of time. Individuals were of some account then. Men like
+himself; men, too, like poor Evans, for instance, with his red face,
+his coal-black whiskers, and his restless eyes, who had set up the first
+patent slip for repairing small ships, on the edge of the forest, in
+a lonely bay three miles up the coast. Mr. Denham had encouraged that
+enterprise too, and yet somehow poor Evans had ended by dying at
+home deucedly hard up. His son, they said, was squeezing oil out of
+cocoa-nuts for a living on some God-forsaken islet of the Indian Ocean;
+but it was from that patent slip in a lonely wooded bay that had sprung
+the workshops of the Consolidated Docks Company, with its three
+graving basins carved out of solid rock, its wharves, its jetties,
+its electric-light plant, its steam-power houses--with its gigantic
+sheer-legs, fit to lift the heaviest weight ever carried afloat, and
+whose head could be seen like the top of a queer white monument peeping
+over bushy points of land and sandy promontories, as you approached the
+New Harbor from the west.
+
+There had been a time when men counted: there were not so many carriages
+in the colony then, though Mr. Denham, he fancied, had a buggy. And
+Captain Whalley seemed to be swept out of the great avenue by the swirl
+of a mental backwash. He remembered muddy shores, a harbor without
+quays, the one solitary wooden pier (but that was a public work) jutting
+out crookedly, the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught
+fire mysteriously and smoldered for days, so that amazed ships came
+into a roadstead full of sulphurous smoke, and the sun hung blood-red
+at midday. He remembered the things, the faces, and something more
+besides--like the faint flavor of a cup quaffed to the bottom, like a
+subtle sparkle of the air that was not to be found in the atmosphere of
+to-day.
+
+In this evocation, swift and full of detail like a flash of magnesium
+light into the niches of a dark memorial hall, Captain Whalley
+contemplated things once important, the efforts of small men, the growth
+of a great place, but now robbed of all consequence by the greatness
+of accomplished facts, by hopes greater still; and they gave him for a
+moment such an almost physical grip upon time, such a comprehension of
+our unchangeable feelings, that he stopped short, struck the ground with
+his stick, and ejaculated mentally, “What the devil am I doing here!” He
+seemed lost in a sort of surprise; but he heard his name called out in
+wheezy tones once, twice--and turned on his heels slowly.
+
+He beheld then, waddling towards him autocratically, a man of an
+old-fashioned and gouty aspect, with hair as white as his own, but with
+shaved, florid cheeks, wearing a necktie--almost a neckcloth--whose
+stiff ends projected far beyond his chin; with round legs, round arms,
+a round body, a round face--generally producing the effect of his short
+figure having been distended by means of an air-pump as much as the
+seams of his clothing would stand. This was the Master-Attendant of the
+port. A master-attendant is a superior sort of harbor-master; a person,
+out in the East, of some consequence in his sphere; a Government
+official, a magistrate for the waters of the port, and possessed of vast
+but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes.
+This particular Master-Attendant was reported to consider it miserably
+inadequate, on the ground that it did not include the power of life
+and death. This was a jocular exaggeration. Captain Eliott was fairly
+satisfied with his position, and nursed no inconsiderable sense of such
+power as he had. His conceited and tyrannical disposition did not allow
+him to let it dwindle in his hands for want of use. The uproarious,
+choleric frankness of his comments on people’s character and conduct
+caused him to be feared at bottom; though in conversation many pretended
+not to mind him in the least, others would only smile sourly at the
+mention of his name, and there were even some who dared to pronounce him
+“a meddlesome old ruffian.” But for almost all of them one of Captain
+Eliott’s outbreaks was nearly as distasteful to face as a chance of
+annihilation.
+
+
+V
+
+
+As soon as he had come up quite close he said, mouthing in a growl--
+
+“What’s this I hear, Whalley? Is it true you’re selling the Fair Maid?”
+
+Captain Whalley, looking away, said the thing was done--money had been
+paid that morning; and the other expressed at once his approbation of
+such an extremely sensible proceeding. He had got out of his trap to
+stretch his legs, he explained, on his way home to dinner. Sir Frederick
+looked well at the end of his time. Didn’t he?
+
+Captain Whalley could not say; had only noticed the carriage going past.
+
+The Master-Attendant, plunging his hands into the pockets of an
+alpaca jacket inappropriately short and tight for a man of his age and
+appearance, strutted with a slight limp, and with his head reaching only
+to the shoulder of Captain Whalley, who walked easily, staring straight
+before him. They had been good comrades years ago, almost intimates. At
+the time when Whalley commanded the renowned Condor, Eliott had charge
+of the nearly as famous Ringdove for the same owners; and when the
+appointment of Master-Attendant was created, Whalley would have been the
+only other serious candidate. But Captain Whalley, then in the prime of
+life, was resolved to serve no one but his own auspicious Fortune. Far
+away, tending his hot irons, he was glad to hear the other had been
+successful. There was a worldly suppleness in bluff Ned Eliott that
+would serve him well in that sort of official appointment. And they
+were so dissimilar at bottom that as they came slowly to the end of the
+avenue before the Cathedral, it had never come into Whalley’s head that
+he might have been in that man’s place--provided for to the end of his
+days.
+
+The sacred edifice, standing in solemn isolation amongst the converging
+avenues of enormous trees, as if to put grave thoughts of heaven into
+the hours of ease, presented a closed Gothic portal to the light and
+glory of the west. The glass of the rosace above the ogive glowed like
+fiery coal in the deep carvings of a wheel of stone. The two men faced
+about.
+
+“I’ll tell you what they ought to do next, Whalley,” growled Captain
+Eliott suddenly.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“They ought to send a real live lord out here when Sir Frederick’s time
+is up. Eh?”
+
+Captain Whalley perfunctorily did not see why a lord of the right sort
+should not do as well as anyone else. But this was not the other’s point
+of view.
+
+“No, no. Place runs itself. Nothing can stop it now. Good enough for a
+lord,” he growled in short sentences. “Look at the changes in our time.
+We need a lord here now. They have got a lord in Bombay.”
+
+He dined once or twice every year at the Government House--a
+many-windowed, arcaded palace upon a hill laid out in roads and gardens.
+And lately he had been taking about a duke in his Master-Attendant’s
+steam-launch to visit the harbor improvements. Before that he had “most
+obligingly” gone out in person to pick out a good berth for the ducal
+yacht. Afterwards he had an invitation to lunch on board. The duchess
+herself lunched with them. A big woman with a red face. Complexion quite
+sunburnt. He should think ruined. Very gracious manners. They were going
+on to Japan. . . .
+
+He ejaculated these details for Captain Whalley’s edification, pausing
+to blow out his cheeks as if with a pent-up sense of importance, and
+repeatedly protruding his thick lips till the blunt crimson end of his
+nose seemed to dip into the milk of his mustache. The place ran itself;
+it was fit for any lord; it gave no trouble except in its Marine
+department--in its Marine department he repeated twice, and after
+a heavy snort began to relate how the other day her Majesty’s
+Consul-General in French Cochin-China had cabled to him--in his official
+capacity--asking for a qualified man to be sent over to take charge of a
+Glasgow ship whose master had died in Saigon.
+
+“I sent word of it to the officers’ quarters in the Sailors’ Home,” he
+continued, while the limp in his gait seemed to grow more accentuated
+with the increasing irritation of his voice. “Place’s full of them.
+Twice as many men as there are berths going in the local trade. All
+hungry for an easy job. Twice as many--and--What d’you think,
+Whalley? . . .”
+
+He stopped short; his hands clenched and thrust deeply downwards, seemed
+ready to burst the pockets of his jacket. A slight sigh escaped Captain
+Whalley.
+
+“Hey? You would think they would be falling over each other. Not a bit
+of it. Frightened to go home. Nice and warm out here to lie about a
+veranda waiting for a job. I sit and wait in my office. Nobody. What
+did they suppose? That I was going to sit there like a dummy with the
+Consul-General’s cable before me? Not likely. So I looked up a list of
+them I keep by me and sent word for Hamilton--the worst loafer of them
+all--and just made him go. Threatened to instruct the steward of the
+Sailors’ Home to have him turned out neck and crop. He did not think
+the berth was good enough--if--you--please. ‘I’ve your little records by
+me,’ said I. ‘You came ashore here eighteen months ago, and you haven’t
+done six months’ work since. You are in debt for your board now at the
+Home, and I suppose you reckon the Marine Office will pay in the end.
+Eh? So it shall; but if you don’t take this chance, away you go to
+England, assisted passage, by the first homeward steamer that comes
+along. You are no better than a pauper. We don’t want any white paupers
+here.’ I scared him. But look at the trouble all this gave me.”
+
+“You would not have had any trouble,” Captain Whalley said almost
+involuntarily, “if you had sent for me.”
+
+Captain Eliott was immensely amused; he shook with laughter as he
+walked. But suddenly he stopped laughing. A vague recollection had
+crossed his mind. Hadn’t he heard it said at the time of the Travancore
+and Deccan smash that poor Whalley had been cleaned out completely.
+“Fellow’s hard up, by heavens!” he thought; and at once he cast a
+sidelong upward glance at his companion. But Captain Whalley was smiling
+austerely straight before him, with a carriage of the head inconceivable
+in a penniless man--and he became reassured. Impossible. Could not
+have lost everything. That ship had been only a hobby of his. And the
+reflection that a man who had confessed to receiving that very morning a
+presumably large sum of money was not likely to spring upon him a demand
+for a small loan put him entirely at his ease again. There had come a
+long pause in their talk, however, and not knowing how to begin again,
+he growled out soberly, “We old fellows ought to take a rest now.”
+
+“The best thing for some of us would be to die at the oar,” Captain
+Whalley said negligently.
+
+“Come, now. Aren’t you a bit tired by this time of the whole show?”
+ muttered the other sullenly.
+
+“Are you?”
+
+Captain Eliott was. Infernally tired. He only hung on to his berth so
+long in order to get his pension on the highest scale before he went
+home. It would be no better than poverty, anyhow; still, it was the only
+thing between him and the workhouse. And he had a family. Three girls,
+as Whalley knew. He gave “Harry, old boy,” to understand that these
+three girls were a source of the greatest anxiety and worry to him.
+Enough to drive a man distracted.
+
+“Why? What have they been doing now?” asked Captain Whalley with a sort
+of amused absent-mindedness.
+
+“Doing! Doing nothing. That’s just it. Lawn-tennis and silly novels from
+morning to night. . . .”
+
+If one of them at least had been a boy. But all three! And, as ill-luck
+would have it, there did not seem to be any decent young fellows left
+in the world. When he looked around in the club he saw only a lot of
+conceited popinjays too selfish to think of making a good woman happy.
+Extreme indigence stared him in the face with all that crowd to keep at
+home. He had cherished the idea of building himself a little house in
+the country--in Surrey--to end his days in, but he was afraid it was out
+of the question, . . . and his staring eyes rolled upwards with such
+a pathetic anxiety that Captain Whalley charitably nodded down at him,
+restraining a sort of sickening desire to laugh.
+
+“You must know what it is yourself, Harry. Girls are the very devil for
+worry and anxiety.”
+
+“Ay! But mine is doing well,” Captain Whalley pronounced slowly, staring
+to the end of the avenue.
+
+The Master-Attendant was glad to hear this. Uncommonly glad. He
+remembered her well. A pretty girl she was.
+
+Captain Whalley, stepping out carelessly, assented as if in a dream.
+
+“She was pretty.”
+
+The procession of carriages was breaking up.
+
+One after another they left the file to go off at a trot, animating the
+vast avenue with their scattered life and movement; but soon the aspect
+of dignified solitude returned and took possession of the straight wide
+road. A syce in white stood at the head of a Burmah pony harnessed to a
+varnished two-wheel cart; and the whole thing waiting by the curb seemed
+no bigger than a child’s toy forgotten under the soaring trees. Captain
+Eliott waddled up to it and made as if to clamber in, but refrained;
+and keeping one hand resting easily on the shaft, he changed the
+conversation from his pension, his daughters, and his poverty back again
+to the only other topic in the world--the Marine Office, the men and the
+ships of the port.
+
+He proceeded to give instances of what was expected of him; and his
+thick voice drowsed in the still air like the obstinate droning of an
+enormous bumble-bee. Captain Whalley did not know what was the force or
+the weakness that prevented him from saying good-night and walking away.
+It was as though he had been too tired to make the effort. How queer.
+More queer than any of Ned’s instances. Or was it that overpowering
+sense of idleness alone that made him stand there and listen to these
+stories. Nothing very real had ever troubled Ned Eliott; and gradually
+he seemed to detect deep in, as if wrapped up in the gross wheezy
+rumble, something of the clear hearty voice of the young captain of the
+Ringdove. He wondered if he too had changed to the same extent; and it
+seemed to him that the voice of his old chum had not changed so very
+much--that the man was the same. Not a bad fellow the pleasant, jolly
+Ned Eliott, friendly, well up to his business--and always a bit of a
+humbug. He remembered how he used to amuse his poor wife. She could read
+him like an open book. When the Condor and the Ringdove happened to be
+in port together, she would frequently ask him to bring Captain Eliott
+to dinner. They had not met often since those old days. Not once in five
+years, perhaps. He regarded from under his white eyebrows this man he
+could not bring himself to take into his confidence at this juncture;
+and the other went on with his intimate outpourings, and as remote from
+his hearer as though he had been talking on a hill-top a mile away.
+
+He was in a bit of a quandary now as to the steamer Sofala. Ultimately
+every hitch in the port came into his hands to undo. They would miss
+him when he was gone in another eighteen months, and most likely some
+retired naval officer had been pitchforked into the appointment--a man
+that would understand nothing and care less. That steamer was a coasting
+craft having a steady trade connection as far north as Tenasserim; but
+the trouble was she could get no captain to take her on her regular
+trip. Nobody would go in her. He really had no power, of course, to
+order a man to take a job. It was all very well to stretch a point on
+the demand of a consul-general, but . . .
+
+“What’s the matter with the ship?” Captain Whalley interrupted in
+measured tones.
+
+“Nothing’s the matter. Sound old steamer. Her owner has been in my
+office this afternoon tearing his hair.”
+
+“Is he a white man?” asked Whalley in an interested voice.
+
+“He calls himself a white man,” answered the Master-Attendant scornfully;
+“but if so, it’s just skin-deep and no more. I told him that to his face
+too.”
+
+“But who is he, then?”
+
+“He’s the chief engineer of her. See _that_, Harry?”
+
+“I see,” Captain Whalley said thoughtfully. “The engineer. I see.”
+
+How the fellow came to be a shipowner at the same time was quite a
+tale. He came out third in a home ship nearly fifteen years ago, Captain
+Eliott remembered, and got paid off after a bad sort of row both with
+his skipper and his chief. Anyway, they seemed jolly glad to get rid of
+him at all costs. Clearly a mutinous sort of chap. Well, he remained out
+here, a perfect nuisance, everlastingly shipped and unshipped, unable
+to keep a berth very long; pretty nigh went through every engine-room
+afloat belonging to the colony. Then suddenly, “What do you think
+happened, Harry?”
+
+Captain Whalley, who seemed lost in a mental effort as of doing a sum
+in his head, gave a slight start. He really couldn’t imagine. The
+Master-Attendant’s voice vibrated dully with hoarse emphasis. The man
+actually had the luck to win the second prize in the Manilla lottery.
+All these engineers and officers of ships took tickets in that gamble.
+It seemed to be a perfect mania with them all.
+
+Everybody expected now that he would take himself off home with his
+money, and go to the devil in his own way. Not at all. The Sofala,
+judged too small and not quite modern enough for the sort of trade
+she was in, could be got for a moderate price from her owners, who had
+ordered a new steamer from Europe. He rushed in and bought her. This man
+had never given any signs of that sort of mental intoxication the mere
+fact of getting hold of a large sum of money may produce--not till he
+got a ship of his own; but then he went off his balance all at once:
+came bouncing into the Marine Office on some transfer business, with his
+hat hanging over his left eye and switching a little cane in his hand,
+and told each one of the clerks separately that “Nobody could put him
+out now. It was his turn. There was no one over him on earth, and there
+never would be either.” He swaggered and strutted between the desks,
+talking at the top of his voice, and trembling like a leaf all the
+while, so that the current business of the office was suspended for the
+time he was in there, and everybody in the big room stood open-mouthed
+looking at his antics. Afterwards he could be seen during the hottest
+hours of the day with his face as red as fire rushing along up and down
+the quays to look at his ship from different points of view: he seemed
+inclined to stop every stranger he came across just to let them know
+“that there would be no longer anyone over him; he had bought a ship;
+nobody on earth could put him out of his engine-room now.”
+
+Good bargain as she was, the price of the Sofala took up pretty near all
+the lottery-money. He had left himself no capital to work with. That did
+not matter so much, for these were the halcyon days of steam
+coasting trade, before some of the home shipping firms had thought of
+establishing local fleets to feed their main lines. These, when once
+organized, took the biggest slices out of that cake, of course; and
+by-and-by a squad of confounded German tramps turned up east of Suez
+Canal and swept up all the crumbs. They prowled on the cheap to and fro
+along the coast and between the islands, like a lot of sharks in the
+water ready to snap up anything you let drop. And then the high old
+times were over for good; for years the Sofala had made no more, he
+judged, than a fair living. Captain Eliott looked upon it as his duty
+in every way to assist an English ship to hold her own; and it stood to
+reason that if for want of a captain the Sofala began to miss her trips
+she would very soon lose her trade. There was the quandary. The man was
+too impracticable. “Too much of a beggar on horseback from the first,”
+ he explained. “Seemed to grow worse as the time went on. In the last
+three years he’s run through eleven skippers; he had tried every single
+man here, outside of the regular lines. I had warned him before that
+this would not do. And now, of course, no one will look at the Sofala. I
+had one or two men up at my office and talked to them; but, as they said
+to me, what was the good of taking the berth to lead a regular dog’s
+life for a month and then get the sack at the end of the first trip? The
+fellow, of course, told me it was all nonsense; there has been a plot
+hatching for years against him. And now it had come. All the horrid
+sailors in the port had conspired to bring him to his knees, because he
+was an engineer.”
+
+Captain Eliott emitted a throaty chuckle.
+
+“And the fact is, that if he misses a couple more trips he need never
+trouble himself to start again. He won’t find any cargo in his old
+trade. There’s too much competition nowadays for people to keep their
+stuff lying about for a ship that does not turn up when she’s expected.
+It’s a bad lookout for him. He swears he will shut himself on board and
+starve to death in his cabin rather than sell her--even if he could find
+a buyer. And that’s not likely in the least. Not even the Japs would
+give her insured value for her. It isn’t like selling sailing-ships.
+Steamers _do_ get out of date, besides getting old.”
+
+“He must have laid by a good bit of money though,” observed Captain
+Whalley quietly.
+
+The Harbor-master puffed out his purple cheeks to an amazing size.
+
+“Not a stiver, Harry. Not--a--single--sti-ver.”
+
+He waited; but as Captain Whalley, stroking his beard slowly, looked
+down on the ground without a word, he tapped him on the forearm,
+tiptoed, and said in a hoarse whisper--
+
+“The Manilla lottery has been eating him up.”
+
+He frowned a little, nodding in tiny affirmative jerks. They all were
+going in for it; a third of the wages paid to ships’ officers (“in my
+port,” he snorted) went to Manilla. It was a mania. That fellow Massy
+had been bitten by it like the rest of them from the first; but after
+winning once he seemed to have persuaded himself he had only to try
+again to get another big prize. He had taken dozens and scores of
+tickets for every drawing since. What with this vice and his ignorance
+of affairs, ever since he had improvidently bought that steamer he had
+been more or less short of money.
+
+This, in Captain Eliott’s opinion, gave an opening for a sensible
+sailor-man with a few pounds to step in and save that fool from
+the consequences of his folly. It was his craze to quarrel with his
+captains. He had had some really good men too, who would have been too
+glad to stay if he would only let them. But no. He seemed to think
+he was no owner unless he was kicking somebody out in the morning and
+having a row with the new man in the evening. What was wanted for him
+was a master with a couple of hundred or so to take an interest in the
+ship on proper conditions. You don’t discharge a man for no fault, only
+because of the fun of telling him to pack up his traps and go ashore,
+when you know that in that case you are bound to buy back his share. On
+the other hand, a fellow with an interest in the ship is not likely to
+throw up his job in a huff about a trifle. He had told Massy that. He
+had said: “‘This won’t do, Mr. Massy. We are getting very sick of you
+here in the Marine Office. What you must do now is to try whether you
+could get a sailor to join you as partner. That seems to be the only
+way.’ And that was sound advice, Harry.”
+
+Captain Whalley, leaning on his stick, was perfectly still all over, and
+his hand, arrested in the act of stroking, grasped his whole beard. And
+what did the fellow say to that?
+
+The fellow had the audacity to fly out at the Master-Attendant. He had
+received the advice in a most impudent manner. “I didn’t come here to
+be laughed at,” he had shrieked. “I appeal to you as an Englishman and a
+shipowner brought to the verge of ruin by an illegal conspiracy of your
+beggarly sailors, and all you condescend to do for me is to tell me to
+go and get a partner!” . . . The fellow had presumed to stamp with rage
+on the floor of the private office. Where was he going to get a partner?
+Was he being taken for a fool? Not a single one of that contemptible lot
+ashore at the “Home” had twopence in his pocket to bless himself with.
+The very native curs in the bazaar knew that much. . . . “And it’s true
+enough, Harry,” rumbled Captain Eliott judicially. “They are much more
+likely one and all to owe money to the Chinamen in Denham Road for the
+clothes on their backs. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you make too much noise over it
+for my taste, Mr. Massy. Good morning.’ He banged the door after him; he
+dared to bang my door, confound his cheek!”
+
+The head of the Marine department was out of breath with indignation;
+then recollecting himself as it were, “I’ll end by being late to
+dinner--yarning with you here . . . wife doesn’t like it.”
+
+He clambered ponderously into the trap; leaned out sideways, and only
+then wondered wheezily what on earth Captain Whalley could have been
+doing with himself of late. They had had no sight of each other for
+years and years till the other day when he had seen him unexpectedly in
+the office.
+
+What on earth . . .
+
+Captain Whalley seemed to be smiling to himself in his white beard.
+
+“The earth is big,” he said vaguely.
+
+The other, as if to test the statement, stared all round from his
+driving-seat. The Esplanade was very quiet; only from afar, from very
+far, a long way from the seashore, across the stretches of grass,
+through the long ranges of trees, came faintly the toot--toot--toot of
+the cable car beginning to roll before the empty peristyle of the Public
+Library on its three-mile journey to the New Harbor Docks.
+
+“Doesn’t seem to be so much room on it,” growled the Master-Attendant,
+“since these Germans came along shouldering us at every turn. It was not
+so in our time.”
+
+He fell into deep thought, breathing stertorously, as though he had been
+taking a nap open-eyed. Perhaps he too, on his side, had detected in the
+silent pilgrim-like figure, standing there by the wheel, like an arrested
+wayfarer, the buried lineaments of the features belonging to the young
+captain of the Condor. Good fellow--Harry Whalley--never very talkative.
+You never knew what he was up to--a bit too off-hand with people of
+consequence, and apt to take a wrong view of a fellow’s actions. Fact
+was he had a too good opinion of himself. He would have liked to tell
+him to get in and drive him home to dinner. But one never knew. Wife
+would not like it.
+
+“And it’s funny to think, Harry,” he went on in a big, subdued drone,
+“that of all the people on it there seems only you and I left to
+remember this part of the world as it used to be . . .”
+
+He was ready to indulge in the sweetness of a sentimental mood had it
+not struck him suddenly that Captain Whalley, unstirring and without
+a word, seemed to be awaiting something--perhaps expecting . . . He
+gathered the reins at once and burst out in bluff, hearty growls--
+
+“Ha! My dear boy. The men we have known--the ships we’ve sailed--ay! and
+the things we’ve done . . .”
+
+The pony plunged--the syce skipped out of the way. Captain Whalley
+raised his arm.
+
+“Good-by.”
+
+
+VI
+
+The sun had set. And when, after drilling a deep hole with his stick, he
+moved from that spot the night had massed its army of shadows under the
+trees. They filled the eastern ends of the avenues as if only waiting
+the signal for a general advance upon the open spaces of the world; they
+were gathering low between the deep stone-faced banks of the canal. The
+Malay prau, half-concealed under the arch of the bridge, had not altered
+its position a quarter of an inch. For a long time Captain Whalley
+stared down over the parapet, till at last the floating immobility
+of that beshrouded thing seemed to grow upon him into something
+inexplicable and alarming. The twilight abandoned the zenith; its
+reflected gleams left the world below, and the water of the canal seemed
+to turn into pitch. Captain Whalley crossed it.
+
+The turning to the right, which was his way to his hotel, was only
+a very few steps farther. He stopped again (all the houses of the
+sea-front were shut up, the quayside was deserted, but for one or two
+figures of natives walking in the distance) and began to reckon the
+amount of his bill. So many days in the hotel at so many dollars a
+day. To count the days he used his fingers: plunging one hand into his
+pocket, he jingled a few silver coins. All right for three days more;
+and then, unless something turned up, he must break into the five
+hundred--Ivy’s money--invested in her father. It seemed to him that
+the first meal coming out of that reserve would choke him--for certain.
+Reason was of no use. It was a matter of feeling. His feelings had never
+played him false.
+
+He did not turn to the right. He walked on, as if there still had been
+a ship in the roadstead to which he could get himself pulled off in
+the evening. Far away, beyond the houses, on the slope of an indigo
+promontory closing the view of the quays, the slim column of a
+factory-chimney smoked quietly straight up into the clear air. A
+Chinaman, curled down in the stern of one of the half-dozen sampans
+floating off the end of the jetty, caught sight of a beckoning hand.
+He jumped up, rolled his pigtail round his head swiftly, tucked in two
+rapid movements his wide dark trousers high up his yellow thighs, and
+by a single, noiseless, finlike stir of the oars, sheered the sampan
+alongside the steps with the ease and precision of a swimming fish.
+
+“Sofala,” articulated Captain Whalley from above; and the Chinaman,
+a new emigrant probably, stared upwards with a tense attention as if
+waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from the white man’s lips.
+“Sofala,” Captain Whalley repeated; and suddenly his heart failed him.
+He paused. The shores, the islets, the high ground, the low points, were
+dark: the horizon had grown somber; and across the eastern sweep of
+the shore the white obelisk, marking the landing-place of the
+telegraph-cable, stood like a pale ghost on the beach before the dark
+spread of uneven roofs, intermingled with palms, of the native town.
+Captain Whalley began again.
+
+“Sofala. Savee So-fa-la, John?”
