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 sea-
manship had commended the prudence of his invest-
ments, 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 ex-
pressed 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 yacht-
ing to satisfy him. He wanted the illusion of affairs;
and his acquisition of the Fair Maid preserved the con-
tinuity of his life. He introduced her to his acquaint-
ances 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 sen-
timentalism of regret; and a little wistfully withal, be-
cause 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 bedplace. 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 splash-
ings, 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, acknowl-
edging 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 maple-
wood 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 state-
room 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 re-
membered 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 con-
fessed 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 listen-
ing 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 Hongkong 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 Whal-
ley 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 to-
gether 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 de-
light. "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 associa-
tion 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 dis-
satisfied there was not to see that she clung now to some-
body 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, hold-
ing 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 under-
stood 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 what-
ever 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 catas-
trophe, 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 Cap-
tain 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 suf-
fered 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 ex-
planations, 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 mo-
ment 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 Whal-
ley 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 knock-
ing 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. Cap-
tain Whalley was methodically winding up the chro-
nometers, 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.
