IV
Revolving these thoughts, he strolled on near the rail-
ings 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, mas-
sively 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 dis-
turbed 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 hun-
dred 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 sea-
going 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 ter-
raced shore; and beyond, upon the level expanse, pro-
found and glistening like the gaze of a dark-blue eye,
an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself in-
definitely 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 di-
verse 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 lamp-
posts 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 sur-
face 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 out-
wards 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 pull-
ing 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 motion-
less 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 shoul-
der, and the dusky face of the coachman leaned for-
ward at once over the hands taking a fresh grip of the
reins. It was a long dark-green landau, having a digni-
fied 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, notwith-
standing 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. Den-
ham--this governor with his jacket off; a man who
tended night and day, so to speak, the growing pros-
perity 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 under-
taking 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 him-
self; 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 Whal-
ley 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 re-
membered 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 impor-
tant, the efforts of small men, the growth of a great
place, but now robbed of all consequence by the great-
ness 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 unchange-
able 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, wear-
ing a necktie--almost a neckcloth--whose stiff ends pro-
jected 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 con-
sider 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 satis-
fied 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 frank-
ness of his comments on people's character and conduct
caused him to be feared at bottom; though in conversa-
tion 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 distaste-
ful to face as a chance of annihilation.