+
+This time the Chinaman made out that bizarre sound, and grunted his
+assent uncouthly, low down in his bare throat. With the first yellow
+twinkle of a star that appeared like the head of a pin stabbed deep into
+the smooth, pale, shimmering fabric of the sky, the edge of a keen chill
+seemed to cleave through the warm air of the earth. At the moment of
+stepping into the sampan to go and try for the command of the Sofala
+Captain Whalley shivered a little.
+
+
+When on his return he landed on the quay again Venus, like a choice
+jewel set low on the hem of the sky, cast a faint gold trail behind him
+upon the roadstead, as level as a floor made of one dark and
+polished stone. The lofty vaults of the avenues were black--all
+black overhead--and the porcelain globes on the lamp-posts resembled
+egg-shaped pearls, gigantic and luminous, displayed in a row whose
+farther end seemed to sink in the distance, down to the level of his
+knees. He put his hands behind his back. He would now consider calmly
+the discretion of it before saying the final word to-morrow. His feet
+scrunched the gravel loudly--the discretion of it. It would have been
+easier to appraise had there been a workable alternative. The honesty
+of it was indubitable: he meant well by the fellow; and periodically
+his shadow leaped up intense by his side on the trunks of the trees,
+to lengthen itself, oblique and dim, far over the grass--repeating his
+stride.
+
+The discretion of it. Was there a choice? He seemed already to have lost
+something of himself; to have given up to a hungry specter something of
+his truth and dignity in order to live. But his life was necessary. Let
+poverty do its worst in exacting its toll of humiliation. It was certain
+that Ned Eliott had rendered him, without knowing it, a service for
+which it would have been impossible to ask. He hoped Ned would not think
+there had been something underhand in his action. He supposed that now
+when he heard of it he would understand--or perhaps he would only think
+Whalley an eccentric old fool. What would have been the good of telling
+him--any more than of blurting the whole tale to that man Massy? Five
+hundred pounds ready to invest. Let him make the best of that. Let him
+wonder. You want a captain--I want a ship. That’s enough. B-r-r-r-r.
+What a disagreeable impression that empty, dark, echoing steamer had
+made upon him. . . .
+
+A laid-up steamer was a dead thing and no mistake; a sailing-ship
+somehow seems always ready to spring into life with the breath of the
+incorruptible heaven; but a steamer, thought Captain Whalley, with her
+fires out, without the warm whiffs from below meeting you on her decks,
+without the hiss of steam, the clangs of iron in her breast--lies there
+as cold and still and pulseless as a corpse.
+
+In the solitude of the avenue, all black above and lighted below,
+Captain Whalley, considering the discretion of his course, met, as it
+were incidentally, the thought of death. He pushed it aside with dislike
+and contempt. He almost laughed at it; and in the unquenchable vitality
+of his age only thought with a kind of exultation how little he needed
+to keep body and soul together. Not a bad investment for the poor
+woman this solid carcass of her father. And for the rest--in case of
+anything--the agreement should be clear: the whole five hundred to
+be paid back to her integrally within three months. Integrally. Every
+penny. He was not to lose any of her money whatever else had to go--a
+little dignity--some of his self-respect. He had never before allowed
+anybody to remain under any sort of false impression as to himself.
+Well, let that go--for her sake. After all, he had never _said_ anything
+misleading--and Captain Whalley felt himself corrupt to the marrow of
+his bones. He laughed a little with the intimate scorn of his worldly
+prudence. Clearly, with a fellow of that sort, and in the peculiar
+relation they were to stand to each other, it would not have done to
+blurt out everything. He did not like the fellow. He did not like his
+spells of fawning loquacity and bursts of resentfulness. In the end--a
+poor devil. He would not have liked to stand in his shoes. Men were
+not evil, after all. He did not like his sleek hair, his queer way of
+standing at right angles, with his nose in the air, and glancing along
+his shoulder at you. No. On the whole, men were not bad--they were only
+silly or unhappy.
+
+Captain Whalley had finished considering the discretion of that
+step--and there was the whole long night before him. In the full light
+his long beard would glisten like a silver breastplate covering his
+heart; in the spaces between the lamps his burly figure passed less
+distinct, loomed very big, wandering, and mysterious. No; there was
+not much real harm in men: and all the time a shadow marched with him,
+slanting on his left hand--which in the East is a presage of evil.
+
+. . . . . . .
+
+“Can you make out the clump of palms yet, Serang?” asked Captain Whalley
+from his chair on the bridge of the Sofala approaching the bar of Batu
+Beru.
+
+“No, Tuan. By-and-by see.” The old Malay, in a blue dungaree suit,
+planted on his bony dark feet under the bridge awning, put his hands
+behind his back and stared ahead out of the innumerable wrinkles at the
+corners of his eyes.
+
+Captain Whalley sat still, without lifting his head to look for himself.
+Three years--thirty-six times. He had made these palms thirty-six times
+from the southward. They would come into view at the proper time. Thank
+God, the old ship made her courses and distances trip after trip, as
+correct as clockwork. At last he murmured again--
+
+“In sight yet?”
+
+“The sun makes a very great glare, Tuan.”
+
+“Watch well, Serang.”
+
+“Ya, Tuan.”
+
+A white man had ascended the ladder from the deck noiselessly, and had
+listened quietly to this short colloquy. Then he stepped out on the
+bridge and began to walk from end to end, holding up the long cherrywood
+stem of a pipe. His black hair lay plastered in long lanky wisps
+across the bald summit of his head; he had a furrowed brow, a yellow
+complexion, and a thick shapeless nose. A scanty growth of whisker did
+not conceal the contour of his jaw. His aspect was of brooding care;
+and sucking at a curved black mouthpiece, he presented such a heavy
+overhanging profile that even the Serang could not help reflecting
+sometimes upon the extreme unloveliness of some white men.
+
+Captain Whalley seemed to brace himself up in his chair, but gave no
+recognition whatever to his presence. The other puffed jets of smoke;
+then suddenly--
+
+“I could never understand that new mania of yours of having this Malay
+here for your shadow, partner.”
+
+Captain Whalley got up from the chair in all his imposing stature and
+walked across to the binnacle, holding such an unswerving course that
+the other had to back away hurriedly, and remained as if intimidated,
+with the pipe trembling in his hand. “Walk over me now,” he muttered in
+a sort of astounded and discomfited whisper. Then slowly and distinctly
+he said--
+
+“I--am--not--dirt.” And then added defiantly, “As you seem to think.”
+
+The Serang jerked out--
+
+“See the palms now, Tuan.”
+
+Captain Whalley strode forward to the rail; but his eyes, instead of
+going straight to the point, with the assured keen glance of a sailor,
+wandered irresolutely in space, as though he, the discoverer of new
+routes, had lost his way upon this narrow sea.
+
+Another white man, the mate, came up on the bridge. He was tall, young,
+lean, with a mustache like a trooper, and something malicious in the
+eye. He took up a position beside the engineer. Captain Whalley, with
+his back to them, inquired--
+
+“What’s on the log?”
+
+“Eighty-five,” answered the mate quickly, and nudged the engineer with
+his elbow.
+
+Captain Whalley’s muscular hands squeezed the iron rail with an
+extraordinary force; his eyes glared with an enormous effort; he knitted
+his eyebrows, the perspiration fell from under his hat,--and in a
+faint voice he murmured, “Steady her, Serang--when she is on the proper
+bearing.”
+
+The silent Malay stepped back, waited a little, and lifted his arm
+warningly to the helmsman. The wheel revolved rapidly to meet the swing
+of the ship. Again the mate nudged the engineer. But Massy turned upon
+him.
+
+“Mr. Sterne,” he said violently, “let me tell you--as a shipowner--that
+you are no better than a confounded fool.”
+
+
+VII
+
+Sterne went down smirking and apparently not at all disconcerted, but
+the engineer Massy remained on the bridge, moving about with uneasy
+self-assertion. Everybody on board was his inferior--everyone without
+exception. He paid their wages and found them in their food. They ate
+more of his bread and pocketed more of his money than they were worth;
+and they had no care in the world, while he alone had to meet all the
+difficulties of shipowning. When he contemplated his position in all its
+menacing entirety, it seemed to him that he had been for years the
+prey of a band of parasites: and for years he had scowled at everybody
+connected with the Sofala except, perhaps, at the Chinese firemen
+who served to get her along. Their use was manifest: they were an
+indispensable part of the machinery of which he was the master.
+
+When he passed along his decks he shouldered those he came across
+brutally; but the Malay deck hands had learned to dodge out of his way.
+He had to bring himself to tolerate them because of the necessary manual
+labor of the ship which must be done. He had to struggle and plan and
+scheme to keep the Sofala afloat--and what did he get for it? Not even
+enough respect. They could not have given him enough of that if all
+their thoughts and all their actions had been directed to that end. The
+vanity of possession, the vainglory of power, had passed away by this
+time, and there remained only the material embarrassments, the fear
+of losing that position which had turned out not worth having, and an
+anxiety of thought which no abject subservience of men could repay.
+
+He walked up and down. The bridge was his own after all. He had paid
+for it; and with the stem of the pipe in his hand he would stop short at
+times as if to listen with a profound and concentrated attention to the
+deadened beat of the engines (his own engines) and the slight grinding
+of the steering chains upon the continuous low wash of water alongside.
+But for these sounds, the ship might have been lying as still as if
+moored to a bank, and as silent as if abandoned by every living soul;
+only the coast, the low coast of mud and mangroves with the three palms
+in a bunch at the back, grew slowly more distinct in its long straight
+line, without a single feature to arrest attention. The native
+passengers of the Sofala lay about on mats under the awnings; the smoke
+of her funnel seemed the only sign of her life and connected with her
+gliding motion in a mysterious manner.
+
+Captain Whalley on his feet, with a pair of binoculars in his hand and
+the little Malay Serang at his elbow, like an old giant attended by a
+wizened pigmy, was taking her over the shallow water of the bar.
+
+This submarine ridge of mud, scoured by the stream out of the soft
+bottom of the river and heaped up far out on the hard bottom of the sea,
+was difficult to get over. The alluvial coast having no distinguishing
+marks, the bearings of the crossing-place had to be taken from the shape
+of the mountains inland. The guidance of a form flattened and uneven
+at the top like a grinder tooth, and of another smooth, saddle-backed
+summit, had to be searched for within the great unclouded glare that
+seemed to shift and float like a dry fiery mist, filling the air,
+ascending from the water, shrouding the distances, scorching to the eye.
+In this veil of light the near edge of the shore alone stood out almost
+coal-black with an opaque and motionless solidity. Thirty miles away
+the serrated range of the interior stretched across the horizon, its
+outlines and shades of blue, faint and tremulous like a background
+painted on airy gossamer on the quivering fabric of an impalpable
+curtain let down to the plain of alluvial soil; and the openings of the
+estuary appeared, shining white, like bits of silver let into the square
+pieces snipped clean and sharp out of the body of the land bordered with
+mangroves.
+
+On the forepart of the bridge the giant and the pigmy muttered to each
+other frequently in quiet tones. Behind them Massy stood sideways with
+an expression of disdain and suspense on his face. His globular eyes
+were perfectly motionless, and he seemed to have forgotten the long pipe
+he held in his hand.
+
+On the fore-deck below the bridge, steeply roofed with the white slopes
+of the awnings, a young lascar seaman had clambered outside the rail.
+He adjusted quickly a broad band of sail canvas under his armpits,
+and throwing his chest against it, leaned out far over the water. The
+sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, cut off close to the shoulder,
+bared his brown arm of full rounded form and with a satiny skin like a
+woman’s. He swung it rigidly with the rotary and menacing action of a
+slinger: the 14-lb. weight hurtled circling in the air, then suddenly
+flew ahead as far as the curve of the bow. The wet thin line swished
+like scratched silk running through the dark fingers of the man, and
+the plunge of the lead close to the ship’s side made a vanishing silvery
+scar upon the golden glitter; then after an interval the voice of the
+young Malay uplifted and long-drawn declared the depth of the water in
+his own language.
+
+“Tiga stengah,” he cried after each splash and pause, gathering the line
+busily for another cast. “Tiga stengah,” which means three fathom and a
+half. For a mile or so from seaward there was a uniform depth of water
+right up to the bar. “Half-three. Half-three. Half-three,”--and his
+modulated cry, returned leisurely and monotonous, like the repeated
+call of a bird, seemed to float away in sunshine and disappear in the
+spacious silence of the empty sea and of a lifeless shore lying
+open, north and south, east and west, without the stir of a single
+cloud-shadow or the whisper of any other voice.
+
+The owner-engineer of the Sofala remained very still behind the two
+seamen of different race, creed, and color; the European with the
+time-defying vigor of his old frame, the little Malay, old, too, but
+slight and shrunken like a withered brown leaf blown by a chance wind
+under the mighty shadow of the other. Very busy looking forward at the
+land, they had not a glance to spare; and Massy, glaring at them from
+behind, seemed to resent their attention to their duty like a personal
+slight upon himself.
+
+This was unreasonable; but he had lived in his own world of unreasonable
+resentments for many years. At last, passing his moist palm over the
+rare lanky wisps of coarse hair on the top of his yellow head, he began
+to talk slowly.
+
+“A leadsman, you want! I suppose that’s your correct mail-boat style.
+Haven’t you enough judgment to tell where you are by looking at the
+land? Why, before I had been a twelvemonth in the trade I was up to that
+trick--and I am only an engineer. I can point to you from here where the
+bar is, and I could tell you besides that you are as likely as not to
+stick her in the mud in about five minutes from now; only you would call
+it interfering, I suppose. And there’s that written agreement of ours,
+that says I mustn’t interfere.”
+
+His voice stopped. Captain Whalley, without relaxing the set severity of
+his features, moved his lips to ask in a quick mumble--
+
+“How near, Serang?”
+
+“Very near now, Tuan,” the Malay muttered rapidly.
+
+“Dead slow,” said the Captain aloud in a firm tone.
+
+The Serang snatched at the handle of the telegraph. A gong clanged down
+below. Massy with a scornful snigger walked off and put his head down
+the engineroom skylight.
+
+“You may expect some rare fooling with the engines, Jack,” he bellowed.
+The space into which he stared was deep and full of gloom; and the gray
+gleams of steel down there seemed cool after the intense glare of the
+sea around the ship. The air, however, came up clammy and hot on his
+face. A short hoot on which it would have been impossible to put any
+sort of interpretation came from the bottom cavernously. This was the
+way in which the second engineer answered his chief.
+
+He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive manner, and apparently
+wrapped up in such a taciturn concern for his engines that he seemed
+to have lost the use of speech. When addressed directly his only answer
+would be a grunt or a hoot, according to the distance. For all the years
+he had been in the Sofala he had never been known to exchange as much
+as a frank Good-morning with any of his shipmates. He did not seem aware
+that men came and went in the world; he did not seem to see them at all.
+Indeed he never recognized his ship mates on shore. At table (the four
+white men of the Sofala messed together) he sat looking into his plate
+dispassionately, but at the end of the meal would jump up and bolt down
+below as if a sudden thought had impelled him to rush and see whether
+somebody had not stolen the engines while he dined. In port at the end
+of the trip he went ashore regularly, but no one knew where he spent
+his evenings or in what manner. The local coasting fleet had preserved
+a wild and incoherent tale of his infatuation for the wife of a sergeant
+in an Irish infantry regiment. The regiment, however, had done its turn
+of garrison duty there ages before, and was gone somewhere to the other
+side of the earth, out of men’s knowledge. Twice or perhaps three times
+in the course of the year he would take too much to drink. On these
+occasions he returned on board at an earlier hour than usual; ran
+across the deck balancing himself with his spread arms like a tight-rope
+walker; and locking the door of his cabin, he would converse and argue
+with himself the livelong night in an amazing variety of tones; storm,
+sneer, and whine with an inexhaustible persistence. Massy in his berth
+next door, raising himself on his elbow, would discover that his second
+had remembered the name of every white man that had passed through the
+Sofala for years and years back. He remembered the names of men that had
+died, that had gone home, that had gone to America: he remembered in his
+cups the names of men whose connection with the ship had been so short
+that Massy had almost forgotten its circumstances and could barely
+recall their faces. The inebriated voice on the other side of the
+bulkhead commented upon them all with an extraordinary and ingenious
+venom of scandalous inventions. It seems they had all offended him in
+some way, and in return he had found them all out. He muttered darkly;
+he laughed sardonically; he crushed them one after another; but of his
+chief, Massy, he babbled with an envious and naive admiration. Clever
+scoundrel! Don’t meet the likes of him every day. Just look at him. Ha!
+Great! Ship of his own. Wouldn’t catch _him_ going wrong. No fear--the
+beast! And Massy, after listening with a gratified smile to these
+artless tributes to his greatness, would begin to shout, thumping at the
+bulkhead with both fists--
+
+“Shut up, you lunatic! Won’t you let me go to sleep, you fool!”
+
+But a half smile of pride lingered on his lips; outside the solitary
+lascar told off for night duty in harbor, perhaps a youth fresh from
+a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck
+listening to the endless drunken gabble. His heart would be thumping
+with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who
+pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes,--beings with weird
+intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by
+inscrutable motives.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+For a while after his second’s answering hoot Massy hung over the
+engine-room gloomily. Captain Whalley, who, by the power of five hundred
+pounds, had kept his command for three years, might have been suspected
+of never having seen that coast before. He seemed unable to put down his
+glasses, as though they had been glued under his contracted eyebrows.
+This settled frown gave to his face an air of invincible and just
+severity; but his raised elbow trembled slightly, and the perspiration
+poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at
+the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose
+blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust.
+
+From time to time, still holding up his glasses, he raised his other
+hand to wipe his streaming face. The drops rolled down his cheeks, fell
+like rain upon the white hairs of his beard, and brusquely, as if guided
+by an uncontrollable and anxious impulse, his arm reached out to the
+stand of the engine-room telegraph.
+
+The gong clanged down below. The balanced vibration of the dead-slow
+speed ceased together with every sound and tremor in the ship, as if the
+great stillness that reigned upon the coast had stolen in through
+her sides of iron and taken possession of her innermost recesses. The
+illusion of perfect immobility seemed to fall upon her from the luminous
+blue dome without a stain arching over a flat sea without a stir. The
+faint breeze she had made for herself expired, as if all at once the air
+had become too thick to budge; even the slight hiss of the water on her
+stem died out. The narrow, long hull, carrying its way without a ripple,
+seemed to approach the shoal water of the bar by stealth. The plunge of
+the lead with the mournful, mechanical cry of the lascar came at longer
+and longer intervals; and the men on her bridge seemed to hold their
+breath. The Malay at the helm looked fixedly at the compass card, the
+Captain and the Serang stared at the coast.
+
+Massy had left the skylight, and, walking flat-footed, had returned
+softly to the very spot on the bridge he had occupied before. A slow,
+lingering grin exposed his set of big white teeth: they gleamed evenly
+in the shade of the awning like the keyboard of a piano in a dusky room.
+
+At last, pretending to talk to himself in excessive astonishment, he
+said not very loud--
+
+“Stop the engines now. What next, I wonder?”
+
+He waited, stooping from the shoulders, his head bowed, his glance
+oblique. Then raising his voice a shade--
+
+“If I dared make an absurd remark I would say that you haven’t the
+stomach to . . .”
+
+But a yelling spirit of excitement, like some frantic soul wandering
+unsuspected in the vast stillness of the coast, had seized upon the body
+of the lascar at the lead. The languid monotony of his sing-song changed
+to a swift, sharp clamor. The weight flew after a single whir, the line
+whistled, splash followed splash in haste. The water had shoaled, and
+the man, instead of the drowsy tale of fathoms, was calling out the
+soundings in feet.
+
+“Fifteen feet. Fifteen, fifteen! Fourteen, fourteen . . .”
+
+Captain Whalley lowered the arm holding the glasses. It descended slowly
+as if by its own weight; no other part of his towering body stirred; and
+the swift cries with their eager warning note passed him by as though he
+had been deaf.
+
+Massy, very still, and turning an attentive ear, had fastened his eyes
+upon the silvery, close-cropped back of the steady old head. The ship
+herself seemed to be arrested but for the gradual decrease of depth
+under her keel.
+
+“Thirteen feet . . . Thirteen! Twelve!” cried the leadsman anxiously
+below the bridge. And suddenly the barefooted Serang stepped away
+noiselessly to steal a glance over the side.
+
+Narrow of shoulder, in a suit of faded blue cotton, an old gray felt hat
+rammed down on his head, with a hollow in the nape of his dark neck, and
+with his slender limbs, he appeared from the back no bigger than a boy
+of fourteen. There was a childlike impulsiveness in the curiosity with
+which he watched the spread of the voluminous, yellowish convolutions
+rolling up from below to the surface of the blue water like massive
+clouds driving slowly upwards on the unfathomable sky. He was not
+startled at the sight in the least. It was not doubt, but the certitude
+that the keel of the Sofala must be stirring the mud now, which made him
+peep over the side.
+
+His peering eyes, set aslant in a face of the Chinese type, a little old
+face, immovable, as if carved in old brown oak, had informed him long
+before that the ship was not headed at the bar properly. Paid off from
+the Fair Maid, together with the rest of the crew, after the completion
+of the sale, he had hung, in his faded blue suit and floppy gray hat,
+about the doors of the Harbor Office, till one day, seeing Captain
+Whalley coming along to get a crew for the Sofala, he had put himself
+quietly in the way, with his bare feet in the dust and an upward mute
+glance. The eyes of his old commander had fallen on him favorably--it
+must have been an auspicious day--and in less than half an hour the
+white men in the “Ofiss” had written his name on a document as Serang of
+the fire-ship Sofala. Since that time he had repeatedly looked at that
+estuary, upon that coast, from this bridge and from this side of the
+bar. The record of the visual world fell through his eyes upon his
+unspeculating mind as on a sensitized plate through the lens of a
+camera. His knowledge was absolute and precise; nevertheless, had he
+been asked his opinion, and especially if questioned in the downright,
+alarming manner of white men, he would have displayed the hesitation of
+ignorance. He was certain of his facts--but such a certitude counted for
+little against the doubt what answer would be pleasing. Fifty years ago,
+in a jungle village, and before he was a day old, his father (who died
+without ever seeing a white face) had had his nativity cast by a man of
+skill and wisdom in astrology, because in the arrangement of the stars
+may be read the last word of human destiny. His destiny had been to
+thrive by the favor of various white men on the sea. He had swept the
+decks of ships, had tended their helms, had minded their stores, had
+risen at last to be a Serang; and his placid mind had remained as
+incapable of penetrating the simplest motives of those he served as they
+themselves were incapable of detecting through the crust of the earth
+the secret nature of its heart, which may be fire or may be stone. But
+he had no doubt whatever that the Sofala was out of the proper track for
+crossing the bar at Batu Beru.
+
+It was a slight error. The ship could not have been more than twice her
+own length too far to the northward; and a white man at a loss for a
+cause (since it was impossible to suspect Captain Whalley of blundering
+ignorance, of want of skill, or of neglect) would have been inclined to
+doubt the testimony of his senses. It was some such feeling that kept
+Massy motionless, with his teeth laid bare by an anxious grin. Not so
+the Serang. He was not troubled by any intellectual mistrust of his
+senses. If his captain chose to stir the mud it was well. He had known
+in his life white men indulge in outbreaks equally strange. He was only
+genuinely interested to see what would come of it. At last, apparently
+satisfied, he stepped back from the rail.
+
+He had made no sound: Captain Whalley, however, seemed to have observed
+the movements of his Serang. Holding his head rigidly, he asked with a
+mere stir of his lips--
+
+“Going ahead still, Serang?”
+
+“Still going a little, Tuan,” answered the Malay. Then added casually,
+“She is over.”
+
+The lead confirmed his words; the depth of water increased at every
+cast, and the soul of excitement departed suddenly from the lascar swung
+in the canvas belt over the Sofala’s side. Captain Whalley ordered the
+lead in, set the engines ahead without haste, and averting his eyes from
+the coast directed the Serang to keep a course for the middle of the
+entrance.
+
+Massy brought the palm of his hand with a loud smack against his thigh.
+
+“You grazed on the bar. Just look astern and see if you didn’t. Look at
+the track she left. You can see it plainly. Upon my soul, I thought you
+would! What made you do that? What on earth made you do that? I believe
+you are trying to scare me.”
+
+He talked slowly, as it were circumspectly, keeping his prominent black
+eyes on his captain. There was also a slight plaintive note in his
+rising choler, for, primarily, it was the clear sense of a wrong
+suffered undeservedly that made him hate the man who, for a beggarly
+five hundred pounds, claimed a sixth part of the profits under the three
+years’ agreement. Whenever his resentment got the better of the awe
+the person of Captain Whalley inspired he would positively whimper with
+fury.
+
+“You don’t know what to invent to plague my life out of me. I would not
+have thought that a man of your sort would condescend . . .”
+
+He paused, half hopefully, half timidly, whenever Captain Whalley made
+the slightest movement in the deck-chair, as though expecting to be
+conciliated by a soft speech or else rushed upon and hunted off the
+bridge.
+
+“I am puzzled,” he went on again, with the watchful unsmiling baring of
+his big teeth. “I don’t know what to think. I do believe you are trying
+to frighten me. You very nearly planted her on the bar for at least
+twelve hours, besides getting the engines choked with mud. Ships can’t
+afford to lose twelve hours on a trip nowadays--as you ought to know
+very well, and do know very well to be sure, only . . .”
+
+His slow volubility, the sideways cranings of his neck, the black
+glances out of the very corners of his eyes, left Captain Whalley
+unmoved. He looked at the deck with a severe frown. Massy waited for
+some little time, then began to threaten plaintively.
+
+“You think you’ve got me bound hand and foot in that agreement. You
+think you can torment me in any way you please. Ah! But remember it has
+another six weeks to run yet. There’s time for me to dismiss you before
+the three years are out. You will do yet something that will give me the
+chance to dismiss you, and make you wait a twelvemonth for your money
+before you can take yourself off and pull out your five hundred, and
+leave me without a penny to get the new boilers for her. You gloat over
+that idea--don’t you? I do believe you sit here gloating. It’s as if I
+had sold my soul for five hundred pounds to be everlastingly damned in
+the end. . . .”
+
+He paused, without apparent exasperation, then continued evenly--
+
+“. . . With the boilers worn out and the survey hanging over my head,
+Captain Whalley--Captain Whalley, I say, what do you do with your
+money? You must have stacks of money somewhere--a man like you must. It
+stands to reason. I am not a fool, you know, Captain Whalley--partner.”
+
+Again he paused, as though he had done for good. He passed his tongue
+over his lips, gave a backward glance at the Serang conning the ship
+with quiet whispers and slight signs of the hand. The wash of the
+propeller sent a swift ripple, crested with dark froth, upon a long flat
+spit of black slime. The Sofala had entered the river; the trail she had
+stirred up over the bar was a mile astern of her now, out of sight, had
+disappeared utterly; and the smooth, empty sea along the coast was left
+behind in the glittering desolation of sunshine. On each side of her,
+low down, the growth of somber twisted mangroves covered the semi-liquid
+banks; and Massy continued in his old tone, with an abrupt start, as if
+his speech had been ground out of him, like the tune of a music-box, by
+turning a handle.
