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 pórticos 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.