Title: The End of the Tether
Author: Conrad, Joseph
Language: English
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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.





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