+
+“Though if anybody ever got the best of me, it is you. I don’t mind
+saying this. I’ve said it--there! What more can you want? Isn’t that
+enough for your pride, Captain Whalley. You got over me from the first.
+It’s all of a piece, when I look back at it. You allowed me to insert
+that clause about intemperance without saying anything, only looking
+very sick when I made a point of it going in black on white. How could
+I tell what was wrong about you. There’s generally something wrong
+somewhere. And, lo and behold! when you come on board it turns out that
+you’ve been in the habit of drinking nothing but water for years and
+years.”
+
+His dogmatic reproachful whine stopped. He brooded profoundly, after
+the manner of crafty and unintelligent men. It seemed inconceivable
+that Captain Whalley should not laugh at the expression of disgust that
+overspread the heavy, yellow countenance. But Captain Whalley never
+raised his eyes--sitting in his arm-chair, outraged, dignified, and
+motionless.
+
+“Much good it was to me,” Massy remonstrated monotonously, “to insert a
+clause for dismissal for intemperance against a man who drinks nothing
+but water. And you looked so upset, too, when I read my draft in
+the lawyer’s office that morning, Captain Whalley,--you looked so
+crestfallen, that I made sure I had gone home on your weak spot. A
+shipowner can’t be too careful as to the sort of skipper he gets. You
+must have been laughing at me in your sleeve all the blessed time. . . .
+Eh? What are you going to say?”
+
+Captain Whalley had only shuffled his feet slightly. A dull animosity
+became apparent in Massy’s sideways stare.
+
+“But recollect that there are other grounds of dismissal. There’s
+habitual carelessness, amounting to incompetence--there’s gross and
+persistent neglect of duty. I am not quite as big a fool as you try to
+make me out to be. You have been careless of late--leaving everything
+to that Serang. Why! I’ve seen you letting that old fool of a Malay
+take bearings for you, as if you were too big to attend to your work
+yourself. And what do you call that silly touch-and-go manner in which
+you took the ship over the bar just now? You expect me to put up with
+that?”
+
+Leaning on his elbow against the ladder abaft the bridge, Sterne, the
+mate, tried to hear, blinking the while from the distance at the second
+engineer, who had come up for a moment, and stood in the engine-room
+companion. Wiping his hands on a bunch of cotton waste, he looked about
+with indifference to the right and left at the river banks slipping
+astern of the Sofala steadily.
+
+Massy turned full at the chair. The character of his whine became again
+threatening.
+
+“Take care. I may yet dismiss you and freeze to your money for a year. I
+may . . .”
+
+But before the silent, rigid immobility of the man whose money had come
+in the nick of time to save him from utter ruin, his voice died out in
+his throat.
+
+“Not that I want you to go,” he resumed after a silence, and in an
+absurdly insinuating tone. “I want nothing better than to be friends
+and renew the agreement, if you will consent to find another couple of
+hundred to help with the new boilers, Captain Whalley. I’ve told you
+before. She must have new boilers; you know it as well as I do. Have you
+thought this over?”
+
+He waited. The slender stem of the pipe with its bulky lump of a bowl at
+the end hung down from his thick lips. It had gone out. Suddenly he took
+it from between his teeth and wrung his hands slightly.
+
+“Don’t you believe me?” He thrust the pipe bowl into the pocket of his
+shiny black jacket.
+
+“It’s like dealing with the devil,” he said. “Why don’t you speak? At
+first you were so high and mighty with me I hardly dared to creep about
+my own deck. Now I can’t get a word from you. You don’t seem to see me
+at all. What does it mean? Upon my soul, you terrify me with this deaf
+and dumb trick. What’s going on in that head of yours? What are you
+plotting against me there so hard that you can’t say a word? You will
+never make me believe that you--you--don’t know where to lay your hands
+on a couple of hundred. You have made me curse the day I was born. . . .”
+
+“Mr. Massy,” said Captain Whalley suddenly, without stirring.
+
+The engineer started violently.
+
+“If that is so I can only beg you to forgive me.”
+
+“Starboard,” muttered the Serang to the helmsman; and the Sofala began
+to swing round the bend into the second reach.
+
+“Ough!” Massy shuddered. “You make my blood run cold. What made you come
+here? What made you come aboard that evening all of a sudden, with your
+high talk and your money--tempting me? I always wondered what was your
+motive? You fastened yourself on me to have easy times and grow fat on
+my life blood, I tell you. Was that it? I believe you are the greatest
+miser in the world, or else why . . .”
+
+“No. I am only poor,” interrupted Captain Whalley, stonily.
+
+“Steady,” murmured the Serang. Massy turned away with his chin on his
+shoulder.
+
+“I don’t believe it,” he said in his dogmatic tone. Captain Whalley
+made no movement. “There you sit like a gorged vulture--exactly like a
+vulture.”
+
+He embraced the middle of the reach and both the banks in one blank
+unseeing circular glance, and left the bridge slowly.
+
+
+IX
+
+On turning to descend Massy perceived the head of Sterne the mate
+loitering, with his sly confident smile, his red mustaches and blinking
+eyes, at the foot of the ladder.
+
+Sterne had been a junior in one of the larger shipping concerns before
+joining the Sofala. He had thrown up his berth, he said, “on general
+principles.” The promotion in the employ was very slow, he complained,
+and he thought it was time for him to try and get on a bit in the world.
+It seemed as though nobody would ever die or leave the firm; they all
+stuck fast in their berths till they got mildewed; he was tired of
+waiting; and he feared that when a vacancy did occur the best servants
+were by no means sure of being treated fairly. Besides, the captain he
+had to serve under--Captain Provost--was an unaccountable sort of man,
+and, he fancied, had taken a dislike to him for some reason or other.
+For doing rather more than his bare duty as likely as not. When he
+had done anything wrong he could take a talking to, like a man; but
+he expected to be treated like a man too, and not to be addressed
+invariably as though he were a dog. He had asked Captain Provost plump
+and plain to tell him where he was at fault, and Captain Provost, in a
+most scornful way, had told him that he was a perfect officer, and that
+if he disliked the way he was being spoken to there was the gangway--he
+could take himself off ashore at once. But everybody knew what sort of
+man Captain Provost was. It was no use appealing to the office. Captain
+Provost had too much influence in the employ. All the same, they had to
+give him a good character. He made bold to say there was nothing in the
+world against him, and, as he had happened to hear that the mate of the
+Sofala had been taken to the hospital that morning with a sunstroke, he
+thought there would be no harm in seeing whether he would not do. . . .
+
+He had come to Captain Whalley freshly shaved, red-faced, thin-flanked,
+throwing out his lean chest; and had recited his little tale with an
+open and manly assurance. Now and then his eyelids quivered slightly,
+his hand would steal up to the end of the flaming mustache; his eyebrows
+were straight, furry, of a chestnut color, and the directness of his
+frank gaze seemed to tremble on the verge of impudence. Captain Whalley
+had engaged him temporarily; then, the other man having been ordered
+home by the doctors, he had remained for the next trip, and then the
+next. He had now attained permanency, and the performance of his duties
+was marked by an air of serious, single-minded application. Directly
+he was spoken to, he began to smile attentively, with a great deference
+expressed in his whole attitude; but there was in the rapid winking
+which went on all the time something quizzical, as though he had
+possessed the secret of some universal joke cheating all creation and
+impenetrable to other mortals.
+
+Grave and smiling he watched Massy come down step by step; when the
+chief engineer had reached the deck he swung about, and they found
+themselves face to face. Matched as to height and utterly dissimilar,
+they confronted each other as if there had been something between
+them--something else than the bright strip of sunlight that, falling
+through the wide lacing of two awnings, cut crosswise the narrow
+planking of the deck and separated their feet as it were a stream;
+something profound and subtle and incalculable, like an unexpressed
+understanding, a secret mistrust, or some sort of fear.
+
+At last Sterne, blinking his deep-set eyes and sticking forward his
+scraped, clean-cut chin, as crimson as the rest of his face, murmured--
+
+“You’ve seen? He grazed! You’ve seen?”
+
+Massy, contemptuous, and without raising his yellow, fleshy countenance,
+replied in the same pitch--
+
+“Maybe. But if it had been you we would have been stuck fast in the
+mud.”
+
+“Pardon me, Mr. Massy. I beg to deny it. Of course a shipowner may say
+what he jolly well pleases on his own deck. That’s all right; but I beg
+to . . .”
+
+“Get out of my way!”
+
+The other had a slight start, the impulse of suppressed indignation
+perhaps, but held his ground. Massy’s downward glance wandered right and
+left, as though the deck all round Sterne had been bestrewn with eggs
+that must not be broken, and he had looked irritably for places where
+he could set his feet in flight. In the end he too did not move, though
+there was plenty of room to pass on.
+
+“I heard you say up there,” went on the mate--“and a very just remark it
+was too--that there’s always something wrong. . . .”
+
+“Eavesdropping is what’s wrong with _you_, Mr. Sterne.”
+
+“Now, if you would only listen to me for a moment, Mr. Massy, sir, I
+could . . .”
+
+“You are a sneak,” interrupted Massy in a great hurry, and even managed
+to get so far as to repeat, “a common sneak,” before the mate had broken
+in argumentatively--
+
+“Now, sir, what is it you want? You want . . .”
+
+“I want--I want,” stammered Massy, infuriated and astonished--“I want.
+How do you know that I want anything? How dare you? . . . What do you
+mean? . . . What are you after--you . . .”
+
+“Promotion.” Sterne silenced him with a sort of candid bravado. The
+engineer’s round soft cheeks quivered still, but he said quietly
+enough--
+
+“You are only worrying my head off,” and Sterne met him with a confident
+little smile.
+
+“A chap in business I know (well up in the world he is now) used to tell
+me that this was the proper way. ‘Always push on to the front,’ he would
+say. ‘Keep yourself well before your boss. Interfere whenever you get a
+chance. Show him what you know. Worry him into seeing you.’ That was his
+advice. Now I know no other boss than you here. You are the owner, and
+no one else counts for _that_ much in my eyes. See, Mr. Massy? I want to
+get on. I make no secret of it that I am one of the sort that means to
+get on. These are the men to make use of, sir. You haven’t arrived at
+the top of the tree, sir, without finding that out--I dare say.”
+
+“Worry your boss in order to get on,” mumbled Massy, as if awestruck by
+the irreverent originality of the idea. “I shouldn’t wonder if this was
+just what the Blue Anchor people kicked you out of the employ for. Is
+that what you call getting on? You shall get on in the same way here if
+you aren’t careful--I can promise you.”
+
+At this Sterne hung his head, thoughtful, perplexed, winking hard at
+the deck. All his attempts to enter into confidential relations with
+his owner had led of late to nothing better than these dark threats
+of dismissal; and a threat of dismissal would check him at once into a
+hesitating silence as though he were not sure that the proper time for
+defying it had come. On this occasion he seemed to have lost his tongue
+for a moment, and Massy, getting in motion, heavily passed him by with
+an abortive attempt at shouldering. Sterne defeated it by stepping
+aside. He turned then swiftly, opening his mouth very wide as if to
+shout something after the engineer, but seemed to think better of it.
+
+Always--as he was ready to confess--on the lookout for an opening to
+get on, it had become an instinct with him to watch the conduct of his
+immediate superiors for something “that one could lay hold of.” It was
+his belief that no skipper in the world would keep his command for a
+day if only the owners could be “made to know.” This romantic and
+naive theory had led him into trouble more than once, but he remained
+incorrigible; and his character was so instinctively disloyal that
+whenever he joined a ship the intention of ousting his commander out
+of the berth and taking his place was always present at the back of his
+head, as a matter of course. It filled the leisure of his waking hours
+with the reveries of careful plans and compromising discoveries--the
+dreams of his sleep with images of lucky turns and favorable accidents.
+Skippers had been known to sicken and die at sea, than which nothing
+could be better to give a smart mate a chance of showing what he’s made
+of. They also would tumble overboard sometimes: he had heard of one or
+two such cases. Others again . . . But, as it were constitutionally,
+he was faithful to the belief that the conduct of no single one of them
+would stand the test of careful watching by a man who “knew what’s what”
+ and who kept his eyes “skinned pretty well” all the time.
+
+After he had gained a permanent footing on board the Sofala he allowed
+his perennial hope to rise high. To begin with, it was a great advantage
+to have an old man for captain: the sort of man besides who in the
+nature of things was likely to give up the job before long from one
+cause or another. Sterne was greatly chagrined, however, to notice that
+he did not seem anyway near being past his work yet. Still, these
+old men go to pieces all at once sometimes. Then there was the
+owner-engineer close at hand to be impressed by his zeal and steadiness.
+Sterne never for a moment doubted the obvious nature of his own merits
+(he was really an excellent officer); only, nowadays, professional merit
+alone does not take a man along fast enough. A chap must have some push
+in him, and must keep his wits at work too to help him forward. He made
+up his mind to inherit the charge of this steamer if it was to be done
+at all; not indeed estimating the command of the Sofala as a very great
+catch, but for the reason that, out East especially, to make a start is
+everything, and one command leads to another.
+
+He began by promising himself to behave with great circumspection;
+Massy’s somber and fantastic humors intimidated him as being outside
+one’s usual sea experience; but he was quite intelligent enough to
+realize almost from the first that he was there in the presence of an
+exceptional situation. His peculiar prying imagination penetrated it
+quickly; the feeling that there was in it an element which eluded his
+grasp exasperated his impatience to get on. And so one trip came to an
+end, then another, and he had begun his third before he saw an opening
+by which he could step in with any sort of effect. It had all been very
+queer and very obscure; something had been going on near him, as if
+separated by a chasm from the common life and the working routine of
+the ship, which was exactly like the life and the routine of any other
+coasting steamer of that class.
+
+Then one day he made his discovery.
+
+It came to him after all these weeks of watchful observation and puzzled
+surmises, suddenly, like the long-sought solution of a riddle that
+suggests itself to the mind in a flash. Not with the same authority,
+however. Great heavens! Could it be that? And after remaining
+thunderstruck for a few seconds he tried to shake it off with
+self-contumely, as though it had been the product of an unhealthy bias
+towards the Incredible, the Inexplicable, the Unheard-of--the Mad!
+
+This--the illuminating moment--had occurred the trip before, on the
+return passage. They had just left a place of call on the mainland
+called Pangu; they were steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a
+massive headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the rocky
+strata showing through its ragged clothing of rank bushes and thorny
+creepers. The wind had begun to sing in the rigging; the sea along the
+coast, green and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon,
+seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow and thundering
+fall, into the shadow of the leeward cape; and across the wide opening
+the nearest of a group of small islands stood enveloped in the hazy
+yellow light of a breezy sunrise; still farther out the hummocky tops
+of other islets peeped out motionless above the water of the channels
+between, scoured tumultuously by the breeze.
+
+The usual track of the Sofala both going and returning on every trip led
+her for a few miles along this reefinfested region. She followed a broad
+lane of water, dropping astern, one after another, these crumbs of the
+earth’s crust resembling a squadron of dismasted hulks run in disorder
+upon a foul ground of rocks and shoals. Some of these fragments of land
+appeared, indeed, no bigger than a stranded ship; others, quite flat,
+lay awash like anchored rafts, like ponderous, black rafts of stone;
+several, heavily timbered and round at the base, emerged in squat domes
+of deep green foliage that shuddered darkly all over to the flying touch
+of cloud shadows driven by the sudden gusts of the squally season. The
+thunderstorms of the coast broke frequently over that cluster; it turned
+then shadowy in its whole extent; it turned more dark, and as if more
+still in the play of fire; as if more impenetrably silent in the peals
+of thunder; its blurred shapes vanished--dissolving utterly at times
+in the thick rain--to reappear clear-cut and black in the stormy light
+against the gray sheet of the cloud--scattered on the slaty round table
+of the sea. Unscathed by storms, resisting the work of years, unfretted
+by the strife of the world, there it lay unchanged as on that day, four
+hundred years ago, when first beheld by Western eyes from the deck of a
+high-pooped caravel.
+
+It was one of these secluded spots that may be found on the busy sea,
+as on land you come sometimes upon the clustered houses of a hamlet
+untouched by men’s restlessness, untouched by their need, by their
+thought, and as if forgotten by time itself. The lives of uncounted
+generations had passed it by, and the multitudes of seafowl, urging
+their way from all the points of the horizon to sleep on the outer rocks
+of the group, unrolled the converging evolutions of their flight in
+long somber streamers upon the glow of the sky. The palpitating cloud of
+their wings soared and stooped over the pinnacles of the rocks, over
+the rocks slender like spires, squat like martello towers; over the
+pyramidal heaps like fallen ruins, over the lines of bald bowlders
+showing like a wall of stones battered to pieces and scorched by
+lightning--with the sleepy, clear glimmer of water in every breach. The
+noise of their continuous and violent screaming filled the air.
+
+This great noise would meet the Sofala coming up from Batu Beru; it
+would meet her on quiet evenings, a pitiless and savage clamor enfeebled
+by distance, the clamor of seabirds settling to rest, and struggling for
+a footing at the end of the day. No one noticed it especially on board;
+it was the voice of their ship’s unerring landfall, ending the steady
+stretch of a hundred miles. She had made good her course, she had run
+her distance till the punctual islets began to emerge one by one, the
+points of rocks, the hummocks of earth . . . and the cloud of birds
+hovered--the restless cloud emitting a strident and cruel uproar, the
+sound of the familiar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath,
+of the outspread sea, and of the high sky without a flaw.
+
+But when the Sofala happened to close with the land after sunset she
+would find everything very still there under the mantle of the night.
+All would be still, dumb, almost invisible--but for the blotting out of
+the low constellations occulted in turns behind the vague masses of the
+islets whose true outlines eluded the eye amongst the dark spaces of the
+heaven: and the ship’s three lights, resembling three stars--the red and
+the green with the white above--her three lights, like three companion
+stars wandering on the earth, held their unswerving course for the
+passage at the southern end of the group. Sometimes there were human
+eyes open to watch them come nearer, traveling smoothly in the somber
+void; the eyes of a naked fisherman in his canoe floating over a reef.
+He thought drowsily: “Ha! The fire-ship that once in every moon goes in
+and comes out of Pangu bay.” More he did not know of her. And just as he
+had detected the faint rhythm of the propeller beating the calm water
+a mile and a half away, the time would come for the Sofala to alter her
+course, the lights would swing off him their triple beam--and disappear.
+
+A few miserable, half-naked families, a sort of outcast tribe of
+long-haired, lean, and wild-eyed people, strove for their living in this
+lonely wilderness of islets, lying like an abandoned outwork of the land
+at the gates of the bay. Within the knots and loops of the rocks the
+water rested more transparent than crystal under their crooked and leaky
+canoes, scooped out of the trunk of a tree: the forms of the bottom
+undulated slightly to the dip of a paddle; and the men seemed to hang
+in the air, they seemed to hang inclosed within the fibers of a dark,
+sodden log, fishing patiently in a strange, unsteady, pellucid, green
+air above the shoals.
+
+Their bodies stalked brown and emaciated as if dried up in the sunshine;
+their lives ran out silently; the homes where they were born, went to
+rest, and died--flimsy sheds of rushes and coarse grass eked out with a
+few ragged mats--were hidden out of sight from the open sea. No glow
+of their household fires ever kindled for a seaman a red spark upon the
+blind night of the group: and the calms of the coast, the flaming long
+calms of the equator, the unbreathing, concentrated calms like the deep
+introspection of a passionate nature, brooded awfully for days and weeks
+together over the unchangeable inheritance of their children; till at
+last the stones, hot like live embers, scorched the naked sole, till
+the water clung warm, and sickly, and as if thickened, about the legs of
+lean men with girded loins, wading thigh-deep in the pale blaze of the
+shallows. And it would happen now and then that the Sofala, through some
+delay in one of the ports of call, would heave in sight making for Pangu
+bay as late as noonday.
+
+Only a blurring cloud at first, the thin mist of her smoke would arise
+mysteriously from an empty point on the clear line of sea and sky. The
+taciturn fishermen within the reefs would extend their lean arms towards
+the offing; and the brown figures stooping on the tiny beaches, the
+brown figures of men, women, and children grubbing in the sand in search
+of turtles’ eggs, would rise up, crooked elbow aloft and hand over
+the eyes, to watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve
+off--and go by. Their ears caught the panting of that ship; their eyes
+followed her till she passed between the two capes of the mainland going
+at full speed as though she hoped to make her way unchecked into the
+very bosom of the earth.
+
+On such days the luminous sea would give no sign of the dangers lurking
+on both sides of her path. Everything remained still, crushed by the
+overwhelming power of the light; and the whole group, opaque in the
+sunshine,--the rocks resembling pinnacles, the rocks resembling spires,
+the rocks resembling ruins; the forms of islets resembling beehives,
+resembling mole-hills, the islets recalling the shapes of haystacks, the
+contours of ivy-clad towers,--would stand reflected together upside
+down in the unwrinkled water, like carved toys of ebony disposed on the
+silvered plate-glass of a mirror.
+
+The first touch of blowing weather would envelop the whole at once in
+the spume of the windward breakers, as if in a sudden cloudlike burst
+of steam; and the clear water seemed fairly to boil in all the passages.
+The provoked sea outlined exactly in a design of angry foam the wide
+base of the group; the submerged level of broken waste and refuse left
+over from the building of the coast near by, projecting its dangerous
+spurs, all awash, far into the channel, and bristling with wicked long
+spits often a mile long: with deadly spits made of froth and stones.
+
+And even nothing more than a brisk breeze--as on that morning, the
+voyage before, when the Sofala left Pangu bay early, and Mr. Sterne’s
+discovery was to blossom out like a flower of incredible and evil aspect
+from the tiny seed of instinctive suspicion,--even such a breeze had
+enough strength to tear the placid mask from the face of the sea. To
+Sterne, gazing with indifference, it had been like a revelation to
+behold for the first time the dangers marked by the hissing livid
+patches on the water as distinctly as on the engraved paper of a chart.
+It came into his mind that this was the sort of day most favorable for a
+stranger attempting the passage: a clear day, just windy enough for the
+sea to break on every ledge, buoying, as it were, the channel plainly
+to the sight; whereas during a calm you had nothing to depend on but the
+compass and the practiced judgment of your eye. And yet the successive
+captains of the Sofala had had to take her through at night more than
+once. Nowadays you could not afford to throw away six or seven hours
+of a steamer’s time. That you couldn’t. But then use is everything, and
+with proper care . . . The channel was broad and safe enough; the main
+point was to hit upon the entrance correctly in the dark--for if a man
+got himself involved in that stretch of broken water over yonder he
+would never get out with a whole ship--if he ever got out at all.
+
+This was Sterne’s last train of thought independent of the great
+discovery. He had just seen to the securing of the anchor, and had
+remained forward idling away a moment or two. The captain was in charge
+on the bridge. With a slight yawn he had turned away from his survey of
+the sea and had leaned his shoulders against the fish davit.
+
+These, properly speaking, were the very last moments of ease he was to
+know on board the Sofala. All the instants that came after were to be
+pregnant with purpose and intolerable with perplexity. No more idle,
+random thoughts; the discovery would put them on the rack, till
+sometimes he wished to goodness he had been fool enough not to make
+it at all. And yet, if his chance to get on rested on the discovery of
+“something wrong,” he could not have hoped for a greater stroke of luck.
+
+
+X
+
+The knowledge was too disturbing, really. There was “something wrong”
+ with a vengeance, and the moral certitude of it was at first simply
+frightful to contemplate. Sterne had been looking aft in a mood so idle,
+that for once he was thinking no harm of anyone. His captain on the
+bridge presented himself naturally to his sight. How insignificant, how
+casual was the thought that had started the train of discovery--like
+an accidental spark that suffices to ignite the charge of a tremendous
+mine!
+
+Caught under by the breeze, the awnings of the foredeck bellied upwards
+and collapsed slowly, and above their heavy flapping the gray stuff of
+Captain Whalley’s roomy coat fluttered incessantly around his arms and
+trunk. He faced the wind in full light, with his great silvery beard
+blown forcibly against his chest; the eyebrows overhung heavily the
+shadows whence his glance appeared to be staring ahead piercingly.
+Sterne could just detect the twin gleam of the whites shifting under the
+shaggy arches of the brow. At short range these eyes, for all the man’s
+affable manner, seemed to look you through and through. Sterne never
+could defend himself from that feeling when he had occasion to speak
+with his captain. He did not like it. What a big heavy man he appeared
+up there, with that little shrimp of a Serang in close attendance--as
+was usual in this extraordinary steamer! Confounded absurd custom that.
+He resented it. Surely the old fellow could have looked after his ship
+without that loafing native at his elbow. Sterne wriggled his shoulders
+with disgust. What was it? Indolence or what?
+
+That old skipper must have been growing lazy for years. They all grew
+lazy out East here (Sterne was very conscious of his own unimpaired
+activity); they got slack all over. But he towered very erect on the
+bridge; and quite low by his side, as you see a small child looking over
+the edge of a table, the battered soft hat and the brown face of the
+Serang peeped over the white canvas screen of the rail.
+
+No doubt the Malay was standing back, nearer to the wheel; but the
+great disparity of size in close association amused Sterne like the
+observation of a bizarre fact in nature. They were as queer fish out of
+the sea as any in it.
+
+He saw Captain Whalley turn his head quickly to speak to his Serang;
+the wind whipped the whole white mass of the beard sideways. He would
+be directing the chap to look at the compass for him, or what not. Of
+course. Too much trouble to step over and see for himself. Sterne’s
+scorn for that bodily indolence which overtakes white men in the East
+increased on reflection. Some of them would be utterly lost if they
+hadn’t all these natives at their beck and call; they grew perfectly
+shameless about it too. He was not of that sort, thank God! It wasn’t
+in him to make himself dependent for his work on any shriveled-up little
+Malay like that. As if one could ever trust a silly native for anything
+in the world! But that fine old man thought differently, it seems. There
+they were together, never far apart; a pair of them, recalling to the
+mind an old whale attended by a little pilot-fish.
+
+The fancifulness of the comparison made him smile. A whale with an
+inseparable pilot-fish! That’s what the old man looked like; for it
+could not be said he looked like a shark, though Mr. Massy had called
+him that very name. But Mr. Massy did not mind what he said in his
+savage fits. Sterne smiled to himself--and gradually the ideas evoked
+by the sound, by the imagined shape of the word pilot-fish; the ideas
+of aid, of guidance needed and received, came uppermost in his mind:
+the word pilot awakened the idea of trust, of dependence, the idea of
+welcome, clear-eyed help brought to the seaman groping for the land
+in the dark: groping blindly in fogs: feeling their way in the thick
+weather of the gales that, filling the air with a salt mist blown up
+from the sea, contract the range of sight on all sides to a shrunken
+horizon that seems within reach of the hand.
