III
Just at that time the Japanese were casting far and
wide for ships of European build, and he had no diffi-
culty 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 after-
noon 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 en-
closing 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 cushion-
ing 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 alter-
nated 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. Cap-
tain 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 tempera-
ment characterized by a scorn of vulgar gentility and
by prejudiced views as to the derogatory nature of cer-
tain occupations. For his own part he had always pre-
ferred sailing merchant ships (which is a straight-
forward 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. Com-
pany's service, with very slender means besides his pen-
sion, but with distinguished connections. He could re-
member as a boy how frequently waiters at the inns, coun-
try tradesmen and small people of that sort, used to "My
lord" the old warrior on the strength of his appear-
ance.
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 hu-
man 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 con-
sidered 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 pre-
sent 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 pro-
ceeds 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 ve-
randas knew their sight-seeing hurry or their prostrate
repose no more; and Captain Whalley, substantial and
dignified, left wellnigh 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 with-
out 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 man-
hood, 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 anchor-
age. His own was sold, and he had been asking him-
self, 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 your-
self 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 suc-
cessful 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-for-
gotten language.
