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 linéaments 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.”