+
+A pilot sees better than a stranger, because his local knowledge, like
+a sharper vision, completes the shapes of things hurriedly glimpsed;
+penetrates the veils of mist spread over the land by the storms of the
+sea; defines with certitude the outlines of a coast lying under the pall
+of fog, the forms of landmarks half buried in a starless night as in a
+shallow grave. He recognizes because he already knows. It is not to
+his far-reaching eye but to his more extensive knowledge that the pilot
+looks for certitude; for this certitude of the ship’s position on
+which may depend a man’s good fame and the peace of his conscience, the
+justification of the trust deposited in his hands, with his own life
+too, which is seldom wholly his to throw away, and the humble lives of
+others rooted in distant affections, perhaps, and made as weighty as
+the lives of kings by the burden of the awaiting mystery. The pilot’s
+knowledge brings relief and certitude to the commander of a ship; the
+Serang, however, in his fanciful suggestion of a pilot-fish attending a
+whale, could not in any way be credited with a superior knowledge. Why
+should he have it? These two men had come on that run together--the
+white and the brown--on the same day: and of course a white man would
+learn more in a week than the best native would in a month. He was
+made to stick to the skipper as though he were of some use--as the
+pilot-fish, they say, is to the whale. But how--it was very marked--how?
+A pilot-fish--a pilot--a . . . But if not superior knowledge then . . .
+
+Sterne’s discovery was made. It was repugnant to his imagination,
+shocking to his ideas of honesty, shocking to his conception of mankind.
+This enormity affected one’s outlook on what was possible in this world:
+it was as if for instance the sun had turned blue, throwing a new and
+sinister light on men and nature. Really in the first moment he had felt
+sickish, as though he had got a blow below the belt: for a second the
+very color of the sea seemed changed--appeared queer to his wandering
+eye; and he had a passing, unsteady sensation in all his limbs as though
+the earth had started turning the other way.
+
+A very natural incredulity succeeding this sense of upheaval brought a
+measure of relief. He had gasped; it was over. But afterwards during all
+that day sudden paroxysms of wonder would come over him in the midst
+of his occupations. He would stop and shake his head. The revolt of
+his incredulity had passed away almost as quick as the first emotion
+of discovery, and for the next twenty-four hours he had no sleep. That
+would never do. At meal-times (he took the foot of the table set up
+for the white men on the bridge) he could not help losing himself in
+a fascinated contemplation of Captain Whalley opposite. He watched the
+deliberate upward movements of the arm; the old man put his food to his
+lips as though he never expected to find any taste in his daily bread,
+as though he did not know anything about it. He fed himself like a
+somnambulist. “It’s an awful sight,” thought Sterne; and he watched the
+long period of mournful, silent immobility, with a big brown hand
+lying loosely closed by the side of the plate, till he noticed the two
+engineers to the right and left looking at him in astonishment. He would
+close his mouth in a hurry then, and lowering his eyes, wink rapidly at
+his plate. It was awful to see the old chap sitting there; it was even
+awful to think that with three words he could blow him up sky-high.
+All he had to do was to raise his voice and pronounce a single short
+sentence, and yet that simple act seemed as impossible to attempt as
+moving the sun out of its place in the sky. The old chap could eat in
+his terrific mechanical way; but Sterne, from mental excitement, could
+not--not that evening, at any rate.
+
+He had had ample time since to get accustomed to the strain of the
+meal-hours. He would never have believed it. But then use is everything;
+only the very potency of his success prevented anything resembling
+elation. He felt like a man who, in his legitimate search for a loaded
+gun to help him on his way through the world, chances to come upon a
+torpedo--upon a live torpedo with a shattering charge in its head and
+a pressure of many atmospheres in its tail. It is the sort of weapon to
+make its possessor careworn and nervous. He had no mind to be blown up
+himself; and he could not get rid of the notion that the explosion was
+bound to damage him too in some way.
+
+This vague apprehension had restrained him at first. He was able now to
+eat and sleep with that fearful weapon by his side, with the conviction
+of its power always in mind. It had not been arrived at by any
+reflective process; but once the idea had entered his head, the
+conviction had followed overwhelmingly in a multitude of observed little
+facts to which before he had given only a languid attention. The abrupt
+and faltering intonations of the deep voice; the taciturnity put on
+like an armor; the deliberate, as if guarded, movements; the long
+immobilities, as if the man he watched had been afraid to disturb the
+very air: every familiar gesture, every word uttered in his hearing,
+every sigh overheard, had acquired a special significance, a
+confirmatory import.
+
+Every day that passed over the Sofala appeared to Sterne simply crammed
+full with proofs--with incontrovertible proofs. At night, when off duty,
+he would steal out of his cabin in pyjamas (for more proofs) and stand
+a full hour, perhaps, on his bare feet below the bridge, as absolutely
+motionless as the awning stanchion in its deck socket near by. On the
+stretches of easy navigation it is not usual for a coasting captain to
+remain on deck all the time of his watch. The Serang keeps it for him as
+a matter of custom; in open water, on a straight course, he is usually
+trusted to look after the ship by himself. But this old man seemed
+incapable of remaining quietly down below. No doubt he could not sleep.
+And no wonder. This was also a proof. Suddenly in the silence of the
+ship panting upon the still, dark sea, Sterne would hear a low voice
+above him exclaiming nervously--
+
+“Serang!”
+
+“Tuan!”
+
+“You are watching the compass well?”
+
+“Yes, I am watching, Tuan.”
+
+“The ship is making her course?”
+
+“She is, Tuan. Very straight.”
+
+“It is well; and remember, Serang, that the order is that you are to
+mind the helmsmen and keep a lookout with care, the same as if I were
+not on deck.”
+
+Then, when the Serang had made his answer, the low tones on the bridge
+would cease, and everything round Sterne seemed to become more still
+and more profoundly silent. Slightly chilled and with his back aching a
+little from long immobility, he would steal away to his room on the
+port side of the deck. He had long since parted with the last vestige
+of incredulity; of the original emotions, set into a tumult by the
+discovery, some trace of the first awe alone remained. Not the awe of
+the man himself--he could blow him up sky-high with six words--rather it
+was an awestruck indignation at the reckless perversity of avarice (what
+else could it be?), at the mad and somber resolution that for the
+sake of a few dollars more seemed to set at naught the common rule
+of conscience and pretended to struggle against the very decree of
+Providence.
+
+You could not find another man like this one in the whole round
+world--thank God. There was something devilishly dauntless in the
+character of such a deception which made you pause.
+
+Other considerations occurring to his prudence had kept him tongue-tied
+from day to day. It seemed to him now that it would yet have been easier
+to speak out in the first hour of discovery. He almost regretted
+not having made a row at once. But then the very monstrosity of the
+disclosure . . . Why! He could hardly face it himself, let alone
+pointing it out to somebody else. Moreover, with a desperado of that
+sort one never knew. The object was not to get him out (that was as well
+as done already), but to step into his place. Bizarre as the thought
+seemed he might have shown fight. A fellow up to working such a fraud
+would have enough cheek for anything; a fellow that, as it were, stood
+up against God Almighty Himself. He was a horrid marvel--that’s what he
+was: he was perfectly capable of brazening out the affair scandalously
+till he got him (Sterne) kicked out of the ship and everlastingly
+damaged his prospects in this part of the East. Yet if you want to get
+on something must be risked. At times Sterne thought he had been unduly
+timid of taking action in the past; and what was worse, it had come to
+this, that in the present he did not seem to know what action to take.
+
+Massy’s savage moroseness was too disconcerting. It was an incalculable
+factor of the situation. You could not tell what there was behind that
+insulting ferocity. How could one trust such a temper; it did not put
+Sterne in bodily fear for himself, but it frightened him exceedingly as
+to his prospects.
+
+Though of course inclined to credit himself with exceptional powers of
+observation, he had by now lived too long with his discovery. He had
+gone on looking at nothing else, till at last one day it occurred to him
+that the thing was so obvious that no one could miss seeing it. There
+were four white men in all on board the Sofala. Jack, the second
+engineer, was too dull to notice anything that took place out of his
+engine-room. Remained Massy--the owner--the interested person--nearly
+going mad with worry. Sterne had heard and seen more than enough on
+board to know what ailed him; but his exasperation seemed to make him
+deaf to cautious overtures. If he had only known it, there was the very
+thing he wanted. But how could you bargain with a man of that sort? It
+was like going into a tiger’s den with a piece of raw meat in your hand.
+He was as likely as not to rend you for your pains. In fact, he was
+always threatening to do that very thing; and the urgency of the case,
+combined with the impossibility of handling it with safety, made Sterne
+in his watches below toss and mutter open-eyed in his bunk, for hours,
+as though he had been burning with fever.
+
+Occurrences like the crossing of the bar just now were extremely
+alarming to his prospects. He did not want to be left behind by some
+swift catastrophe. Massy being on the bridge, the old man had to brace
+himself up and make a show, he supposed. But it was getting very bad
+with him, very bad indeed, now. Even Massy had been emboldened to find
+fault this time; Sterne, listening at the foot of the ladder, had heard
+the other’s whimpering and artless denunciations. Luckily the beast was
+very stupid and could not see the why of all this. However, small blame
+to him; it took a clever man to hit upon the cause. Nevertheless, it was
+high time to do something. The old man’s game could not be kept up for
+many days more.
+
+“I may yet lose my life at this fooling--let alone my chance,” Sterne
+mumbled angrily to himself, after the stooping back of the chief
+engineer had disappeared round the corner of the skylight. Yes, no
+doubt--he thought; but to blurt out his knowledge would not advance his
+prospects. On the contrary, it would blast them utterly as likely as
+not. He dreaded another failure. He had a vague consciousness of not
+being much liked by his fellows in this part of the world; inexplicably
+enough, for he had done nothing to them. Envy, he supposed. People were
+always down on a clever chap who made no bones about his determination
+to get on. To do your duty and count on the gratitude of that brute
+Massy would be sheer folly. He was a bad lot. Unmanly! A vicious man!
+Bad! Bad! A brute! A brute without a spark of anything human about him;
+without so much as simple curiosity even, or else surely he would have
+responded in some way to all these hints he had been given. . . . Such
+insensibility was almost mysterious. Massy’s state of exasperation
+seemed to Sterne to have made him stupid beyond the ordinary silliness
+of shipowners.
+
+Sterne, meditating on the embarrassments of that stupidity, forgot
+himself completely. His stony, unwinking stare was fixed on the planks
+of the deck.
+
+The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the ship was more
+perceptible in the silent river, shaded and still like a forest
+path. The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the
+coast-belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm sloping
+banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink. Where the
+earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut,
+denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in
+the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried
+on the struggle for life, mingled their foliage in one solid wall
+of leaves, with here and there the shape of an enormous dark pillar
+soaring, or a ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannonball,
+disclosing the impenetrable gloom within, the secular inviolable shade
+of the virgin forest. The thump of the engines reverberated regularly
+like the strokes of a metronome beating the measure of the vast silence,
+the shadow of the western wall had fallen across the river, and the
+smoke pouring backwards from the funnel eddied down behind the ship,
+spread a thin dusky veil over the somber water, which, checked by the
+flood-tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole straight length of the
+reaches.
+
+Sterne’s body, as if rooted on the spot, trembled slightly from top to
+toe with the internal vibration of the ship; from under his feet came
+sometimes a sudden clang of iron, the noisy burst of a shout below; to
+the right the leaves of the tree-tops caught the rays of the low sun,
+and seemed to shine with a golden green light of their own shimmering
+around the highest boughs which stood out black against a smooth blue
+sky that seemed to droop over the bed of the river like the roof of a
+tent. The passengers for Batu Beru, kneeling on the planks, were engaged
+in rolling their bedding of mats busily; they tied up bundles, they
+snapped the locks of wooden chests. A pockmarked peddler of small wares
+threw his head back to drain into his throat the last drops out of an
+earthenware bottle before putting it away in a roll of blankets. Knots
+of traveling traders standing about the deck conversed in low tones;
+the followers of a small Rajah from down the coast, broad-faced, simple
+young fellows in white drawers and round white cotton caps with their
+colored sarongs twisted across their bronze shoulders, squatted on their
+hams on the hatch, chewing betel with bright red mouths as if they had
+been tasting blood. Their spears, lying piled up together within the
+circle of their bare toes, resembled a casual bundle of dry bamboos; a
+thin, livid Chinaman, with a bulky package wrapped up in leaves already
+thrust under his arm, gazed ahead eagerly; a wandering Kling rubbed his
+teeth with a bit of wood, pouring over the side a bright stream of water
+out of his lips; the fat Rajah dozed in a shabby deck-chair,--and at the
+turn of every bend the two walls of leaves reappeared running parallel
+along the banks, with their impenetrable solidity fading at the top to
+a vaporous mistiness of countless slender twigs growing free, of young
+delicate branches shooting from the topmost limbs of hoary trunks,
+of feathery heads of climbers like delicate silver sprays standing up
+without a quiver. There was not a sign of a clearing anywhere; not a
+trace of human habitation, except when in one place, on the bare end of
+a low point under an isolated group of slender tree-ferns, the jagged,
+tangled remnants of an old hut on piles appeared with that peculiar
+aspect of ruined bamboo walls that look as if smashed with a club.
+Farther on, half hidden under the drooping bushes, a canoe containing a
+man and a woman, together with a dozen green cocoanuts in a heap, rocked
+helplessly after the Sofala had passed, like a navigating contrivance of
+venturesome insects, of traveling ants; while two glassy folds of water
+streaming away from each bow of the steamer across the whole width of
+the river ran with her up stream smoothly, fretting their outer ends
+into a brown whispering tumble of froth against the miry foot of each
+bank.
+
+“I must,” thought Sterne, “bring that brute Massy to his bearings. It’s
+getting too absurd in the end. Here’s the old man up there buried in his
+chair--he may just as well be in his grave for all the use he’ll ever be
+in the world--and the Serang’s in charge. Because that’s what he is.
+In charge. In the place that’s mine by rights. I must bring that savage
+brute to his bearings. I’ll do it at once, too . . .”
+
+When the mate made an abrupt start, a little brown half-naked boy, with
+large black eyes, and the string of a written charm round his neck,
+became panic-struck at once. He dropped the banana he had been munching,
+and ran to the knee of a grave dark Arab in flowing robes, sitting like
+a Biblical figure, incongruously, on a yellow tin trunk corded with a
+rope of twisted rattan. The father, unmoved, put out his hand to pat the
+little shaven poll protectingly.
+
+
+XI
+
+Sterne crossed the deck upon the track of the chief engineer. Jack,
+the second, retreating backwards down the engine-room ladder, and still
+wiping his hands, treated him to an incomprehensible grin of white teeth
+out of his grimy hard face; Massy was nowhere to be seen. He must have
+gone straight into his berth. Sterne scratched at the door softly, then,
+putting his lips to the rose of the ventilator, said--
+
+“I must speak to you, Mr. Massy. Just give me a minute or two.”
+
+“I am busy. Go away from my door.”
+
+“But pray, Mr. Massy . . .”
+
+“You go away. D’you hear? Take yourself off altogether--to the other
+end of the ship--quite away . . .” The voice inside dropped low. “To the
+devil.”
+
+Sterne paused: then very quietly--
+
+“It’s rather pressing. When do you think you will be at liberty, sir?”
+
+The answer to this was an exasperated “Never”; and at once Sterne, with
+a very firm expression of face, turned the handle.
+
+Mr. Massy’s stateroom--a narrow, one-berth cabin--smelt strongly of
+soap, and presented to view a swept, dusted, unadorned neatness, not
+so much bare as barren, not so much severe as starved and lacking in
+humanity, like the ward of a public hospital, or rather (owing to the
+small size) like the clean retreat of a desperately poor but exemplary
+person. Not a single photograph frame ornamented the bulkheads; not a
+single article of clothing, not as much as a spare cap, hung from the
+brass hooks. All the inside was painted in one plain tint of pale blue;
+two big sea-chests in sailcloth covers and with iron padlocks fitted
+exactly in the space under the bunk. One glance was enough to embrace
+all the strip of scrubbed planks within the four unconcealed corners.
+The absence of the usual settee was striking; the teak-wood top of the
+washing-stand seemed hermetically closed, and so was the lid of the
+writing-desk, which protruded from the partition at the foot of the
+bed-place, containing a mattress as thin as a pancake under a threadbare
+blanket with a faded red stripe, and a folded mosquito-net against
+the nights spent in harbor. There was not a scrap of paper anywhere in
+sight, no boots on the floor, no litter of any sort, not a speck of
+dust anywhere; no traces of pipe-ash even, which, in a heavy smoker, was
+morally revolting, like a manifestation of extreme hypocrisy; and the
+bottom of the old wooden arm-chair (the only seat there), polished
+with much use, shone as if its shabbiness had been waxed. The screen
+of leaves on the bank, passing as if unrolled endlessly in the round
+opening of the port, sent a wavering network of light and shade into the
+place.
+
+Sterne, holding the door open with one hand, had thrust in his head and
+shoulders. At this amazing intrusion Massy, who was doing absolutely
+nothing, jumped up speechless.
+
+“Don’t call names,” murmured Sterne hurriedly. “I won’t be called names.
+I think of nothing but your good, Mr. Massy.”
+
+A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have
+lost their tongues. Then the mate went on with a discreet glibness.
+
+“You simply couldn’t conceive what’s going on on board your ship.
+It wouldn’t enter your head for a moment. You are too good--too--too
+upright, Mr. Massy, to suspect anybody of such a . . . It’s enough to
+make your hair stand on end.”
+
+He watched for the effect: Massy seemed dazed, uncomprehending. He only
+passed the palm of his hand on the coal-black wisps plastered across
+the top of his head. In a tone suddenly changed to confidential audacity
+Sterne hastened on.
+
+“Remember that there’s only six weeks left to run . . .” The other was
+looking at him stonily . . . “so anyhow you shall require a captain for
+the ship before long.”
+
+Then only, as if that suggestion had scarified his flesh in the manner
+of red-hot iron, Massy gave a start and seemed ready to shriek. He
+contained himself by a great effort.
+
+“Require a captain,” he repeated with scathing slowness. “Who requires
+a captain? You dare to tell me that I need any of you humbugging sailors
+to run my ship. You and your likes have been fattening on me for years.
+It would have hurt me less to throw my money overboard. Pam--pe--red
+us--e--less f-f-f-frauds. The old ship knows as much as the best of
+you.” He snapped his teeth audibly and growled through them, “The silly
+law requires a captain.”
+
+Sterne had taken heart of grace meantime.
+
+“And the silly insurance people too, as well,” he said lightly. “But
+never mind that. What I want to ask is: Why shouldn’t _I_ do, sir? I
+don’t say but you could take a steamer about the world as well as any of
+us sailors. I don’t pretend to tell _you_ that it is a very great trick
+. . .” He emitted a short, hollow guffaw, familiarly . . . “I didn’t
+make the law--but there it is; and I am an active young fellow! I
+quite hold with your ideas; I know your ways by this time, Mr. Massy. I
+wouldn’t try to give myself airs like that--that--er lazy specimen of an
+old man up there.”
+
+He put a marked emphasis on the last sentence, to lead Massy away from
+the track in case . . . but he did not doubt of now holding his success.
+The chief engineer seemed nonplused, like a slow man invited to catch
+hold of a whirligig of some sort.
+
+“What you want, sir, is a chap with no nonsense about him, who would be
+content to be your sailing-master. Quite right, too. Well, I am fit for
+the work as much as that Serang. Because that’s what it amounts to.
+Do you know, sir, that a dam’ Malay like a monkey is in charge of your
+ship--and no one else. Just listen to his feet pit-patting above us on
+the bridge--real officer in charge. He’s taking her up the river while
+the great man is wallowing in the chair--perhaps asleep; and if he is,
+that would not make it much worse either--take my word for it.”
+
+He tried to thrust himself farther in. Massy, with lowered forehead, one
+hand grasping the back of the arm-chair, did not budge.
+
+“You think, sir, that the man has got you tight in his agreement . . .”
+ Massy raised a heavy snarling face at this . . . “Well, sir, one can’t
+help hearing of it on board. It’s no secret. And it has been the talk on
+shore for years; fellows have been making bets about it. No, sir!
+It’s _you_ who have got him at your mercy. You will say that you can’t
+dismiss him for indolence. Difficult to prove in court, and so on. Why,
+yes. But if you say the word, sir, I can tell you something about his
+indolence that will give you the clear right to fire him out on the spot
+and put me in charge for the rest of this very trip--yes, sir, before
+we leave Batu Beru--and make him pay a dollar a day for his keep till
+we get back, if you like. Now, what do you think of that? Come, sir.
+Say the word. It’s really well worth your while, and I am quite ready to
+take your bare word. A definite statement from you would be as good as a
+bond.”
+
+His eyes began to shine. He insisted. A simple statement,--and he
+thought to himself that he would manage somehow to stick in his berth as
+long as it suited him. He would make himself indispensable; the ship had
+a bad name in her port; it would be easy to scare the fellows off. Massy
+would have to keep him.
+
+“A definite statement from me would be enough,” Massy repeated slowly.
+
+“Yes, sir. It would.” Sterne stuck out his chin cheerily and blinked at
+close quarters with that unconscious impudence which had the power to
+enrage Massy beyond anything.
+
+The engineer spoke very distinctly.
+
+“Listen well to me, then, Mr. Sterne: I wouldn’t--d’ye hear?--I wouldn’t
+promise you the value of two pence for anything _you_ can tell me.”
+
+He struck Sterne’s arm away with a smart blow, and catching hold of
+the handle pulled the door to. The terrific slam darkened the cabin
+instantaneously to his eye as if after the flash of an explosion.
+At once he dropped into the chair. “Oh, no! You don’t!” he whispered
+faintly.
+
+The ship had in that place to shave the bank so close that the gigantic
+wall of leaves came gliding like a shutter against the port; the
+darkness of the primeval forest seemed to flow into that bare cabin with
+the odor of rotting leaves, of sodden soil--the strong muddy smell of
+the living earth steaming uncovered after the passing of a deluge. The
+bushes swished loudly alongside; above there was a series of crackling
+sounds, with a sharp rain of small broken branches falling on the
+bridge; a creeper with a great rustle snapped on the head of a boat
+davit, and a long, luxuriant green twig actually whipped in and out of
+the open port, leaving behind a few torn leaves that remained suddenly
+at rest on Mr. Massy’s blanket. Then, the ship sheering out in the
+stream, the light began to return but did not augment beyond a subdued
+clearness: for the sun was very low already, and the river, wending its
+sinuous course through a multitude of secular trees as if at the
+bottom of a precipitous gorge, had been already invaded by a deepening
+gloom--the swift precursor of the night.
+
+“Oh, no, you don’t!” murmured the engineer again. His lips trembled
+almost imperceptibly; his hands too, a little: and to calm himself
+he opened the writing-desk, spread out a sheet of thin grayish
+paper covered with a mass of printed figures and began to scan them
+attentively for the twentieth time this trip at least.
+
+With his elbows propped, his head between his hands, he seemed to lose
+himself in the study of an abstruse problem in mathematics. It was the
+list of the winning numbers from the last drawing of the great lottery
+which had been the one inspiring fact of so many years of his existence.
+The conception of a life deprived of that periodical sheet of paper had
+slipped away from him entirely, as another man, according to his nature,
+would not have been able to conceive a world without fresh air, without
+activity, or without affection. A great pile of flimsy sheets had been
+growing for years in his desk, while the Sofala, driven by the faithful
+Jack, wore out her boilers in tramping up and down the Straits, from
+cape to cape, from river to river, from bay to bay; accumulating by that
+hard labor of an overworked, starved ship the blackened mass of these
+documents. Massy kept them under lock and key like a treasure. There
+was in them, as in the experience of life, the fascination of hope, the
+excitement of a half-penetrated mystery, the longing of a half-satisfied
+desire.
+
+For days together, on a trip, he would shut himself up in his berth with
+them: the thump of the toiling engines pulsated in his ear; and he
+would weary his brain poring over the rows of disconnected figures,
+bewildering by their senseless sequence, resembling the hazards of
+destiny itself. He nourished a conviction that there must be some logic
+lurking somewhere in the results of chance. He thought he had seen
+its very form. His head swam; his limbs ached; he puffed at his pipe
+mechanically; a contemplative stupor would soothe the fretfulness of his
+temper, like the passive bodily quietude procured by a drug, while the
+intellect remains tensely on the stretch. Nine, nine, aught, four,
+two. He made a note. The next winning number of the great prize was
+forty-seven thousand and five. These numbers of course would have to
+be avoided in the future when writing to Manilla for the tickets. He
+mumbled, pencil in hand . . . “and five. Hm . . . hm.” He wetted his
+finger: the papers rustled. Ha! But what’s this? Three years ago, in the
+September drawing, it was number nine, aught, four, two that took the
+first prize. Most remarkable. There was a hint there of a definite rule!
+He was afraid of missing some recondite principle in the overwhelming
+wealth of his material. What could it be? and for half an hour he would
+remain dead still, bent low over the desk, without twitching a muscle.
+At his back the whole berth would be thick with a heavy body of smoke,
+as if a bomb had burst in there, unnoticed, unheard.
+
+At last he would lock up the desk with the decision of unshaken
+confidence, jump and go out. He would walk swiftly back and forth on
+that part of the foredeck which was kept clear of the lumber and of the
+bodies of the native passengers. They were a great nuisance, but they
+were also a source of profit that could not be disdained. He needed
+every penny of profit the Sofala could make. Little enough it was, in
+all conscience! The incertitude of chance gave him no concern, since
+he had somehow arrived at the conviction that, in the course of years,
+every number was bound to have his winning turn. It was simply a matter
+of time and of taking as many tickets as he could afford for every
+drawing. He generally took rather more; all the earnings of the ship
+went that way, and also the wages he allowed himself as chief engineer.
+It was the wages he paid to others that he begrudged with a reasoned
+and at the same time a passionate regret. He scowled at the lascars with
+their deck brooms, at the quartermasters rubbing the brass rails with
+greasy rags; he was eager to shake his fist and roar abuse in bad Malay
+at the poor carpenter--a timid, sickly, opium-fuddled Chinaman, in loose
+blue drawers for all costume, who invariably dropped his tools and fled
+below, with streaming tail and shaking all over, before the fury of that
+“devil.” But it was when he raised up his eyes to the bridge where one
+of these sailor frauds was always planted by law in charge of his ship
+that he felt almost dizzy with rage. He abominated them all; it was an
+old feud, from the time he first went to sea, an unlicked cub with a
+great opinion of himself, in the engine-room. The slights that had
+been put upon him. The persecutions he had suffered at the hands of
+skippers--of absolute nobodies in a steamship after all. And now that
+he had risen to be a shipowner they were still a plague to him: he
+had absolutely to pay away precious money to the conceited useless
+loafers:--As if a fully qualified engineer--who was the owner as
+well--were not fit to be trusted with the whole charge of a ship. Well!
+he made it pretty warm for them; but it was a poor consolation. He had
+come in time to hate the ship too for the repairs she required, for the
+coal-bills he had to pay, for the poor beggarly freights she earned.
+He would clench his hand as he walked and hit the rail a sudden blow,
+viciously, as though she could be made to feel pain. And yet he could
+not do without er; he needed her; he must hang on to her tooth and nail
+to keep his head above water till the expected flood of fortune came
+sweeping up and landed him safely on the high shore of his ambition.
+
+It was now to do nothing, nothing whatever, and have plenty of money
+to do it on. He had tasted of power, the highest form of it his limited
+experience was aware of--the power of shipowning. What a deception!
+Vanity of vanities! He wondered at his folly. He had thrown away the
+substance for the shadow. Of the gratification of wealth he did not know
+enough to excite his imagination with any visions of luxury. How
+could he--the child of a drunken boiler-maker--going straight from the
+workshop into the engine-room of a north-country collier! But the notion
+of the absolute idleness of wealth he could very well conceive. He
+reveled in it, to forget his present troubles; he imagined himself
+walking about the streets of Hull (he knew their gutters well as a boy)
+with his pockets full of sovereigns. He would buy himself a house; his
+married sisters, their husbands, his old workshop chums, would render
+him infinite homage. There would be nothing to think of. His word would
+be law. He had been out of work for a long time before he won his prize,
+and he remembered how Carlo Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley),
+the Maltese hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, had
+cringed joyfully before him in the evening, when the news had come.
+Poor Charley, though he made his living by ministering to various abject
+vices, gave credit for their food to many a piece of white wreckage. He
+was naively overjoyed at the idea of his old bills being paid, and
+he reckoned confidently on a spell of festivities in the cavernous
+grog-shop downstairs. Massy remembered the curious, respectful looks of
+the “trashy” white men in the place. His heart had swelled within him.
+Massy had left Charley’s infamous den directly he had realized the
+possibilities open to him, and with his nose in the air. Afterwards the
+memory of these adulations was a great sadness.
+
+This was the true power of money,--and no trouble with it, nor any
+thinking required either. He thought with difficulty and felt vividly;
+to his blunt brain the problems offered by any ordered scheme of life
+seemed in their cruel toughness to have been put in his way by the
+obvious malevolence of men. As a shipowner everyone had conspired to
+make him a nobody. How could he have been such a fool as to purchase
+that accursed ship. He had been abominably swindled; there was no end
+to this swindling; and as the difficulties of his improvident ambition
+gathered thicker round him, he really came to hate everybody he had
+ever come in contact with. A temper naturally irritable and an amazing
+sensitiveness to the claims of his own personality had ended by making
+of life for him a sort of inferno--a place where his lost soul had been
+given up to the torment of savage brooding.
+
+But he had never hated anyone so much as that old man who had turned up
+one evening to save him from an utter disaster,--from the conspiracy of
+the wretched sailors. He seemed to have fallen on board from the sky.
+His footsteps echoed on the empty steamer, and the strange deep-toned
+voice on deck repeating interrogatively the words, “Mr. Massy, Mr. Massy
+there?” had been startling like a wonder. And coming up from the depths
+of the cold engine-room, where he had been pottering dismally with a
+candle amongst the enormous shadows, thrown on all sides by the skeleton
+limbs of machinery, Massy had been struck dumb by astonishment in the
+presence of that imposing old man with a beard like a silver plate,
+towering in the dusk rendered lurid by the expiring flames of sunset.
+
+“Want to see me on business? What business? I am doing no business.
+Can’t you see that this ship is laid up?” Massy had turned at bay before
+the pursuing irony of his disaster. Afterwards he could not believe his
+ears. What was that old fellow getting at? Things don’t happen that way.
+It was a dream. He would presently wake up and find the man vanished
+like a shape of mist. The gravity, the dignity, the firm and courteous
+tone of that athletic old stranger impressed Massy. He was almost
+afraid. But it was no dream. Five hundred pounds are no dream. At once
+he became suspicious. What did it mean? Of course it was an offer to
+catch hold of for dear life. But what could there be behind?
+
+Before they had parted, after appointing a meeting in a solicitor’s
+office early on the morrow, Massy was asking himself, What is his
+motive? He spent the night in hammering out the clauses of the
+agreement--a unique instrument of its sort whose tenor got bruited
+abroad somehow and became the talk and wonder of the port.
+
+Massy’s object had been to secure for himself as many ways as possible
+of getting rid of his partner without being called upon at once to pay
+back his share. Captain Whalley’s efforts were directed to making the
+money secure. Was it not Ivy’s money--a part of her fortune whose only
+other asset was the time-defying body of her old father? Sure of his
+forbearance in the strength of his love for her, he accepted, with
+stately serenity, Massy’s stupidly cunning paragraphs against his
+incompetence, his dishonesty, his drunkenness, for the sake of other
+stringent stipulations. At the end of three years he was at liberty to
+withdraw from the partnership, taking his money with him. Provision was
+made for forming a fund to pay him off. But if he left the Sofala before
+the term, from whatever cause (barring death), Massy was to have a whole
+year for paying. “Illness?” the lawyer had suggested: a young man fresh
+from Europe and not overburdened with business, who was rather amused.
+Massy began to whine unctuously, “How could he be expected? . . .”
+
+“Let that go,” Captain Whalley had said with a superb confidence in his
+body. “Acts of God,” he added. In the midst of life we are in death, but
+he trusted his Maker with a still greater fearlessness--his Maker who
+knew his thoughts, his human affections, and his motives. His Creator
+knew what use he was making of his health--how much he wanted it . . .
+“I trust my first illness will be my last. I’ve never been ill that I
+can remember,” he had remarked. “Let it go.”
+
+But at this early stage he had already awakened Massy’s hostility by
+refusing to make it six hundred instead of five. “I cannot do that,” was
+all he had said, simply, but with so much decision that Massy desisted
+at once from pressing the point, but had thought to himself, “Can’t! Old
+curmudgeon. _Won’t_ He must have lots of money, but he would like to get
+hold of a soft berth and the sixth part of my profits for nothing if he
+only could.”
+
+And during these years Massy’s dislike grew under the restraint
+of something resembling fear. The simplicity of that man appeared
+dangerous. Of late he had changed, however, had appeared less formidable
+and with a lessened vigor of life, as though he had received a secret
+wound. But still he remained incomprehensible in his simplicity,
+fearlessness, and rectitude. And when Massy learned that he meant to
+leave him at the end of the time, to leave him confronted with the
+problem of boilers, his dislike blazed up secretly into hate.
+
+It had made him so clear-eyed that for a long time now Mr. Sterne could
+have told him nothing he did not know. He had much ado in trying to
+terrorize that mean sneak into silence; he wanted to deal alone with the
+situation; and--incredible as it might have appeared to Mr. Sterne--he
+had not yet given up the desire and the hope of inducing that hated
+old man to stay. Why! there was nothing else to do, unless he were to
+abandon his chances of fortune. But now, suddenly, since the crossing of
+the bar at Batu Beru things seemed to be coming rapidly to a point. It
+disquieted him so much that the study of the winning numbers failed
+to soothe his agitation: and the twilight in the cabin deepened, very
+somber.
+
+He put the list away, muttering once more, “Oh, no, my boy, you don’t.
+Not if I know it.” He did not mean the blinking, eavesdropping humbug to
+force his action. He took his head again into his hands; his immobility
+confined in the darkness of this shut-up little place seemed to make
+him a thing apart infinitely removed from the stir and the sounds of the
+deck.
+
+He heard them: the passengers were beginning to jabber excitedly;
+somebody dragged a heavy box past his door. He heard Captain Whalley’s
+voice above--
+
+“Stations, Mr. Sterne.” And the answer from somewhere on deck forward--
+
+“Ay, ay, sir.”
+
+“We shall moor head up stream this time; the ebb has made.”
+
+“Head up stream, sir.”
+
+“You will see to it, Mr. Sterne.”
+
+The answer was covered by the autocratic clang on the engine-room
+gong. The propeller went on beating slowly: one, two, three; one, two,
+three--with pauses as if hesitating on the turn. The gong clanged time
+after time, and the water churned this way and that by the blades was
+making a great noisy commotion alongside. Mr. Massy did not move. A
+shore-light on the other bank, a quarter of a mile across the river,
+drifted, no bigger than a tiny star, passing slowly athwart the circle
+of the port. Voices from Mr. Van Wyk’s jetty answered the hails from the
+ship; ropes were thrown and missed and thrown again; the swaying flame
+of a torch carried in a large sampan coming to fetch away in state the
+Rajah from down the coast cast a sudden ruddy glare into his cabin,
+over his very person. Mr. Massy did not move. After a few last ponderous
+turns the engines stopped, and the prolonged clanging of the gong
+signified that the captain had done with them. A great number of boats
+and canoes of all sizes boarded the off-side of the Sofala. Then after
+a time the tumult of splashing, of cries, of shuffling feet, of packages
+dropped with a thump, the noise of the native passengers going
+away, subsided slowly. On the shore, a voice, cultivated, slightly
+authoritative, spoke very close alongside--
+
+“Brought any mail for me this time?”
+
+“Yes, Mr. Van Wyk.” This was from Sterne, answering over the rail in a
+tone of respectful cordiality. “Shall I bring it up to you?”
+
+But the voice asked again--
+
+“Where’s the captain?”
+
+“Still on the bridge, I believe. He hasn’t left his chair. Shall I . . .”
+
+The voice interrupted negligently.
+
+“I will come on board.”
+
+“Mr. Van Wyk,” Sterne suddenly broke out with an eager effort, “will you
+do me the favor . . .”
+
+The mate walked away quickly towards the gangway. A silence fell. Mr.
+Massy in the dark did not move.
+
+He did not move even when he heard slow shuffling footsteps pass his
+cabin lazily. He contented himself to bellow out through the closed
+door--
+
+“You--Jack!”
+
+The footsteps came back without haste; the door handle rattled, and the
+second engineer appeared in the opening, shadowy in the sheen of the
+skylight at his back, with his face apparently as black as the rest of
+his figure.
+
+“We have been very long coming up this time,” Mr. Massy growled, without
+changing his attitude.
+
+“What do you expect with half the boiler tubes plugged up for leaks.”
+ The second defended himself loquaciously.
+
+“None of your lip,” said Massy.
+
+“None of your rotten boilers--I say,” retorted his faithful subordinate
+without animation, huskily. “Go down there and carry a head of steam on
+them yourself--if you dare. I don’t.”
+
+“You aren’t worth your salt then,” Massy said. The other made a faint
+noise which resembled a laugh but might have been a snarl.
+
+“Better go slow than stop the ship altogether,” he admonished his
+admired superior. Mr. Massy moved at last. He turned in his chair, and
+grinding his teeth--
+
+“Dam’ you and the ship! I wish she were at the bottom of the sea. Then
+you would have to starve.”
+
+The trusty second engineer closed the door gently.
+
+Massy listened. Instead of passing on to the bathroom where he should
+have gone to clean himself, the second entered his cabin, which was next
+door. Mr. Massy jumped up and waited. Suddenly he heard the lock snap in
+there. He rushed out and gave a violent kick to the door.
+
+“I believe you are locking yourself up to get drunk,” he shouted.
+
+A muffled answer came after a while.
+
+“My own time.”
+
+“If you take to boozing on the trip I’ll fire you out,” Massy cried.
+
+An obstinate silence followed that threat. Massy moved away perplexed.
+On the bank two figures appeared, approaching the gangway. He heard a
+voice tinged with contempt--
+
+“I would rather doubt your word. But I shall certainly speak to him of
+this.”
+
+The other voice, Sterne’s, said with a sort of regretful formality--
+
+“Thanks. That’s all I want. I must do my duty.”
+
+Mr. Massy was surprised. A short, dapper figure leaped lightly on the
+deck and nearly bounded into him where he stood beyond the circle of
+light from the gangway lamp. When it had passed towards the bridge,
+after exchanging a hurried “Good evening,” Massy said surlily to Sterne
+who followed with slow steps--
+
+“What is it you’re making up to Mr. Van Wyk for, now?”
+
+“Far from it, Mr. Massy. I am not good enough for Mr. Van Wyk. Neither
+are you, sir, in his opinion, I am afraid. Captain Whalley is, it seems.
+He’s gone to ask him to dine up at the house this evening.”
+
+Then he murmured to himself darkly--
+
+“I hope he will like it.”
+
+
+XII
+
+Mr. Van Wyk, the white man of Batu Beru, an ex-naval officer who,
+for reasons best known to himself, had thrown away the promise of a
+brilliant career to become the pioneer of tobacco-planting on that
+remote part of the coast, had learned to like Captain Whalley. The
+appearance of the new skipper had attracted his attention. Nothing more
+unlike all the diverse types he had seen succeeding each other on the
+bridge of the Sofala could be imagined.
+
+At that time Batu Beru was not what it has become since: the center of
+a prosperous tobacco-growing district, a tropically suburban-looking
+little settlement of bungalows in one long street shaded with two rows
+of trees, embowered by the flowering and trim luxuriance of the gardens,
+with a three-mile-long carriage-road for the afternoon drives and a
+first-class Resident with a fat, cheery wife to lead the society of
+married estate-managers and unmarried young fellows in the service of the
+big companies.
+
+All this prosperity was not yet; and Mr. Van Wyk prospered alone on the
+left bank on his deep clearing carved out of the forest, which came down
+above and below to the water’s edge. His lonely bungalow faced across
+the river the houses of the Sultan: a restless and melancholy old ruler
+who had done with love and war, for whom life no longer held any savor
+(except of evil forebodings) and time never had any value. He was afraid
+of death, and hoped he would die before the white men were ready to take
+his country from him. He crossed the river frequently (with never
+less than ten boats crammed full of people), in the wistful hope of
+extracting some information on the subject from his own white man. There
+was a certain chair on the veranda he always took: the dignitaries of
+the court squatted on the rugs and skins between the furniture: the
+inferior people remained below on the grass plot between the house and
+the river in rows three or four deep all along the front. Not seldom the
+visit began at daybreak. Mr. Van Wyk tolerated these inroads. He would
+nod out of his bedroom window, tooth-brush or razor in hand, or pass
+through the throng of courtiers in his bathing robe. He appeared and
+disappeared humming a tune, polished his nails with attention, rubbed
+his shaved face with _eau-de-Cologne_, drank his early tea, went out to
+see his coolies at work: returned, looked through some papers on his
+desk, read a page or two in a book or sat before his cottage piano
+leaning back on the stool, his arms extended, fingers on the keys, his
+body swaying slightly from side to side. When absolutely forced to speak
+he gave evasive vaguely soothing answers out of pure compassion: the
+same feeling perhaps made him so lavishly hospitable with the aerated
+drinks that more than once he left himself without soda-water for a whole
+week. That old man had granted him as much land as he cared to have
+cleared: it was neither more nor less than a fortune.
+
+Whether it was fortune or seclusion from his kind that Mr. Van Wyk
+sought, he could not have pitched upon a better place. Even the
+mail-boats of the subsidized company calling on the veriest clusters of
+palm-thatched hovels along the coast steamed past the mouth of Batu Beru
+river far away in the offing. The contract was old: perhaps in a few
+years’ time, when it had expired, Batu Beru would be included in the
+service; meantime all Mr. Van Wyk’s mail was addressed to Malacca,
+whence his agent sent it across once a month by the Sofala. It followed
+that whenever Massy had run short of money (through taking too many
+lottery tickets), or got into a difficulty about a skipper, Mr. Van Wyk
+was deprived of his letter and newspapers. In so far he had a personal
+interest in the fortunes of the Sofala. Though he considered himself
+a hermit (and for no passing whim evidently, since he had stood eight
+years of it already), he liked to know what went on in the world.
+
+Handy on the veranda upon a walnut _etagere_ (it had come last year by the
+Sofala)--everything came by the Sofala there lay, piled up under bronze
+weights, a pile of the Times’ weekly edition, the large sheets of the
+Rotterdam Courant, the Graphic in its world-wide green wrappers, an
+illustrated Dutch publication without a cover, the numbers of a German
+magazine with covers of the “_Bismarck malade_” color. There were also
+parcels of new music--though the piano (it had come years ago by the
+Sofala in the damp atmosphere of the forests was generally out of tune.)
+It was vexing to be cut off from everything for sixty days at a stretch
+sometimes, without any means of knowing what was the matter. And when
+the Sofala reappeared Mr. Van Wyk would descend the steps of the veranda
+and stroll over the grass plot in front of his house, down to the
+waterside, with a frown on his white brow.
+
+“You’ve been laid up after an accident, I presume.”
+
+He addressed the bridge, but before anybody could answer Massy was sure
+to have already scrambled ashore over the rail and pushed in, squeezing
+the palms of his hands together, bowing his sleek head as if gummed all
+over the top with black threads and tapes. And he would be so enraged
+at the necessity of having to offer such an explanation that his moaning
+would be positively pitiful, while all the time he tried to compose his
+big lips into a smile.
+
+“No, Mr. Van Wyk. You would not believe it. I couldn’t get one of those
+wretches to take the ship out. Not a single one of the lazy beasts could
+be induced, and the law, you know, Mr. Van Wyk . . .”
+
+He moaned at great length apologetically; the words conspiracy, plot,
+envy, came out prominently, whined with greater energy. Mr. Van Wyk,
+examining with a faint grimace his polished finger-nails, would say,
+“H’m. Very unfortunate,” and turn his back on him.
+
+Fastidious, clever, slightly skeptical, accustomed to the best society
+(he had held a much-envied shore appointment at the Ministry of Marine
+for a year preceding his retreat from his profession and from Europe),
+he possessed a latent warmth of feeling and a capacity for sympathy
+which were concealed by a sort of haughty, arbitrary indifference of
+manner arising from his early training; and by a something an enemy
+might have called foppish, in his aspect--like a distorted echo of past
+elegance. He managed to keep an almost military discipline amongst the
+coolies of the estate he had dragged into the light of day out of the
+tangle and shadows of the jungle; and the white shirt he put on every
+evening with its stiff glossy front and high collar looked as if he had
+meant to preserve the decent ceremony of evening-dress, but had wound
+a thick crimson sash above his hips as a concession to the wilderness,
+once his adversary, now his vanquished companion.
+
+Moreover, it was a hygienic precaution. Worn wide open in front, a short
+jacket of some airy silken stuff floated from his shoulders. His fluffy,
+fair hair, thin at the top, curled slightly at the sides; a carefully
+arranged mustache, an ungarnished forehead, the gleam of low patent
+shoes peeping under the wide bottom of trowsers cut straight from the
+same stuff as the gossamer coat, completed a figure recalling, with its
+sash, a pirate chief of romance, and at the same time the elegance of
+a slightly bald dandy indulging, in seclusion, a taste for unorthodox
+costume.
+
+It was his evening get-up. The proper time for the Sofala to arrive
+at Batu Beru was an hour before sunset, and he looked picturesque, and
+somehow quite correct too, walking at the water’s edge on the background
+of grass slope crowned with a low long bungalow with an immensely steep
+roof of palm thatch, and clad to the eaves in flowering creepers. While
+the Sofala was being made fast he strolled in the shade of the few trees
+left near the landing-place, waiting till he could go on board. Her
+white men were not of his kind. The old Sultan (though his wistful
+invasions were a nuisance) was really much more acceptable to his
+fastidious taste. But still they were white; the periodical visits of
+the ship made a break in the well-filled sameness of the days without
+disturbing his privacy. Moreover, they were necessary from a business
+point of view; and through a strain of preciseness in his nature he was
+irritated when she failed to appear at the appointed time.
+
+The cause of the irregularity was too absurd, and Massy, in his opinion,
+was a contemptible idiot. The first time the Sofala reappeared under the
+new agreement swinging out of the bend below, after he had almost given
+up all hope of ever seeing her again, he felt so angry that he did not
+go down at once to the landing-place. His servants had come running to
+him with the news, and he had dragged a chair close against the front
+rail of the veranda, spread his elbows out, rested his chin on his
+hands, and went on glaring at her fixedly while she was being made fast
+opposite his house. He could make out easily all the white faces on
+board. Who on earth was that kind of patriarch they had got there on the
+bridge now?
+
+At last he sprang up and walked down the gravel path. It was a fact
+that the very gravel for his paths had been imported by the Sofala.
+Exasperated out of his quiet superciliousness, without looking at anyone
+right or left, he accosted Massy straightway in so determined a manner
+that the engineer, taken aback, began to stammer unintelligibly. Nothing
+could be heard but the words: “Mr. Van Wyk . . . Indeed, Mr. Van Wyk
+. . . For the future, Mr. Van Wyk”--and by the suffusion of blood Massy’s
+vast bilious face acquired an unnatural orange tint, out of which the
+disconcerted coal-black eyes shone in an extraordinary manner.
+
+“Nonsense. I am tired of this. I wonder you have the impudence to come
+alongside my jetty as if I had it made for your convenience alone.”
+
+Massy tried to protest earnestly. Mr. Van Wyk was very angry. He had
+a good mind to ask that German firm--those people in Malacca--what was
+their name?--boats with green funnels. They would be only too glad
+of the opening to put one of their small steamers on the run. Yes;
+Schnitzler, Jacob Schnitzler, would in a moment. Yes. He had decided to
+write without delay.
+
+In his agitation Massy caught up his falling pipe.
+
+“You don’t mean it, sir!” he shrieked.
+
+“You shouldn’t mismanage your business in this ridiculous manner.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk turned on his heel. The other three whites on the bridge had
+not stirred during the scene. Massy walked hastily from side to side,
+puffed out his cheeks, suffocated.
+
+“Stuck up Dutchman!”
+
+And he moaned out feverishly a long tale of griefs. The efforts he had
+made for all these years to please that man. This was the return you
+got for it, eh? Pretty. Write to Schnitzler--let in the green-funnel
+boats--get an old Hamburg Jew to ruin him. No, really he could laugh.
+. . . He laughed sobbingly. . . . Ha! ha! ha! And make him carry the
+letter in his own ship presumably.
+
+He stumbled across a grating and swore. He would not hesitate to fling
+the Dutchman’s correspondence overboard--the whole confounded bundle.
+He had never, never made any charge for that accommodation. But Captain
+Whalley, his new partner, would not let him probably; besides, it would
+be only putting off the evil day. For his own part he would make a hole
+in the water rather than look on tamely at the green funnels overrunning
+his trade.
+
+He raved aloud. The China boys hung back with the dishes at the foot of
+the ladder. He yelled from the bridge down at the deck, “Aren’t we going
+to have any chow this evening at all?” then turned violently to Captain
+Whalley, who waited, grave and patient, at the head of the table,
+smoothing his beard in silence now and then with a forbearing gesture.
+
+“You don’t seem to care what happens to me. Don’t you see that this
+affects your interests as much as mine? It’s no joking matter.”
+
+He took the foot of the table growling between his teeth.
+
+“Unless you have a few thousands put away somewhere. I haven’t.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk dined in his thoroughly lit-up bungalow, putting a point of
+splendor in the night of his clearing above the dark bank of the river.
+Afterwards he sat down to his piano, and in a pause he became aware
+of slow footsteps passing on the path along the front. A plank or two
+creaked under a heavy tread; he swung half round on the music-stool,
+listening with his fingertips at rest on the keyboard. His little
+terrier barked violently, backing in from the veranda. A deep voice
+apologized gravely for “this intrusion.” He walked out quickly.
+
+At the head of the steps the patriarchal figure, who was the new captain
+of the Sofala apparently (he had seen a round dozen of them, but not
+one of that sort), towered without advancing. The little dog barked
+unceasingly, till a flick of Mr. Van Wyk’s handkerchief made him spring
+aside into silence. Captain Whalley, opening the matter, was met by a
+punctiliously polite but determined opposition.
+
+They carried on their discussion standing where they had come face to
+face. Mr. Van Wyk observed his visitor with attention. Then at last, as
+if forced out of his reserve--
+
+“I am surprised that you should intercede for such a confounded fool.”
+
+This outbreak was almost complimentary, as if its meaning had been,
+“That such a man as you should intercede!” Captain Whalley let it pass
+by without flinching. One would have thought he had heard nothing. He
+simply went on to state that he was personally interested in putting
+things straight between them. Personally . . .
+
+But Mr. Van Wyk, really carried away by his disgust with Massy, became
+very incisive--
+
+“Indeed--if I am to be frank with you--his whole character does not seem
+to me particularly estimable or trustworthy . . .”
+
+Captain Whalley, always straight, seemed to grow an inch taller and
+broader, as if the girth of his chest had suddenly expanded under his
+beard.
+
+“My dear sir, you don’t think I came here to discuss a man with whom I
+am--I am--h’m--closely associated.”
+
+A sort of solemn silence lasted for a moment. He was not used to asking
+favors, but the importance he attached to this affair had made him
+willing to try. . . . Mr. Van Wyk, favorably impressed, and suddenly
+mollified by a desire to laugh, interrupted--
+
+“That’s all right if you make it a personal matter; but you can do no
+less than sit down and smoke a cigar with me.”
+
+A slight pause, then Captain Whalley stepped forward heavily. As to the
+regularity of the service, for the future he made himself responsible
+for it; and his name was Whalley--perhaps to a sailor (he was speaking
+to a sailor, was he not?) not altogether unfamiliar. There was a
+lighthouse now, on an island. Maybe Mr. Van Wyk himself . . .
+
+“Oh yes. Oh indeed.” Mr. Van Wyk caught on at once. He indicated a
+chair. How very interesting. For his own part he had seen some service
+in the last Acheen War, but had never been so far East. Whalley Island?
+Of course. Now that was very interesting. What changes his guest must
+have seen since.
+
+“I can look further back even--on a whole half-century.”
+
+Captain Whalley expanded a bit. The flavor of a good cigar (it was a
+weakness) had gone straight to his heart, also the civility of that
+young man. There was something in that accidental contact of which he
+had been starved in his years of struggle.
+
+The front wall retreating made a square recess furnished like a room.
+A lamp with a milky glass shade, suspended below the slope of the high
+roof at the end of a slender brass chain, threw a bright round of light
+upon a little table bearing an open book and an ivory paper-knife. And,
+in the translucent shadows beyond, other tables could be seen, a number
+of easy-chairs of various shapes, with a great profusion of skin rugs
+strewn on the teakwood planking all over the veranda. The flowering
+creepers scented the air. Their foliage clipped out between the uprights
+made as if several frames of thick unstirring leaves reflecting the
+lamplight in a green glow. Through the opening at his elbow Captain
+Whalley could see the gangway lantern of the Sofala burning dim by the
+shore, the shadowy masses of the town beyond the open lustrous darkness
+of the river, and, as if hung along the straight edge of the projecting
+eaves, a narrow black strip of the night sky full of stars--resplendent.
+The famous cigar in hand he had a moment of complacency.
+
+“A trifle. Somebody must lead the way. I just showed that the thing
+could be done; but you men brought up to the use of steam cannot
+conceive the vast importance of my bit of venturesomeness to the Eastern
+trade of the time. Why, that new route reduced the average time of a
+southern passage by eleven days for more than half the year. Eleven
+days! It’s on record. But the remarkable thing--speaking to a sailor--I
+should say was . . .”
+
+He talked well, without egotism, professionally. The powerful voice,
+produced without effort, filled the bungalow even into the empty rooms
+with a deep and limpid resonance, seemed to make a stillness outside;
+and Mr. Van Wyk was surprised by the serene quality of its tone, like
+the perfection of manly gentleness. Nursing one small foot, in a
+silk sock and a patent leather shoe, on his knee, he was immensely
+entertained. It was as if nobody could talk like this now, and the
+overshadowed eyes, the flowing white beard, the big frame, the
+serenity, the whole temper of the man, were an amazing survival from the
+prehistoric times of the world coming up to him out of the sea.
+
+Captain Whalley had been also the pioneer of the early trade in the Gulf
+of Pe-tchi-li. He even found occasion to mention that he had buried
+his “dear wife” there six-and-twenty years ago. Mr. Van Wyk, impassive,
+could not help speculating in his mind swiftly as to the sort of woman
+that would mate with such a man. Did they make an adventurous and
+well-matched pair? No. Very possible she had been small, frail, no
+doubt very feminine--or most likely commonplace with domestic instincts,
+utterly insignificant. But Captain Whalley was no garrulous bore, and
+shaking his head as if to dissipate the momentary gloom that had settled
+on his handsome old face, he alluded conversationally to Mr. Van Wyk’s
+solitude.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk affirmed that sometimes he had more company than he wanted.
+He mentioned smilingly some of the peculiarities of his intercourse with
+“My Sultan.” He made his visits in force. Those people damaged his grass
+plot in front (it was not easy to obtain some approach to a lawn in
+the tropics) and the other day had broken down some rare bushes he had
+planted over there. And Captain Whalley remembered immediately that,
+in ‘forty-seven, the then Sultan, “this man’s grandfather,” had been
+notorious as a great protector of the piratical fleets of praus from
+farther East. They had a safe refuge in the river at Batu Beru. He
+financed more especially a Balinini chief called Haji Daman. Captain
+Whalley, nodding significantly his bushy white eyebrows, had very good
+reason to know something of that. The world had progressed since that
+time.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk demurred with unexpected acrimony. Progressed in what? he
+wanted to know.
+
+Why, in knowledge of truth, in decency, in justice, in order--in honesty
+too, since men harmed each other mostly from ignorance. It was, Captain
+Whalley concluded quaintly, more pleasant to live in.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk whimsically would not admit that Mr. Massy, for instance,
+was more pleasant naturally than the Balinini pirates.
+
+The river had not gained much by the change. They were in their way
+every bit as honest. Massy was less ferocious than Haji Daman no doubt,
+but . . .
+
+“And what about you, my good sir?” Captain Whalley laughed a deep soft
+laugh. “_You_ are an improvement, surely.”
+
+He continued in a vein of pleasantry. A good cigar was better than a
+knock on the head--the sort of welcome he would have found on this
+river forty or fifty years ago. Then leaning forward slightly, he became
+earnestly serious. It seems as if, outside their own sea-gypsy
+tribes, these rovers had hated all mankind with an incomprehensible,
+bloodthirsty hatred. Meantime their depredations had been stopped, and
+what was the consequence? The new generation was orderly, peaceable,
+settled in prosperous villages. He could speak from personal knowledge.
+And even the few survivors of that time--old men now--had changed so
+much, that it would have been unkind to remember against them that they
+had ever slit a throat in their lives. He had one especially in his
+mind’s eye: a dignified, venerable headman of a certain large coast
+village about sixty miles sou’west of Tampasuk. It did one’s heart
+good to see him--to hear that man speak. He might have been a ferocious
+savage once. What men wanted was to be checked by superior intelligence,
+by superior knowledge, by superior force too--yes, by force held in
+trust from God and sanctified by its use in accordance with His declared
+will. Captain Whalley believed a disposition for good existed in every
+man, even if the world were not a very happy place as a whole. In the
+wisdom of men he had not so much confidence. The disposition had to be
+helped up pretty sharply sometimes, he admitted. They might be silly,
+wrongheaded, unhappy; but naturally evil--no. There was at bottom a
+complete harmlessness at least . . .
+
+“Is there?” Mr. Van Wyk snapped acrimoniously.
+
+Captain Whalley laughed at the interjection, in the good humor of large,
+tolerating certitude. He could look back at half a century, he pointed
+out. The smoke oozed placidly through the white hairs hiding his kindly
+lips.
+
+“At all events,” he resumed after a pause, “I am glad that they’ve had
+no time to do you much harm as yet.”
+
+This allusion to his comparative youthfulness did not offend Mr. Van
+Wyk, who got up and wriggled his shoulders with an enigmatic half-smile.
+They walked out together amicably into the starry night towards the
+river-side. Their footsteps resounded unequally on the dark path. At the
+shore end of the gangway the lantern, hung low to the handrail, threw
+a vivid light on the white legs and the big black feet of Mr. Massy
+waiting about anxiously. From the waist upwards he remained shadowy,
+with a row of buttons gleaming up to the vague outline of his chin.
+
+“You may thank Captain Whalley for this,” Mr. Van Wyk said curtly to him
+before turning away.
+
+The lamps on the veranda flung three long squares of light between
+the uprights far over the grass. A bat flitted before his face like a
+circling flake of velvety blackness. Along the jasmine hedge the night
+air seemed heavy with the fall of perfumed dew; flowerbeds bordered the
+path; the clipped bushes uprose in dark rounded clumps here and there
+before the house; the dense foliage of creepers filtered the sheen of
+the lamplight within in a soft glow all along the front; and everything
+near and far stood still in a great immobility, in a great sweetness.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk (a few years before he had had occasion to imagine himself
+treated more badly than anybody alive had ever been by a woman) felt
+for Captain Whalley’s optimistic views the disdain of a man who had once
+been credulous himself. His disgust with the world (the woman for a
+time had filled it for him completely) had taken the form of activity
+in retirement, because, though capable of great depth of feeling, he was
+energetic and essentially practical. But there was in that uncommon old
+sailor, drifting on the outskirts of his busy solitude, something that
+fascinated his skepticism. His very simplicity (amusing enough) was like
+a delicate refinement of an upright character. The striking dignity
+of manner could be nothing else, in a man reduced to such a humble
+position, but the expression of something essentially noble in the
+character. With all his trust in mankind he was no fool; the serenity
+of his temper at the end of so many years, since it could not obviously
+have been appeased by success, wore an air of profound wisdom. Mr. Van
+Wyk was amused at it sometimes. Even the very physical traits of the
+old captain of the Sofala, his powerful frame, his reposeful mien, his
+intelligent, handsome face, the big limbs, the benign courtesy, the
+touch of rugged severity in the shaggy eyebrows, made up a seductive
+personality. Mr. Van Wyk disliked littleness of every kind, but there
+was nothing small about that man, and in the exemplary regularity of
+many trips an intimacy had grown up between them, a warm feeling
+at bottom under a kindly stateliness of forms agreeable to his
+fastidiousness.
+
+They kept their respective opinions on all worldly matters. His other
+convictions Captain Whalley never intruded. The difference of their
+ages was like another bond between them. Once, when twitted with the
+uncharitableness of his youth, Mr. Van Wyk, running his eye over the
+vast proportions of his interlocutor, retorted in friendly banter--
+
+“Oh. You’ll come to my way of thinking yet. You’ll have plenty of time.
+Don’t call yourself old: you look good for a round hundred.”
+
+But he could not help his stinging incisiveness, and though moderating
+it by an almost affectionate smile, he added--
+
+“And by then you will probably consent to die from sheer disgust.”
+
+Captain Whalley, smiling too, shook his head. “God forbid!”
+
+He thought that perhaps on the whole he deserved something better than
+to die in such sentiments. The time of course would have to come, and he
+trusted to his Maker to provide a manner of going out of which he need
+not be ashamed. For the rest he hoped he would live to a hundred if need
+be: other men had been known; it would be no miracle. He expected no
+miracles.
+
+The pronounced, argumentative tone caused Mr. Van Wyk to raise his head
+and look at him steadily. Captain Whalley was gazing fixedly with a rapt
+expression, as though he had seen his Creator’s favorable decree written
+in mysterious characters on the wall. He kept perfectly motionless for
+a few seconds, then got his vast bulk on to his feet so impetuously that
+Mr. Van Wyk was startled.
+
+He struck first a heavy blow on his inflated chest: and, throwing out
+horizontally a big arm that remained steady, extended in the air like
+the limb of a tree on a windless day--
+
+“Not a pain or an ache there. Can you see this shake in the least?”
+
+His voice was low, in an awing, confident contrast with the headlong
+emphasis of his movements. He sat down abruptly.
+
+“This isn’t to boast of it, you know. I am nothing,” he said in his
+effortless strong voice, that seemed to come out as naturally as a river
+flows. He picked up the stump of the cigar he had laid aside, and added
+peacefully, with a slight nod, “As it happens, my life is necessary; it
+isn’t my own, it isn’t--God knows.”
+
+He did not say much for the rest of the evening, but several times Mr.
+Van Wyk detected a faint smile of assurance flitting under the heavy
+mustache.
+
+Later on Captain Whalley would now and then consent to dine “at the
+house.” He could even be induced to drink a glass of wine. “Don’t think
+I am afraid of it, my good sir,” he explained. “There was a very good
+reason why I should give it up.”
+
+On another occasion, leaning back at ease, he remarked, “You have
+treated me most--most humanely, my dear Mr. Van Wyk, from the very
+first.”
+
+“You’ll admit there was some merit,” Mr. Van Wyk hinted slyly. “An
+associate of that excellent Massy. . . . Well, well, my dear captain, I
+won’t say a word against him.”
+
+“It would be no use your saying anything against him,” Captain Whalley
+affirmed a little moodily. “As I’ve told you before, my life--my work,
+is necessary, not for myself alone. I can’t choose” . . . He paused,
+turned the glass before him right round. . . . “I have an only child--a
+daughter.”
+
+The ample downward sweep of his arm over the table seemed to suggest
+a small girl at a vast distance. “I hope to see her once more before I
+die. Meantime it’s enough to know that she has me sound and solid, thank
+God. You can’t understand how one feels. Bone of my bone, flesh of my
+flesh; the very image of my poor wife. Well, she . . .”
+
+Again he paused, then pronounced stoically the words, “She has a hard
+struggle.”
+
+And his head fell on his breast, his eyebrows remained knitted, as by
+an effort of meditation. But generally his mind seemed steeped in the
+serenity of boundless trust in a higher power. Mr. Van Wyk wondered
+sometimes how much of it was due to the splendid vitality of the man,
+to the bodily vigor which seems to impart something of its force to the
+soul. But he had learned to like him very much.
+
+
+XIII
+
+This was the reason why Mr. Sterne’s confidential communication,
+delivered hurriedly on the shore alongside the dark silent ship,
+had disturbed his equanimity. It was the most incomprehensible and
+unexpected thing that could happen; and the perturbation of his spirit
+was so great that, forgetting all about his letters, he ran rapidly up
+the bridge ladder.
+
+The portable table was being put together for dinner to the left of the
+wheel by two pig-tailed “boys,” who as usual snarled at each other
+over the job, while another, a doleful, burly, very yellow Chinaman,
+resembling Mr. Massy, waited apathetically with the cloth over his arm
+and a pile of thick dinner-plates against his chest. A common cabin lamp
+with its globe missing, brought up from below, had been hooked to the
+wooden framework of the awning; the side-screens had been lowered all
+round; Captain Whalley filling the depths of the wicker-chair seemed to
+sit benumbed in a canvas tent crudely lighted, and used for the storing
+of nautical objects; a shabby steering-wheel, a battered brass binnacle
+on a stout mahogany stand, two dingy life-buoys, an old cork fender
+lying in a corner, dilapidated deck-lockers with loops of thin rope
+instead of door-handles.
+
+He shook off the appearance of numbness to return Mr. Van Wyk’s
+unusually brisk greeting, but relapsed directly afterwards. To accept
+a pressing invitation to dinner “up at the house” cost him another very
+visible physical effort. Mr. Van Wyk, perplexed, folded his arms, and
+leaning back against the rail, with his little, black, shiny feet well
+out, examined him covertly.
+
+“I’ve noticed of late that you are not quite yourself, old friend.”
+
+He put an affectionate gentleness into the last two words. The real
+intimacy of their intercourse had never been so vividly expressed
+before.
+
+“Tut, tut, tut!”
+
+The wicker-chair creaked heavily.
+
+“Irritable,” commented Mr. Van Wyk to himself; and aloud, “I’ll expect
+to see you in half an hour, then,” he said negligently, moving off.
+
+“In half an hour,” Captain Whalley’s rigid silvery head repeated behind
+him as if out of a trance.
+
+Amidships, below, two voices, close against the engineroom, could be
+heard answering each other--one angry and slow, the other alert.
+
+“I tell you the beast has locked himself in to get drunk.”
+
+“Can’t help it now, Mr. Massy. After all, a man has a right to shut
+himself up in his cabin in his own time.”
+
+“Not to get drunk.”
+
+“I heard him swear that the worry with the boilers was enough to drive
+any man to drink,” Sterne said maliciously.
+
+Massy hissed out something about bursting the door in. Mr. Van Wyk, to
+avoid them, crossed in the dark to the other side of the deserted deck.
+The planking of the little wharf rattled faintly under his hasty feet.
+
+“Mr. Van Wyk! Mr. Van Wyk!”
+
+He walked on: somebody was running on the path. “You’ve forgotten to get
+your mail.”
+
+Sterne, holding a bundle of papers in his hand, caught up with him.
+
+“Oh, thanks.”
+
+But, as the other continued at his elbow, Mr. Van Wyk stopped short.
+The overhanging eaves, descending low upon the lighted front of the
+bungalow, threw their black straight-edged shadow into the great body of
+the night on that side. Everything was very still. A tinkle of cutlery
+and a slight jingle of glasses were heard. Mr. Van Wyk’s servants were
+laying the table for two on the veranda.
+
+“I’m afraid you give me no credit whatever for my good intentions in the
+matter I’ve spoken to you about,” said Sterne.
+
+“I simply don’t understand you.”
+
+“Captain Whalley is a very audacious man, but he will understand that
+his game is up. That’s all that anybody need ever know of it from me.
+Believe me, I am very considerate in this, but duty is duty. I don’t
+want to make a fuss. All I ask you, as his friend, is to tell him from
+me that the game’s up. That will be sufficient.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk felt a loathsome dismay at this queer privilege of
+friendship. He would not demean himself by asking for the slightest
+explanation; to drive the other away with contumely he did not think
+prudent--as yet, at any rate. So much assurance staggered him. Who
+could tell what there could be in it, he thought? His regard for Captain
+Whalley had the tenacity of a disinterested sentiment, and his practical
+instinct coming to his aid, he concealed his scorn.
+
+“I gather, then, that this is something grave.”
+
+“Very grave,” Sterne assented solemnly, delighted at having produced
+an effect at last. He was ready to add some effusive protestations
+of regret at the “unavoidable necessity,” but Mr. Van Wyk cut him
+short--very civilly, however.
+
+Once on the veranda Mr. Van Wyk put his hands in his pockets, and,
+straddling his legs, stared down at a black panther skin lying on the
+floor before a rocking-chair. “It looks as if the fellow had not the
+pluck to play his own precious game openly,” he thought.
+
+This was true enough. In the face of Massy’s last rebuff Sterne dared
+not declare his knowledge. His object was simply to get charge of the
+steamer and keep it for some time. Massy would never forgive him for
+forcing himself on; but if Captain Whalley left the ship of his own
+accord, the command would devolve upon him for the rest of the trip;
+so he hit upon the brilliant idea of scaring the old man away. A vague
+menace, a mere hint, would be enough in such a brazen case; and, with
+a strange admixture of compassion, he thought that Batu Beru was a
+very good place for throwing up the sponge. The skipper could go ashore
+quietly, and stay with that Dutchman of his. Weren’t these two as thick
+as thieves together? And on reflection he seemed to see that there was a
+way to work the whole thing through that great friend of the old
+man’s. This was another brilliant idea. He had an inborn preference for
+circuitous methods. In this particular case he desired to remain in the
+background as much as possible, to avoid exasperating Massy needlessly.
+No fuss! Let it all happen naturally.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk all through the dinner was conscious of a sense of isolation
+that invades sometimes the closeness of human intercourse. Captain
+Whalley failed lamentably and obviously in his attempts to eat
+something. He seemed overcome by a strange absentmindedness. His hand
+would hover irresolutely, as if left without guidance by a preoccupied
+mind. Mr. Van Wyk had heard him coming up from a long way off in the
+profound stillness of the river-side, and had noticed the irresolute
+character of the footfalls. The toe of his boot had struck the bottom
+stair as though he had come along mooning with his head in the air
+right up to the steps of the veranda. Had the captain of the Sofala been
+another sort of man he would have suspected the work of age there. But
+one glance at him was enough. Time--after, indeed, marking him for its
+own--had given him up to his usefulness, in which his simple faith would
+see a proof of Divine mercy. “How could I contrive to warn him?” Mr. Van
+Wyk wondered, as if Captain Whalley had been miles and miles away, out
+of sight and earshot of all evil. He was sickened by an immense disgust
+of Sterne. To even mention his threat to a man like Whalley would be
+positively indecent. There was something more vile and insulting in
+its hint than in a definite charge of crime--the debasing taint of
+blackmailing. “What could anyone bring against him?” he asked himself.
+This was a limpid personality. “And for what object?” The Power that man
+trusted had thought fit to leave him nothing on earth that envy could
+lay hold of, except a bare crust of bread.
+
+“Won’t you try some of this?” he asked, pushing a dish slightly.
+Suddenly it seemed to Mr. Van Wyk that Sterne might possibly be coveting
+the command of the Sofala. His cynicism was quite startled by what
+looked like a proof that no man may count himself safe from his kind
+unless in the very abyss of misery. An intrigue of that sort was hardly
+worth troubling about, he judged; but still, with such a fool as Massy
+to deal with, Whalley ought to and must be warned.
+
+At this moment Captain Whalley, bolt upright, the deep cavities of the
+eyes overhung by a bushy frown, and one large brown hand resting on each
+side of his empty plate, spoke across the tablecloth abruptly--“Mr. Van
+Wyk, you’ve always treated me with the most humane consideration.”
+
+“My dear captain, you make too much of a simple fact that I am not
+a savage.” Mr. Van Wyk, utterly revolted by the thought of Sterne’s
+obscure attempt, raised his voice incisively, as if the mate had been
+hiding somewhere within earshot. “Any consideration I have been able to
+show was no more than the rightful due of a character I’ve learned to
+regard by this time with an esteem that nothing can shake.”
+
+A slight ring of glass made him lift his eyes from the slice of
+pine-apple he was cutting into small pieces on his plate. In changing
+his position Captain Whalley had contrived to upset an empty tumbler.
+
+Without looking that way, leaning sideways on his elbow, his other
+hand shading his brow, he groped shakily for it, then desisted. Van Wyk
+stared blankly, as if something momentous had happened all at once.
+He did not know why he should feel so startled; but he forgot Sterne
+utterly for the moment.
+
+“Why, what’s the matter?”
+
+And Captain Whalley, half-averted, in a deadened, agitated voice,
+muttered--
+
+“Esteem!”
+
+“And I may add something more,” Mr. Van Wyk, very steady-eyed,
+pronounced slowly.
+
+“Hold! Enough!” Captain Whalley did not change his attitude or raise his
+voice. “Say no more! I can make you no return. I am too poor even for
+that now. Your esteem is worth having. You are not a man that would
+stoop to deceive the poorest sort of devil on earth, or make a ship
+unseaworthy every time he takes her to sea.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk, leaning forward, his face gone pink all over, with the
+starched table-napkin over his knees, was inclined to mistrust his
+senses, his power of comprehension, the sanity of his guest.
+
+“Where? Why? In the name of God!--what’s this? What ship? I don’t
+understand who . . .”
+
+“Then, in the name of God, it is I! A ship’s unseaworthy when her
+captain can’t see. I am going blind.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk made a slight movement, and sat very still afterwards for
+a few seconds; then, with the thought of Sterne’s “The game’s up,” he
+ducked under the table to pick up the napkin which had slipped off his
+knees. This was the game that was up. And at the same time the muffled
+voice of Captain Whalley passed over him--
+
+“I’ve deceived them all. Nobody knows.”
+
+He emerged flushed to the eyes. Captain Whalley, motionless under the
+full blaze of the lamp, shaded his face with his hand.
+
+“And you had that courage?”
+
+“Call it by what name you like. But you are a humane
+man--a--a--gentleman, Mr. Van Wyk. You may have asked me what I had done
+with my conscience.”
+
+He seemed to muse, profoundly silent, very still in his mournful pose.
+
+“I began to tamper with it in my pride. You begin to see a lot of things
+when you are going blind. I could not be frank with an old chum even.
+I was not frank with Massy--no, not altogether. I knew he took me for
+a wealthy sailor fool, and I let him. I wanted to keep up my
+importance--because there was poor Ivy away there--my daughter. What did
+I want to trade on his misery for? I did trade on it--for her. And now,
+what mercy could I expect from him? He would trade on mine if he knew
+it. He would hunt the old fraud out, and stick to the money for a year.
+Ivy’s money. And I haven’t kept a penny for myself. How am I going to
+live for a year. A year! In a year there will be no sun in the sky for
+her father.”
+
+His deep voice came out, awfully veiled, as though he had been
+overwhelmed by the earth of a landslide, and talking to you of the
+thoughts that haunt the dead in their graves. A cold shudder ran down
+Mr. Van Wyk’s back.
+
+“And how long is it since you have . . .?” he began.
+
+“It was a long time before I could bring myself to believe in this--this
+visitation.” Captain Whalley spoke with gloomy patience from under his
+hand.
+
+He had not thought he had deserved it. He had begun by deceiving himself
+from day to day, from week to week. He had the Serang at hand there--an
+old servant. It came on gradually, and when he could no longer deceive
+himself . . .
+
+His voice died out almost.
+
+“Rather than give her up I set myself to deceive you all.”
+
+“It’s incredible,” whispered Mr. Van Wyk. Captain Whalley’s appalling
+murmur flowed on.
+
+“Not even the sign of God’s anger could make me forget her. How could I
+forsake my child, feeling my vigor all the time--the blood warm within
+me? Warm as yours. It seems to me that, like the blinded Samson, I
+would find the strength to shake down a temple upon my head. She’s a
+struggling woman--my own child that we used to pray over together, my
+poor wife and I. Do you remember that day I as well as told you that I
+believed God would let me live to a hundred for her sake? What sin is
+there in loving your child? Do you see it? I was ready for her sake
+to live for ever. I half believed I would. I’ve been praying for death
+since. Ha! Presumptuous man--you wanted to live . . .”
+
+A tremendous, shuddering upheaval of that big frame, shaken by a gasping
+sob, set the glasses jingling all over the table, seemed to make the
+whole house tremble to the roof-tree. And Mr. Van Wyk, whose feeling of
+outraged love had been translated into a form of struggle with nature,
+understood very well that, for that man whose whole life had been
+conditioned by action, there could exist no other expression for all the
+emotions; that, to voluntarily cease venturing, doing, enduring, for his
+child’s sake, would have been exactly like plucking his warm love for
+her out of his living heart. Something too monstrous, too impossible,
+even to conceive.
+
+Captain Whalley had not changed his attitude, that seemed to express
+something of shame, sorrow, and defiance.
+
+“I have even deceived you. If it had not been for that word ‘esteem.’
+These are not the words for me. I would have lied to you. Haven’t I
+lied to you? Weren’t you going to trust your property on board this very
+trip?”
+
+“I have a floating yearly policy,” Mr. Van Wyk said almost unwittingly,
+and was amazed at the sudden cropping up of a commercial detail.
+
+“The ship is unseaworthy, I tell you. The policy would be invalid if it
+were known . . .”
+
+“We shall share the guilt, then.”
+
+“Nothing could make mine less,” said Captain Whalley.
+
+He had not dared to consult a doctor; the man would have perhaps asked
+who he was, what he was doing; Massy might have heard something. He had
+lived on without any help, human or divine. The very prayers stuck in
+his throat. What was there to pray for? and death seemed as far as ever.
+Once he got into his cabin he dared not come out again; when he sat down
+he dared not get up; he dared not raise his eyes to anybody’s face;
+he felt reluctant to look upon the sea or up to the sky. The world was
+fading before his great fear of giving himself away. The old ship was
+his last friend; he was not afraid of her; he knew every inch of her
+deck; but at her too he hardly dared to look, for fear of finding he
+could see less than the day before. A great incertitude enveloped him.
+The horizon was gone; the sky mingled darkly with the sea. Who was this
+figure standing over yonder? what was this thing lying down there? And
+a frightful doubt of the reality of what he could see made even the
+remnant of sight that remained to him an added torment, a pitfall always
+open for his miserable pretense. He was afraid to stumble inexcusably
+over something--to say a fatal Yes or No to a question. The hand of God
+was upon him, but it could not tear him away from his child. And, as if
+in a nightmare of humiliation, every featureless man seemed an enemy.
+
+He let his hand fall heavily on the table. Mr. Van Wyk, arms down,
+chin on breast, with a gleam of white teeth pressing on the lower lip,
+meditated on Sterne’s “The game’s up.”
+
+“The Serang of course does not know.”
+
+“Nobody,” said Captain Whalley, with assurance.
+
+“Ah yes. Nobody. Very well. Can you keep it up to the end of the trip?
+That is the last under the agreement with Massy.”
+
+Captain Whalley got up and stood erect, very stately, with the great
+white beard lying like a silver breastplate over the awful secret of his
+heart. Yes; that was the only hope there was for him of ever seeing her
+again, of securing the money, the last he could do for her, before he
+crept away somewhere--useless, a burden, a reproach to himself. His
+voice faltered.
+
+“Think of it! Never see her any more: the only human being besides
+myself now on earth that can remember my wife. She’s just like her
+mother. Lucky the poor woman is where there are no tears shed over
+those they loved on earth and that remain to pray not to be led into
+temptation--because, I suppose, the blessed know the secret of grace in
+God’s dealings with His created children.”
+
+He swayed a little, said with austere dignity--
+
+“I don’t. I know only the child He has given me.”
+
+And he began to walk. Mr. Van Wyk, jumping up, saw the full meaning
+of the rigid head, the hesitating feet, the vaguely extended hand.
+His heart was beating fast; he moved a chair aside, and instinctively
+advanced as if to offer his arm. But Captain Whalley passed him by,
+making for the stairs quite straight.
+
+“He could not see me at all out of his line,” Van Wyk thought, with a
+sort of awe. Then going to the head of the stairs, he asked a little
+tremulously--
+
+“What is it like--like a mist--like . . .”
+
+Captain Whalley, half-way down, stopped, and turned round undismayed to
+answer.
+
+“It is as if the light were ebbing out of the world. Have you ever
+watched the ebbing sea on an open stretch of sands withdrawing farther
+and farther away from you? It is like this--only there will be no flood
+to follow. Never. It is as if the sun were growing smaller, the stars
+going out one by one. There can’t be many left that I can see by this.
+But I haven’t had the courage to look of late . . .” He must have been
+able to make out Mr. Van Wyk, because he checked him by an authoritative
+gesture and a stoical--
+
+“I can get about alone yet.”
+
+It was as if he had taken his line, and would accept no help from men,
+after having been cast out, like a presumptuous Titan, from his heaven.
+Mr. Van Wyk, arrested, seemed to count the footsteps right out of
+earshot. He walked between the tables, tapping smartly with his heels,
+took up a paper-knife, dropped it after a vague glance along the blade;
+then happening upon the piano, struck a few chords again and again,
+vigorously, standing up before the keyboard with an attentive poise
+of the head like a piano-tuner; closing it, he pivoted on his heels
+brusquely, avoided the little terrier sleeping trustfully on crossed
+forepaws, came upon the stairs next, and, as though he had lost his
+balance on the top step, ran down headlong out of the house. His
+servants, beginning to clear the table, heard him mutter to himself
+(evil words no doubt) down there, and then after a pause go away with a
+strolling gait in the direction of the wharf.
+
+The bulwarks of the Sofala lying alongside the bank made a low, black
+wall on the undulating contour of the shore. Two masts and a funnel
+uprose from behind it with a great rake, as if about to fall: a solid,
+square elevation in the middle bore the ghostly shapes of white boats,
+the curves of davits, lines of rail and stanchions, all confused and
+mingling darkly everywhere; but low down, amidships, a single lighted
+port stared out on the night, perfectly round, like a small, full moon,
+whose yellow beam caught a patch of wet mud, the edge of trodden grass,
+two turns of heavy cable wound round the foot of a thick wooden post in
+the ground.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk, peering alongside, heard a muzzy boastful voice apparently
+jeering at a person called Prendergast. It mouthed abuse thickly,
+choked; then pronounced very distinctly the word “Murphy,” and chuckled.
+Glass tinkled tremulously. All these sounds came from the lighted port.
+Mr. Van Wyk hesitated, stooped; it was impossible to look through unless
+he went down into the mud.
+
+“Sterne,” he said, half aloud.
+
+The drunken voice within said gladly--
+
+“Sterne--of course. Look at him blink. Look at him! Sterne, Whalley,
+Massy. Massy, Whalley, Sterne. But Massy’s the best. You can’t come over
+him. He would just love to see you starve.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk moved away, made out farther forward a shadowy head stuck
+out from under the awnings as if on the watch, and spoke quietly in
+Malay, “Is the mate asleep?”
+
+“No. Here, at your service.”
+
+In a moment Sterne appeared, walking as noiselessly as a cat on the
+wharf.
+
+“It’s so jolly dark, and I had no idea you would be down to-night.”
+
+“What’s this horrible raving?” asked Mr. Van Wyk, as if to explain the
+cause of a shudder than ran over him audibly.
+
+“Jack’s broken out on a drunk. That’s our second. It’s his way. He will
+be right enough by to-morrow afternoon, only Mr. Massy will keep on
+worrying up and down the deck. We had better get away.”
+
+He muttered suggestively of a talk “up at the house.” He had long
+desired to effect an entrance there, but Mr. Van Wyk nonchalantly
+demurred: it would not, he feared, be quite prudent, perhaps; and
+the opaque black shadow under one of the two big trees left at the
+landing-place swallowed them up, impenetrably dense, by the side of the
+wide river, that seemed to spin into threads of glitter the light of
+a few big stars dropped here and there upon its outspread and flowing
+stillness.
+
+“The situation is grave beyond doubt,” Mr. Van Wyk said. Ghost-like in
+their white clothes they could not distinguish each others’ features,
+and their feet made no sound on the soft earth. A sort of purring was
+heard. Mr. Sterne felt gratified by such a beginning.
+
+“I thought, Mr. Van Wyk, a gentleman of your sort would see at once how
+awkwardly I was situated.”
+
+“Yes, very. Obviously his health is bad. Perhaps he’s breaking up. I
+see, and he himself is well aware--I assume I am speaking to a man of
+sense--he is well aware that his legs are giving out.”
+
+“His legs--ah!” Mr. Sterne was disconcerted, and then turned sulky.
+“You may call it his legs if you like; what I want to know is whether he
+intends to clear out quietly. That’s a good one, too! His legs! Pooh!”
+
+“Why, yes. Only look at the way he walks.” Mr. Van Wyk took him up in a
+perfectly cool and undoubting tone. “The question, however, is whether
+your sense of duty does not carry you too far from your true interest.
+After all, I too could do something to serve you. You know who I am.”
+
+“Everybody along the Straits has heard of you, sir.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk presumed that this meant something favorable. Sterne had
+a soft laugh at this pleasantry. He should think so! To the opening
+statement, that the partnership agreement was to expire at the end of
+this very trip, he gave an attentive assent. He was aware. One heard of
+nothing else on board all the blessed day long. As to Massy, it was no
+secret that he was in a jolly deep hole with these worn-out boilers. He
+would have to borrow somewhere a couple of hundred first of all to pay
+off the captain; and then he would have to raise money on mortgage upon
+the ship for the new boilers--that is, if he could find a lender at all.
+At best it meant loss of time, a break in the trade, short earnings
+for the year--and there was always the danger of having his connection
+filched away from him by the Germans. It was whispered about that he
+had already tried two firms. Neither would have anything to do with
+him. Ship too old, and the man too well known in the place. . . .
+Mr. Sterne’s final rapid winking remained buried in the deep darkness
+sibilating with his whispers.
+
+“Supposing, then, he got the loan,” Mr. Van Wyk resumed in a deliberate
+undertone, “on your own showing he’s more than likely to get a
+mortgagee’s man thrust upon him as captain. For my part, I know that I
+would make that very stipulation myself if I had to find the money.
+And as a matter of fact I am thinking of doing so. It would be worth
+my while in many ways. Do you see how this would bear on the case under
+discussion?”
+
+“Thank you, sir. I am sure you couldn’t get anybody that would care more
+for your interests.”
+
+“Well, it suits my interest that Captain Whalley should finish his time.
+I shall probably take a passage with you down the Straits. If that can
+be done, I’ll be on the spot when all these changes take place, and in a
+position to look after _your_ interests.”
+
+“Mr. Van Wyk, I want nothing better. I am sure I am infinitely . . .”
+
+“I take it, then, that this may be done without any trouble.”
+
+“Well, sir, what risk there is can’t be helped; but (speaking to you as
+my employer now) the thing is more safe than it looks. If anybody had
+told me of it I wouldn’t have believed it, but I have been looking on
+myself. That old Serang has been trained up to the game. There’s nothing
+the matter with his--his--limbs, sir. He’s got used to doing things
+himself in a remarkable way. And let me tell you, sir, that Captain
+Whalley, poor man, is by no means useless. Fact. Let me explain to you,
+sir. He stiffens up that old monkey of a Malay, who knows well enough
+what to do. Why, he must have kept captain’s watches in all sorts of
+country ships off and on for the last five-and-twenty years. These
+natives, sir, as long as they have a white man close at the back, will
+go on doing the right thing most surprisingly well--even if left quite
+to themselves. Only the white man must be of the sort to put starch into
+them, and the captain is just the one for that. Why, sir, he has drilled
+him so well that now he needs hardly speak at all. I have seen that
+little wrinkled ape made to take the ship out of Pangu Bay on a blowy
+morning and on all through the islands; take her out first-rate, sir,
+dodging under the old man’s elbow, and in such quiet style that you
+could not have told for the life of you which of the two was doing the
+work up there. That’s where our poor friend would be still of use to
+the ship even if--if--he could no longer lift a foot, sir. Provided the
+Serang does not know that there’s anything wrong.”
+
+“He doesn’t.”
+
+“Naturally not. Quite beyond his apprehension. They aren’t capable of
+finding out anything about us, sir.”
+
+“You seem to be a shrewd man,” said Mr. Van Wyk in a choked mutter, as
+though he were feeling sick.
+
+“You’ll find me a good enough servant, sir.”
+
+Mr. Sterne hoped now for a handshake at least, but unexpectedly, with a
+“What’s this? Better not to be seen together,” Mr. Van Wyk’s white shape
+wavered, and instantly seemed to melt away in the black air under
+the roof of boughs. The mate was startled. Yes. There was that faint
+thumping clatter.
+
+He stole out silently from under the shade. The lighted port-hole shone
+from afar. His head swam with the intoxication of sudden success. What
+a thing it was to have a gentleman to deal with! He crept aboard, and
+there was something weird in the shadowy stretch of empty decks, echoing
+with shouts and blows proceeding from a darker part amidships. Mr. Massy
+was raging before the door of the berth: the drunken voice within flowed
+on undisturbed in the violent racket of kicks.
+
+“Shut up! Put your light out and turn in, you confounded swilling
+pig--you! D’you hear me, you beast?”
+
+The kicking stopped, and in the pause the muzzy oracular voice announced
+from within--
+
+“Ah! Massy, now--that’s another thing. Massy’s deep.”
+
+“Who’s that aft there? You, Sterne? He’ll drink himself into a fit of
+horrors.” The chief engineer appeared vague and big at the corner of the
+engineroom.
+
+“He will be good enough for duty to-morrow. I would let him be, Mr.
+Massy.”
+
+Sterne slipped away into his berth, and at once had to sit down. His
+head swam with exultation. He got into his bunk as if in a dream. A
+feeling of profound peace, of pacific joy, came over him. On deck all
+was quiet.
+
+Mr. Massy, with his ear against the door of Jack’s cabin, listened
+critically to a deep stertorous breathing within. This was a dead-drunk
+sleep. The bout was over: tranquilized on that score, he too went in,
+and with slow wriggles got out of his old tweed jacket. It was a garment
+with many pockets, which he used to put on at odd times of the day,
+being subject to sudden chilly fits, and when he felt warmed he would
+take it off and hang it about anywhere all over the ship. It would
+be seen swinging on belaying-pins, thrown over the heads of winches,
+suspended on people’s very door-handles for that matter. Was he not the
+owner? But his favorite place was a hook on a wooden awning stanchion on
+the bridge, almost against the binnacle. He had even in the early days
+more than one tussle on that point with Captain Whalley, who desired the
+bridge to be kept tidy. He had been overawed then. Of late, though, he
+had been able to defy his partner with impunity. Captain Whalley never
+seemed to notice anything now. As to the Malays, in their awe of that
+scowling man not one of the crew would dream of laying a hand on the
+thing, no matter where or what it swung from.
+
+With an unexpectedness which made Mr. Massy jump and drop the coat
+at his feet, there came from the next berth the crash and thud of a
+headlong, jingling, clattering fall. The faithful Jack must have dropped
+to sleep suddenly as he sat at his revels, and now had gone over chair
+and all, breaking, as it seemed by the sound, every single glass and
+bottle in the place. After the terrific smash all was still for a time
+in there, as though he had killed himself outright on the spot. Mr.
+Massy held his breath. At last a sleepy uneasy groaning sigh was exhaled
+slowly on the other side of the bulkhead.
+
+“I hope to goodness he’s too drunk to wake up now,” muttered Mr. Massy.
+
+The sound of a softly knowing laugh nearly drove him to despair. He
+swore violently under his breath. The fool would keep him awake all
+night now for certain. He cursed his luck. He wanted to forget his
+maddening troubles in sleep sometimes. He could detect no movements.
+Without apparently making the slightest attempt to get up, Jack went on
+sniggering to himself where he lay; then began to speak, where he had
+left off as it were--
+
+“Massy! I love the dirty rascal. He would like to see his poor old Jack
+starve--but just you look where he has climbed to.” . . . He hiccoughed
+in a superior, leisurely manner. . . . “Ship-owning it with the best.
+A lottery ticket you want. Ha! ha! I will give you lottery tickets, my
+boy. Let the old ship sink and the old chum starve--that’s right. He
+don’t go wrong--Massy don’t. Not he. He’s a genius--that man is. That’s
+the way to win your money. Ship and chum must go.”
+
+“The silly fool has taken it to heart,” muttered Massy to himself. And,
+listening with a softened expression of face for any slight sign of
+returning drowsiness, he was discouraged profoundly by a burst of
+laughter full of joyful irony.
+
+“Would like to see her at the bottom of the sea! Oh, you clever, clever
+devil! Wish her sunk, eh? I should think you would, my boy; the damned
+old thing and all your troubles with her. Rake in the insurance money
+--turn your back on your old chum--all’s well--gentleman again.”
+
+A grim stillness had come over Massy’s face. Only his big black eyes
+rolled uneasily. The raving fool. And yet it was all true. Yes. Lottery
+tickets, too. All true. What? Beginning again? He wished he
+wouldn’t. . . .
+
+But it was even so. The imaginative drunkard on the other side of the
+bulkhead shook off the deathlike stillness that after his last words had
+fallen on the dark ship moored to a silent shore.
+
+“Don’t you dare to say anything against George Massy, Esquire. When he’s
+tired of waiting he will do away with her. Look out! Down she goes--chum
+and all. He’ll know how to . . .”
+
+The voice hesitated, weary, dreamy, lost, as if dying away in a vast
+open space.
+
+“. . . Find a trick that will work. He’s up to it--never fear . . .”
+
+He must have been very drunk, for at last the heavy sleep gripped him
+with the suddenness of a magic spell, and the last word lengthened
+itself into an interminable, noisy, in-drawn snore. And then even the
+snoring stopped, and all was still.
+
+But it seemed as though Mr. Massy had suddenly come to doubt the
+efficacy of sleep as against a man’s troubles; or perhaps he had found
+the relief he needed in the stillness of a calm contemplation that
+may contain the vivid thoughts of wealth, of a stroke of luck, of long
+idleness, and may bring before you the imagined form of every desire;
+for, turning about and throwing his arms over the edge of his bunk, he
+stood there with his feet on his favorite old coat, looking out through
+the round port into the night over the river. Sometimes a breath of wind
+would enter and touch his face, a cool breath charged with the damp,
+fresh feel from a vast body of water. A glimmer here and there was all
+he could see of it; and once he might after all suppose he had dozed
+off, since there appeared before his vision, unexpectedly and connected
+with no dream, a row of flaming and gigantic figures--three naught seven
+one two--making up a number such as you may see on a lottery ticket.
+And then all at once the port was no longer black: it was pearly gray,
+framing a shore crowded with houses, thatched roof beyond thatched
+roof, walls of mats and bamboo, gables of carved teak timber. Rows
+of dwellings raised on a forest of piles lined the steely band of the
+river, brimful and still, with the tide at the turn. This was Batu
+Beru--and the day had come.
+
+Mr. Massy shook himself, put on the tweed coat, and, shivering nervously
+as if from some great shock, made a note of the number. A fortunate,
+rare hint that. Yes; but to pursue fortune one wanted money--ready cash.
+
+Then he went out and prepared to descend into the engine-room. Several
+small jobs had to be seen to, and Jack was lying dead drunk on the
+floor of his cabin, with the door locked at that. His gorge rose at
+the thought of work. Ay! But if you wanted to do nothing you had to get
+first a good bit of money. A ship won’t save you. He cursed the Sofala.
+True, all true. He was tired of waiting for some chance that would rid
+him at last of that ship that had turned out a curse on his life.
+
+
+XIV
+
+The deep, interminable hoot of the steam-whistle had, in its grave,
+vibrating note, something intolerable, which sent a slight shudder down
+Mr. Van Wyk’s back. It was the early afternoon; the Sofala was leaving
+Batu Beru for Pangu, the next place of call. She swung in the stream,
+scantily attended by a few canoes, and, gliding on the broad river,
+became lost to view from the Van Wyk bungalow.
+
+Its owner had not gone this time to see her off. Generally he came down
+to the wharf, exchanged a few words with the bridge while she cast off,
+and waved his hand to Captain Whalley at the last moment. This day he
+did not even go as far as the balustrade of the veranda. “He couldn’t
+see me if I did,” he said to himself. “I wonder whether he can make out
+the house at all.” And this thought somehow made him feel more alone
+than he had ever felt for all these years. What was it? six or seven?
+Seven. A long time.
+
+He sat on the veranda with a closed book on his knee, and, as it were,
+looked out upon his solitude, as if the fact of Captain Whalley’s
+blindness had opened his eyes to his own. There were many sorts of
+heartaches and troubles, and there was no place where they could not
+find a man out. And he felt ashamed, as though he had for six years
+behaved like a peevish boy.
+
+His thought followed the Sofala on her way. On the spur of the moment he
+had acted impulsively, turning to the thing most pressing. And what else
+could he have done? Later on he should see. It seemed necessary that
+he should come out into the world, for a time at least. He had
+money--something could be arranged; he would grudge no time, no trouble,
+no loss of his solitude. It weighed on him now--and Captain Whalley
+appeared to him as he had sat shading his eyes, as if, being deceived in
+the trust of his faith, he were beyond all the good and evil that can be
+wrought by the hands of men.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk’s thoughts followed the Sofala down the river, winding about
+through the belt of the coast forest, between the buttressed shafts of
+the big trees, through the mangrove strip, and over the bar. The ship
+crossed it easily in broad daylight, piloted, as it happened, by Mr.
+Sterne, who took the watch from four to six, and then went below to hug
+himself with delight at the prospect of being virtually employed by a
+rich man--like Mr. Van Wyk. He could not see how any hitch could occur
+now. He did not seem able to get over the feeling of being “fixed up at
+last.” From six to eight, in the course of duty, the Serang looked alone
+after the ship. She had a clear road before her now till about three
+in the morning, when she would close with the Pangu group. At eight Mr.
+Sterne came out cheerily to take charge again till midnight. At ten he
+was still chirruping and humming to himself on the bridge, and about
+that time Mr. Van Wyk’s thought abandoned the Sofala. Mr. Van Wyk had
+fallen asleep at last.
+
+Massy, blocking the engine-room companion, jerked himself into his tweed
+jacket surlily, while the second waited with a scowl.
+
+“Oh. You came out? You sot! Well, what have you got to say for
+yourself?”
+
+He had been in charge of the engines till then. A somber fury darkened
+his mind: a hot anger against the ship, against the facts of life,
+against the men for their cheating, against himself too--because of an
+inward tremor of his heart.
+
+An incomprehensible growl answered him.
+
+“What? Can’t you open your mouth now? You yelp out your infernal rot
+loud enough when you are drunk. What do you mean by abusing people in
+that way?--you old useless boozer, you!”
+
+“Can’t help it. Don’t remember anything about it. You shouldn’t listen.”
+
+“You dare to tell me! What do you mean by going on a drunk like this!”
+
+“Don’t ask me. Sick of the dam’ boilers--you would be. Sick of life.”
+
+“I wish you were dead, then. You’ve made me sick of you. Don’t you
+remember the uproar you made last night? You miserable old soaker!”
+
+“No; I don’t. Don’t want to. Drink is drink.”
+
+“I wonder what prevents me from kicking you out. What do you want here?”
+
+“Relieve you. You’ve been long enough down there, George.”
+
+“Don’t you George me--you tippling old rascal, you! If I were to die
+to-morrow you would starve. Remember that. Say Mr. Massy.”
+
+“Mr. Massy,” repeated the other stolidly.
+
+Disheveled, with dull blood-shot eyes, a snuffy, grimy shirt, greasy
+trowsers, naked feet thrust into ragged slippers, he bolted in head down
+directly Massy had made way for him.
+
+The chief engineer looked around. The deck was empty as far as the
+taffrail. All the native passengers had left in Batu Beru this time, and
+no others had joined. The dial of the patent log tinkled periodically
+in the dark at the end of the ship. It was a dead calm, and, under the
+clouded sky, through the still air that seemed to cling warm, with a
+seaweed smell, to her slim hull, on a sea of somber gray and unwrinkled,
+the ship moved on an even keel, as if floating detached in empty space.
+But Mr. Massy slapped his forehead, tottered a little, caught hold of a
+belaying-pin at the foot of the mast.
+
+“I shall go mad,” he muttered, walking across the deck unsteadily. A
+shovel was scraping loose coal down below--a fire-door clanged. Sterne
+on the bridge began whistling a new tune.
+
+Captain Whalley, sitting on the couch, awake and fully dressed, heard
+the door of his cabin open. He did not move in the least, waiting to
+recognize the voice, with an appalling strain of prudence.
+
+A bulkhead lamp blazed on the white paint, the crimson plush, the
+brown varnish of mahogany tops. The white wood packing-case under the
+bed-place had remained unopened for three years now, as though Captain
+Whalley had felt that, after the Fair Maid was gone, there could be
+no abiding-place on earth for his affections. His hands rested on his
+knees; his handsome head with big eyebrows presented a rigid profile to
+the doorway. The expected voice spoke out at last.
+
+“Once more, then. What am I to call you?”
+
+Ha! Massy. Again. The weariness of it crushed his heart--and the pain of
+shame was almost more than he could bear without crying out.
+
+“Well. Is it to be ‘partner’ still?”
+
+“You don’t know what you ask.”
+
+“I know what I want . . .”
+
+Massy stepped in and closed the door.
+
+“. . . And I am going to have a try for it with you once more.”
+
+His whine was half persuasive, half menacing.
+
+“For it’s no manner of use to tell me that you are poor. You don’t spend
+anything on yourself, that’s true enough; but there’s another name for
+that. You think you are going to have what you want out of me for three
+years, and then cast me off without hearing what I think of you. You
+think I would have submitted to your airs if I had known you had only a
+beggarly five hundred pounds in the world. You ought to have told me.”
+
+“Perhaps,” said Captain Whalley, bowing his head. “And yet it has saved
+you.” . . . Massy laughed scornfully. . . . “I have told you often
+enough since.”
+
+“And I don’t believe you now. When I think how I let you lord it over
+my ship! Do you remember how you used to bullyrag me about my coat and
+_your_ bridge? It was in his way. _His_ bridge! ‘And I won’t be a party
+to this--and I couldn’t think of doing that.’ Honest man! And now it all
+comes out. ‘I am poor, and I can’t. I have only this five hundred in the
+world.’”
+
+He contemplated the immobility of Captain Whalley, that seemed to
+present an inconquerable obstacle in his path. His face took a mournful
+cast.
+
+“You are a hard man.”
+
+“Enough,” said Captain Whalley, turning upon him. “You shall get nothing
+from me, because I have nothing of mine to give away now.”
+
+“Tell that to the marines!”
+
+Mr. Massy, going out, looked back once; then the door closed, and
+Captain Whalley, alone, sat as still as before. He had nothing of his
+own--even his past of honor, of truth, of just pride, was gone. All his
+spotless life had fallen into the abyss. He had said his last good-by
+to it. But what belonged to _her_, that he meant to save. Only a little
+money. He would take it to her in his own hands--this last gift of a man
+that had lasted too long. And an immense and fierce impulse, the very
+passion of paternity, flamed up with all the unquenched vigor of his
+worthless life in a desire to see her face.
+
+Just across the deck Massy had gone straight to his cabin, struck a
+light, and hunted up the note of the dreamed number whose figures had
+flamed up also with the fierceness of another passion. He must contrive
+somehow not to miss a drawing. That number meant something. But what
+expedient could he contrive to keep himself going?
+
+“Wretched miser!” he mumbled.
+
+If Mr. Sterne could at no time have told him anything new about his
+partner, he could have told Mr. Sterne that another use could be made of
+a man’s affliction than just to kick him out, and thus defer the term of
+a difficult payment for a year. To keep the secret of the affliction
+and induce him to stay was a better move. If without means, he would be
+anxious to remain; and that settled the question of refunding him his
+share. He did not know exactly how much Captain Whalley was disabled;
+but if it so happened that he put the ship ashore somewhere for good and
+all, it was not the owner’s fault--was it? He was not obliged to know
+that there was anything wrong. But probably nobody would raise such a
+point, and the ship was fully insured. He had had enough self-restraint
+to pay up the premiums. But this was not all. He could not believe
+Captain Whalley to be so confoundedly destitute as not to have some more
+money put away somewhere. If he, Massy, could get hold of it, that would
+pay for the boilers, and everything went on as before. And if she
+got lost in the end, so much the better. He hated her: he loathed the
+troubles that took his mind off the chances of fortune. He wished her
+at the bottom of the sea, and the insurance money in his pocket. And
+as, baffled, he left Captain Whalley’s cabin, he enveloped in the same
+hatred the ship with the worn-out boilers and the man with the dimmed
+eyes.
+
+And our conduct after all is so much a matter of outside suggestion,
+that had it not been for his Jack’s drunken gabble he would have there
+and then had it out with this miserable man, who would neither help, nor
+stay, nor yet lose the ship. The old fraud! He longed to kick him out.
+But he restrained himself. Time enough for that--when he liked. There
+was a fearful new thought put into his head. Wasn’t he up to it after
+all? How that beast Jack had raved! “Find a safe trick to get rid of
+her.” Well, Jack was not so far wrong. A very clever trick had occurred
+to him. Aye! But what of the risk?
+
+A feeling of pride--the pride of superiority to common prejudices--crept
+into his breast, made his heart beat fast, his mouth turn dry. Not
+everybody would dare; but he was Massy, and he was up to it!
+
+Six bells were struck on deck. Eleven! He drank a glass of water, and
+sat down for ten minutes or so to calm himself. Then he got out of his
+chest a small bull’s-eye lantern of his own and lit it.
+
+Almost opposite his berth, across the narrow passage under the bridge,
+there was, in the iron deck-structure covering the stokehold fiddle and
+the boiler-space, a storeroom with iron sides, iron roof, iron-plated
+floor, too, on account of the heat below. All sorts of rubbish was shot
+there: it had a mound of scrap-iron in a corner; rows of empty oil-cans;
+sacks of cotton-waste, with a heap of charcoal, a deck-forge, fragments
+of an old hencoop, winch-covers all in rags, remnants of lamps, and a
+brown felt hat, discarded by a man dead now (of a fever on the Brazil
+coast), who had been once mate of the Sofala, had remained for years
+jammed forcibly behind a length of burst copper pipe, flung at some
+time or other out of the engine-room. A complete and imperious blackness
+pervaded that Capharnaum of forgotten things. A small shaft of light
+from Mr. Massy’s bull’s-eye fell slanting right through it.
+
+His coat was unbuttoned; he shot the bolt of the door (there was no
+other opening), and, squatting before the scrap-heap, began to pack his
+pockets with pieces of iron. He packed them carefully, as if the rusty
+nuts, the broken bolts, the links of cargo chain, had been so much gold
+he had that one chance to carry away. He packed his side-pockets till
+they bulged, the breast pocket, the pockets inside. He turned over the
+pieces. Some he rejected. A small mist of powdered rust began to rise
+about his busy hands. Mr. Massy knew something of the scientific basis
+of his clever trick. If you want to deflect the magnetic needle of a
+ship’s compass, soft iron is the best; likewise many small pieces in
+the pockets of a jacket would have more effect than a few large ones,
+because in that way you obtain a greater amount of surface for weight in
+your iron, and it’s surface that tells.
+
+He slipped out swiftly--two strides sufficed--and in his cabin he
+perceived that his hands were all red--red with rust. It disconcerted
+him, as though he had found them covered with blood: he looked himself
+over hastily. Why, his trowsers too! He had been rubbing his rusty palms
+on his legs.
+
+He tore off the waistband button in his haste, brushed his coat, washed
+his hands. Then the air of guilt left him, and he sat down to wait.
+
+He sat bolt upright and weighted with iron in his chair. He had a hard,
+lumpy bulk against each hip, felt the scrappy iron in his pockets touch
+his ribs at every breath, the downward drag of all these pounds hanging
+upon his shoulders. He looked very dull too, sitting idle there, and his
+yellow face, with motionless black eyes, had something passive and sad
+in its quietness.
+
+When he heard eight bells struck above his head, he rose and made ready
+to go out. His movements seemed aimless, his lower lip had dropped a
+little, his eyes roamed about the cabin, and the tremendous tension of
+his will had robbed them of every vestige of intelligence.
+
+With the last stroke of the bell the Serang appeared noiselessly on the
+bridge to relieve the mate. Sterne overflowed with good nature, since he
+had nothing more to desire.
+
+“Got your eyes well open yet, Serang? It’s middling dark; I’ll wait till
+you get your sight properly.”
+
+The old Malay murmured, looked up with his worn eyes, sidled away into
+the light of the binnacle, and, crossing his hands behind his back,
+fixed his eyes on the compass-card.
+
+“You’ll have to keep a good look-out ahead for land, about half-past
+three. It’s fairly clear, though. You have looked in on the captain as
+you came along--eh? He knows the time? Well, then, I am off.”
+
+At the foot of the ladder he stood aside for the captain. He watched him
+go up with an even, certain tread, and remained thoughtful for a moment.
+“It’s funny,” he said to himself, “but you can never tell whether that
+man has seen you or not. He might have heard me breathe this time.”
+
+He was a wonderful man when all was said and done. They said he had had
+a name in his day. Mr. Sterne could well believe it; and he concluded
+serenely that Captain Whalley must be able to see people more or less
+--as himself just now, for instance--but not being certain of anybody,
+had to keep up that unnoticing silence of manner for fear of giving
+himself away. Mr. Sterne was a shrewd guesser.
+
+This necessity of every moment brought home to Captain Whalley’s heart
+the humiliation of his falsehood. He had drifted into it from paternal
+love, from incredulity, from boundless trust in divine justice meted out
+to men’s feelings on this earth. He would give his poor Ivy the benefit
+of another month’s work; perhaps the affliction was only temporary.
+Surely God would not rob his child of his power to help, and cast him
+naked into a night without end. He had caught at every hope; and when
+the evidence of his misfortune was stronger than hope, he tried not to
+believe the manifest thing.
+
+In vain. In the steadily darkening universe a sinister clearness fell
+upon his ideas. In the illuminating moments of suffering he saw life,
+men, all things, the whole earth with all her burden of created nature,
+as he had never seen them before.
+
+Sometimes he was seized with a sudden vertigo and an overwhelming
+terror; and then the image of his daughter appeared. Her, too, he had
+never seen so clearly before. Was it possible that he should ever be
+unable to do anything whatever for her? Nothing. And not see her any
+more? Never.
+
+Why? The punishment was too great for a little presumption, for a little
+pride. And at last he came to cling to his deception with a fierce
+determination to carry it out to the end, to save her money intact, and
+behold her once more with his own eyes. Afterwards--what? The idea of
+suicide was revolting to the vigor of his manhood. He had prayed for
+death till the prayers had stuck in his throat. All the days of his life
+he had prayed for daily bread, and not to be led into temptation, in a
+childlike humility of spirit. Did words mean anything? Whence did the
+gift of speech come? The violent beating of his heart reverberated in
+his head--seemed to shake his brain to pieces.
+
+He sat down heavily in the deck-chair to keep the pretense of his watch.
+The night was dark. All the nights were dark now.
+
+“Serang,” he said, half aloud.
+
+“Ada, Tuan. I am here.”
+
+“There are clouds on the sky?”
+
+“There are, Tuan.”
+
+“Let her be steered straight. North.”
+
+“She is going north, Tuan.”
+
+The Serang stepped back. Captain Whalley recognized Massy’s footfalls on
+the bridge.
+
+The engineer walked over to port and returned, passing behind the chair
+several times. Captain Whalley detected an unusual character as of
+prudent care in this prowling. The near presence of that man brought
+with it always a recrudescence of moral suffering for Captain Whalley.
+It was not remorse. After all, he had done nothing but good to the poor
+devil. There was also a sense of danger--the necessity of a greater
+care.
+
+Massy stopped and said--
+
+“So you still say you must go?”
+
+“I must indeed.”
+
+“And you couldn’t at least leave the money for a term of years?”
+
+“Impossible.”
+
+“Can’t trust it with me without your care, eh?”
+
+Captain Whalley remained silent. Massy sighed deeply over the back of
+the chair.
+
+“It would just do to save me,” he said in a tremulous voice.
+
+“I’ve saved you once.”
+
+The chief engineer took off his coat with careful movements, and
+proceeded to feel for the brass hook screwed into the wooden stanchion.
+For this purpose he placed himself right in front of the binnacle, thus
+hiding completely the compass-card from the quartermaster at the wheel.
+“Tuan!” the lascar at last murmured softly, meaning to let the white man
+know that he could not see to steer.
+
+Mr. Massy had accomplished his purpose. The coat was hanging from the
+nail, within six inches of the binnacle. And directly he had stepped
+aside the quartermaster, a middle-aged, pock-marked, Sumatra Malay,
+almost as dark as a negro, perceived with amazement that in that short
+time, in this smooth water, with no wind at all, the ship had gone
+swinging far out of her course. He had never known her get away like
+this before. With a slight grunt of astonishment he turned the wheel
+hastily to bring her head back north, which was the course. The grinding
+of the steering-chains, the chiding murmurs of the Serang, who had come
+over to the wheel, made a slight stir, which attracted Captain Whalley’s
+anxious attention. He said, “Take better care.” Then everything settled
+to the usual quiet on the bridge. Mr. Massy had disappeared.
+
+But the iron in the pockets of the coat had done its work; and the
+Sofala, heading north by the compass, made untrue by this simple device,
+was no longer making a safe course for Pangu Bay.
+
+The hiss of water parted by her stem, the throb of her engines, all the
+sounds of her faithful and laborious life, went on uninterrupted in the
+great calm of the sea joining on all sides the motionless layer of cloud
+over the sky. A gentle stillness as vast as the world seemed to wait
+upon her path, enveloping her lovingly in a supreme caress. Mr. Massy
+thought there could be no better night for an arranged shipwreck.
+
+Run up high and dry on one of the reefs east of Pangu--wait for
+daylight--hole in the bottom--out boats--Pangu Bay same evening. That’s
+about it. As soon as she touched he would hasten on the bridge, get hold
+of the coat (nobody would notice in the dark), and shake it upside-down
+over the side, or even fling it into the sea. A detail. Who could
+guess? Coat been seen hanging there from that hook hundreds of times.
+Nevertheless, when he sat down on the lower step of the bridge-ladder
+his knees knocked together a little. The waiting part was the worst
+of it. At times he would begin to pant quickly, as though he had been
+running, and then breathe largely, swelling with the intimate sense of
+a mastered fate. Now and then he would hear the shuffle of the Serang’s
+bare feet up there: quiet, low voices would exchange a few words, and
+lapse almost at once into silence. . . .
+
+“Tell me directly you see any land, Serang.”
+
+“Yes, Tuan. Not yet.”
+
+“No, not yet,” Captain Whalley would agree.
+
+The ship had been the best friend of his decline. He had sent all the
+money he had made by and in the Sofala to his daughter. His thought
+lingered on the name. How often he and his wife had talked over the cot
+of the child in the big stern-cabin of the Condor; she would grow up,
+she would marry, she would love them, they would live near her and look
+at her happiness--it would go on without end. Well, his wife was dead,
+to the child he had given all he had to give; he wished he could come
+near her, see her, see her face once, live in the sound of her
+voice, that could make the darkness of the living grave ready for him
+supportable. He had been starved of love too long. He imagined her
+tenderness.
+
+The Serang had been peering forward, and now and then glancing at the
+chair. He fidgeted restlessly, and suddenly burst out close to Captain
+Whalley--
+
+“Tuan, do you see anything of the land?”
+
+The alarmed voice brought Captain Whalley to his feet at once. He! See!
+And at the question, the curse of his blindness seemed to fall on him
+with a hundredfold force.
+
+“What’s the time?” he cried.
+
+“Half-past three, Tuan.”
+
+“We are close. You _must_ see. Look, I say. Look.”
+
+Mr. Massy, awakened by the sudden sound of talking from a short doze on
+the lowest step, wondered why he was there. Ah! A faintness came over
+him. It is one thing to sow the seed of an accident and another to see
+the monstrous fruit hanging over your head ready to fall in the sound of
+agitated voices.
+
+“There’s no danger,” he muttered thickly.
+
+The horror of incertitude had seized upon Captain Whalley, the miserable
+mistrust of men, of things--of the very earth. He had steered that very
+course thirty-six times by the same compass--if anything was certain
+in this world it was its absolute, unerring correctness. Then what had
+happened? Did the Serang lie? Why lie? Why? Was he going blind too?
+
+“Is there a mist? Look low on the water. Low down, I say.”
+
+“Tuan, there’s no mist. See for yourself.”
+
+Captain Whalley steadied the trembling of his limbs by an effort.
+Should he stop the engines at once and give himself away. A gust of
+irresolution swayed all sorts of bizarre notions in his mind. The
+unusual had come, and he was not fit to deal with it. In this passage of
+inexpressible anguish he saw her face--the face of a young girl--with
+an amazing strength of illusion. No, he must not give himself away after
+having gone so far for her sake. “You steered the course? You made it?
+Speak the truth.”
+
+“Ya, Tuan. On the course now. Look.”
+
+Captain Whalley strode to the binnacle, which to him made such a dim
+spot of light in an infinity of shapeless shadow. By bending his face
+right down to the glass he had been able before . . .
+
+Having to stoop so low, he put out, instinctively, his arm to where he
+knew there was a stanchion to steady himself against. His hand closed
+on something that was not wood but cloth. The slight pull adding to the
+weight, the loop broke, and Mr. Massy’s coat falling, struck the deck
+heavily with a dull thump, accompanied by a lot of clicks.
+
+“What’s this?”
+
+Captain Whalley fell on his knees, with groping hands extended in a
+frank gesture of blindness. They trembled, these hands feeling for the
+truth. He saw it. Iron near the compass. Wrong course. Wreck her! His
+ship. Oh no. Not that.
+
+“Jump and stop her!” he roared out in a voice not his own.
+
+He ran himself--hands forward, a blind man, and while the clanging of
+the gong echoed still all over the ship, she seemed to butt full tilt
+into the side of a mountain.
+
+It was low water along the north side of the strait. Mr. Massy had not
+reckoned on that. Instead of running aground for half her length, the
+Sofala butted the sheer ridge of a stone reef which would have been
+awash at high water. This made the shock absolutely terrific. Everybody
+in the ship that was standing was thrown down headlong: the shaken
+rigging made a great rattling to the very trucks. All the lights went
+out: several chain-guys, snapping, clattered against the funnel: there
+were crashes, pings of parted wire-rope, splintering sounds, loud
+cracks, the masthead lamp flew over the bows, and all the doors about
+the deck began to bang heavily. Then, after having hit, she rebounded,
+hit the second time the very same spot like a battering-ram. This
+completed the havoc: the funnel, with all the guys gone, fell over with
+a hollow sound of thunder, smashing the wheel to bits, crushing the
+frame of the awnings, breaking the lockers, filling the bridge with
+a mass of splinters, sticks, and broken wood. Captain Whalley picked
+himself up and stood knee-deep in wreckage, torn, bleeding, knowing the
+nature of the danger he had escaped mostly by the sound, and holding Mr.
+Massy’s coat in his arms.
+
+By this time Sterne (he had been flung out of his bunk) had set the
+engines astern. They worked for a few turns, then a voice bawled out,
+“Get out of the damned engine-room, Jack!”--and they stopped; but the
+ship had gone clear of the reef and lay still, with a heavy cloud of
+steam issuing from the broken deckpipes, and vanishing in wispy shapes
+into the night. Notwithstanding the suddenness of the disaster there was
+no shouting, as if the very violence of the shock had half-stunned the
+shadowy lot of people swaying here and there about her decks. The voice
+of the Serang pronounced distinctly above the confused murmurs--
+
+“Eight fathom.” He had heaved the lead.
+
+Mr. Sterne cried out next in a strained pitch--
+
+“Where the devil has she got to? Where are we?”
+
+Captain Whalley replied in a calm bass--
+
+“Amongst the reefs to the eastward.”
+
+“You know it, sir? Then she will never get out again.”
+
+“She will be sunk in five minutes. Boats, Sterne. Even one will save you
+all in this calm.”
+
+The Chinaman stokers went in a disorderly rush for the port boats.
+Nobody tried to check them. The Malays, after a moment of confusion,
+became quiet, and Mr. Sterne showed a good countenance. Captain Whalley
+had not moved. His thoughts were darker than this night in which he had
+lost his first ship.
+
+“He made me lose a ship.”
+
+Another tall figure standing before him amongst the litter of the smash
+on the bridge whispered insanely--
+
+“Say nothing of it.”
+
+Massy stumbled closer. Captain Whalley heard the chattering of his
+teeth.
+
+“I have the coat.”
+
+“Throw it down and come along,” urged the chattering voice.
+“B-b-b-b-boat!”
+
+“You will get fifteen years for this.”
+
+Mr. Massy had lost his voice. His speech was a mere dry rustling in his
+throat.
+
+“Have mercy!”
+
+“Had you any when you made me lose my ship? Mr. Massy, you shall get
+fifteen years for this!”
+
+“I wanted money! Money! My own money! I will give you some money. Take
+half of it. You love money yourself.”
+
+“There’s a justice . . .”
+
+Massy made an awful effort, and in a strange, half choked utterance--
+
+“You blind devil! It’s you that drove me to it.”
+
+Captain Whalley, hugging the coat to his breast, made no sound. The
+light had ebbed for ever from the world--let everything go. But this man
+should not escape scot-free.
+
+Sterne’s voice commanded--
+
+“Lower away!”
+
+The blocks rattled.
+
+“Now then,” he cried, “over with you. This way. You, Jack, here. Mr.
+Massy! Mr. Massy! Captain! Quick, sir! Let’s get--
+
+“I shall go to prison for trying to cheat the insurance, but you’ll get
+exposed; you, honest man, who has been cheating me. You are poor. Aren’t
+you? You’ve nothing but the five hundred pounds. Well, you have nothing
+at all now. The ship’s lost, and the insurance won’t be paid.”
+
+Captain Whalley did not move. True! Ivy’s money! Gone in this wreck.
+Again he had a flash of insight. He was indeed at the end of his tether.
+
+Urgent voices cried out together alongside. Massy did not seem able
+to tear himself away from the bridge. He chattered and hissed
+despairingly--
+
+“Give it up to me! Give it up!”
+
+“No,” said Captain Whalley; “I could not give it up. You had better go.
+Don’t wait, man, if you want to live. She’s settling down by the head
+fast. No; I shall keep it, but I shall stay on board.”
+
+Massy did not seem to understand; but the love of life, awakened
+suddenly, drove him away from the bridge.
+
+Captain Whalley laid the coat down, and stumbled amongst the heaps of
+wreckage to the side.
+
+“Is Mr. Massy in with you?” he called out into the night.
+
+Sterne from the boat shouted--
+
+“Yes; we’ve got him. Come along, sir. It’s madness to stay longer.”
+
+Captain Whalley felt along the rail carefully, and, without a word, cast
+off the painter. They were expecting him still down there. They were
+waiting, till a voice suddenly exclaimed--
+
+“We are adrift! Shove off!”
+
+“Captain Whalley! Leap! . . . pull up a little . . . leap! You can
+swim.”
+
+In that old heart, in that vigorous body, there was, that nothing should
+be wanting, a horror of death that apparently could not be overcome
+by the horror of blindness. But after all, for Ivy he had carried his
+point, walking in his darkness to the very verge of a crime. God had not
+listened to his prayers. The light had finished ebbing out of the world;
+not a glimmer. It was a dark waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley
+who had gone so far to carry a point should continue to live. He must
+pay the price.
+
+“Leap as far as you can, sir; we will pick you up.”
+
+They did not hear him answer. But their shouting seemed to remind him of
+something. He groped his way back, and sought for Mr. Massy’s coat. He
+could swim indeed; people sucked down by the whirlpool of a sinking ship
+do come up sometimes to the surface, and it was unseemly that a Whalley,
+who had made up his mind to die, should be beguiled by chance into a
+struggle. He would put all these pieces of iron into his own pockets.
+
+They, looking from the boat, saw the Sofala, a black mass upon a black
+sea, lying still at an appalling cant. No sound came from her. Then,
+with a great bizarre shuffling noise, as if the boilers had broken
+through the bulkheads, and with a faint muffled detonation, where the
+ship had been there appeared for a moment something standing upright and
+narrow, like a rock out of the sea. Then that too disappeared.
+
+
+When the Sofala failed to come back to Batu Beru at the proper time, Mr.
+Van Wyk understood at once that he would never see her any more. But he
+did not know what had happened till some months afterwards, when, in a
+native craft lent him by his Sultan, he had made his way to the Sofala’s
+port of registry, where already her existence and the official inquiry
+into her loss was beginning to be forgotten.
+
+It had not been a very remarkable or interesting case, except for the
+fact that the captain had gone down with his sinking ship. It was the
+only life lost; and Mr. Van Wyk would not have been able to learn any
+details had it not been for Sterne, whom he met one day on the quay
+near the bridge over the creek, almost on the very spot where Captain
+Whalley, to preserve his daughter’s five hundred pounds intact, had
+turned to get a sampan which would take him on board the Sofala.
+
+From afar Mr. Van Wyk saw Sterne blink straight at him and raise his
+hand to his hat. They drew into the shade of a building (it was a bank),
+and the mate related how the boat with the crew got into Pangu Bay about
+six hours after the accident, and how they had lived for a fortnight in
+a state of destitution before they found an opportunity to get away from
+that beastly place. The inquiry had exonerated everybody from all blame.
+The loss of the ship was put down to an unusual set of the current.
+Indeed, it could not have been anything else: there was no other way
+to account for the ship being set seven miles to the eastward of her
+position during the middle watch.
+
+“A piece of bad luck for me, sir.”
+
+Sterne passed his tongue on his lips, and glanced aside. “I lost the
+advantage of being employed by you, sir. I can never be sorry enough.
+But here it is: one man’s poison, another man’s meat. This could not
+have been handier for Mr. Massy if he had arranged that shipwreck
+himself. The most timely total loss I’ve ever heard of.”
+
+“What became of that Massy?” asked Mr. Van Wyk.
+
+“He, sir? Ha! ha! He would keep on telling me that he meant to buy
+another ship; but as soon as he had the money in his pocket he cleared
+out for Manilla by mail-boat early in the morning. I gave him chase
+right aboard, and he told me then he was going to make his fortune dead
+sure in Manilla. I could go to the devil for all he cared. And yet he as
+good as promised to give me the command if I didn’t talk too much.”
+
+“You never said anything . . .” Mr. Van Wyk began.
+
+“Not I, sir. Why should I? I mean to get on, but the dead aren’t in my
+way,” said Sterne. His eyelids were beating rapidly, then drooped for an
+instant. “Besides, sir, it would have been an awkward business. You made
+me hold my tongue just a bit too long.”
+
+“Do you know how it was that Captain Whalley remained on board? Did he
+really refuse to leave? Come now! Or was it perhaps an accidental . . .?”
+
+“Nothing!” Sterne interrupted with energy. “I tell you I yelled for him
+to leap overboard. He simply _must_ have cast off the painter of the
+boat himself. We all yelled to him--that is, Jack and I. He wouldn’t
+even answer us. The ship was as silent as a grave to the last. Then the
+boilers fetched away, and down she went. Accident! Not it! The game was
+up, sir, I tell you.”
+
+This was all that Sterne had to say.
+
+Mr. Van Wyk had been of course made the guest of the club for a
+fortnight, and it was there that he met the lawyer in whose office had
+been signed the agreement between Massy and Captain Whalley.
+
+“Extraordinary old man,” he said. “He came into my office from nowhere
+in particular as you may say, with his five hundred pounds to place, and
+that engineer fellow following him anxiously. And now he is gone out
+a little inexplicably, just as he came. I could never understand him
+quite. There was no mystery at all about that Massy, eh? I wonder
+whether Whalley refused to leave the ship. It would have been foolish.
+He was blameless, as the court found.”
+
+Mr. Van Wyk had known him well, he said, and he could not believe in
+suicide. Such an act would not have been in character with what he knew
+of the man.
+
+“It is my opinion, too,” the lawyer agreed. The general theory was that
+the captain had remained too long on board trying to save something of
+importance. Perhaps the chart which would clear him, or else something
+of value in his cabin. The painter of the boat had come adrift of itself
+it was supposed. However, strange to say, some little time before that
+voyage poor Whalley had called in his office and had left with him a
+sealed envelope addressed to his daughter, to be forwarded to her in
+case of his death. Still it was nothing very unusual, especially in a
+man of his age. Mr. Van Wyk shook his head. Captain Whalley looked good
+for a hundred years.
+
+“Perfectly true,” assented the lawyer. “The old fellow looked as though
+he had come into the world full-grown and with that long beard. I could
+never, somehow, imagine him either younger or older--don’t you know.
+There was a sense of physical power about that man too. And perhaps that
+was the secret of that something peculiar in his person which struck
+everybody who came in contact with him. He looked indestructible by
+any ordinary means that put an end to the rest of us. His deliberate,
+stately courtesy of manner was full of significance. It was as though
+he were certain of having plenty of time for everything. Yes, there was
+something indestructible about him; and the way he talked sometimes you
+might have thought he believed it himself. When he called on me last
+with that letter he wanted me to take charge of, he was not depressed
+at all. Perhaps a shade more deliberate in his talk and manner. Not
+depressed in the least. Had he a presentiment, I wonder? Perhaps! Still
+it seems a miserable end for such a striking figure.”
+
+“Oh yes! It was a miserable end,” Mr. Van Wyk said, with so much fervor
+that the lawyer looked up at him curiously; and afterwards, after
+parting with him, he remarked to an acquaintance--
+
+“Queer person that Dutch tobacco-planter from Batu Beru. Know anything
+of him?”
+
+“Heaps of money,” answered the bank manager. “I hear he’s going home
+by the next mail to form a company to take over his estates. Another
+tobacco district thrown open. He’s wise, I think. These good times won’t
+last for ever.”
+
+In the southern hemisphere Captain Whalley’s daughter had no
+presentiment of evil when she opened the envelope addressed to her in
+the lawyer’s handwriting. She had received it in the afternoon; all the
+boarders had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat upstairs
+in his big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced, wrapped up in rugs to the
+waist. The house was still, and the grayness of a cloudy day lay against
+the panes of three lofty windows.
+
+In a shabby dining-room, where a faint cold smell of dishes lingered all
+the year round, sitting at the end of a long table surrounded by
+many chairs pushed in with their backs close against the edge of the
+perpetually laid table-cloth, she read the opening sentence: “Most
+profound regret--painful duty--your father is no more--in accordance
+with his instructions--fatal casualty--consolation--no blame attached to
+his memory. . . .”
+
+Her face was thin, her temples a little sunk under the smooth bands of
+black hair, her lips remained resolutely compressed, while her dark eyes
+grew larger, till at last, with a low cry, she stood up, and instantly
+stooped to pick up another envelope which had slipped off her knees on
+to the floor.
+
+She tore it open, snatched out the inclosure. . . .
+
+“My dearest child,” it said, “I am writing this while I am able yet to
+write legibly. I am trying hard to save for you all the money that is
+left; I have only kept it to serve you better. It is yours. It shall not
+be lost: it shall not be touched. There’s five hundred pounds. Of what
+I have earned I have kept nothing back till now. For the future, if I
+live, I must keep back some--a little--to bring me to you. I must come
+to you. I must see you once more.
+
+“It is hard to believe that you will ever look on these lines. God
+seems to have forgotten me. I want to see you--and yet death would be
+a greater favor. If you ever read these words, I charge you to begin by
+thanking a God merciful at last, for I shall be dead then, and it will
+be well. My dear, I am at the end of my tether.”
+
+The next paragraph began with the words: “My sight is going . . .”
+
+She read no more that day. The hand holding up the paper to her eyes
+fell slowly, and her slender figure in a plain black dress walked
+rigidly to the window. Her eyes were dry: no cry of sorrow or whisper of
+thanks went up to heaven from her lips. Life had been too hard, for all
+the efforts of his love. It had silenced her emotions. But for the first
+time in all these years its sting had departed, the carking care of
+poverty, the meanness of a hard struggle for bread. Even the image of
+her husband and of her children seemed to glide away from her into the
+gray twilight; it was her father’s face alone that she saw, as though he
+had come to see her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him last, but
+with something more august and tender in his aspect.
+
+She slipped his folded letter between the two buttons of her plain black
+bodice, and leaning her forehead against a window-pane remained there
+till dusk, perfectly motionless, giving him all the time she could
+spare. Gone! Was it possible? My God, was it possible! The blow had come
+softened by the spaces of the earth, by the years of absence. There had
+been whole days when she had not thought of him at all--had no time. But
+she had loved him, she felt she had loved him, after all.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of End of the Tether, by Joseph Conrad
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