The sun had set. And when, after
drilling a deep hole with his stick, he moved from
that spot the night had massed its army of shadows
under the trees. They filled the eastern ends
of the avenues as if only waiting the signal for a
general advance upon the open spaces of the world;
they were gathering low between the deep stone-faced
banks of the canal. The Malay prau, half-concealed
under the arch of the bridge, had not altered its
position a quarter of an inch. For a long time
Captain Whalley stared down over the parapet, till
at last the floating immobility of that beshrouded
thing seemed to grow upon him into something inexplicable
and alarming. The twilight abandoned the zenith;
its reflected gleams left the world below, and the
water of the canal seemed to turn into pitch.
Captain Whalley crossed it.
The turning to the right, which was
his way to his hotel, was only a very few steps farther.
He stopped again (all the houses of the sea-front
were shut up, the quayside was deserted, but for one
or two figures of natives walking in the distance)
and began to reckon the amount of his bill. So
many days in the hotel at so many dollars a day.
To count the days he used his fingers: plunging
one hand into his pocket, he jingled a few silver
coins. All right for three days more; and then,
unless something turned up, he must break into the
five hundred Ivy’s money invested
in her father. It seemed to him that the first
meal coming out of that reserve would choke him for
certain. Reason was of no use. It was a
matter of feeling. His feelings had never played
him false.
He did not turn to the right.
He walked on, as if there still had been a ship in
the roadstead to which he could get himself pulled
off in the evening. Far away, beyond the houses,
on the slope of an indigo promontory closing the view
of the quays, the slim column of a factory-chimney
smoked quietly straight up into the clear air.
A Chinaman, curled down in the stern of one of the
half-dozen sampans floating off the end of the
jetty, caught sight of a beckoning hand. He jumped
up, rolled his pigtail round his head swiftly, tucked
in two rapid movements his wide dark trousers high
up his yellow thighs, and by a single, noiseless,
finlike stir of the oars, sheered the sampan alongside
the steps with the ease and precision of a swimming
fish.
“Sofala,” articulated
Captain Whalley from above; and the Chinaman, a new
emigrant probably, stared upwards with a tense attention
as if waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from
the white man’s lips. “Sofala,”
Captain Whalley repeated; and suddenly his heart failed
him. He paused. The shores, the islets,
the high ground, the low points, were dark: the
horizon had grown somber; and across the eastern sweep
of the shore the white obelisk, marking the landing-place
of the telegraph-cable, stood like a pale ghost on
the beach before the dark spread of uneven roofs,
intermingled with palms, of the native town.
Captain Whalley began again.
“Sofala. Savee So-fa-la,
John?”
This time the Chinaman made out that
bizarre sound, and grunted his assent uncouthly, low
down in his bare throat. With the first yellow
twinkle of a star that appeared like the head of a
pin stabbed deep into the smooth, pale, shimmering
fabric of the sky, the edge of a keen chill seemed
to cleave through the warm air of the earth. At
the moment of stepping into the sampan to go and try
for the command of the Sofala Captain Whalley shivered
a little.
When on his return he landed on the
quay again Venus, like a choice jewel set low on the
hem of the sky, cast a faint gold trail behind him
upon the roadstead, as level as a floor made of one
dark and polished stone. The lofty vaults of
the avenues were black all black overhead and
the porcelain globes on the lamp-posts resembled egg-shaped
pearls, gigantic and luminous, displayed in a row whose
farther end seemed to sink in the distance, down to
the level of his knees. He put his hands behind
his back. He would now consider calmly the discretion
of it before saying the final word to-morrow.
His feet scrunched the gravel loudly the
discretion of it. It would have been easier to
appraise had there been a workable alternative.
The honesty of it was indubitable: he meant well
by the fellow; and periodically his shadow leaped
up intense by his side on the trunks of the trees,
to lengthen itself, oblique and dim, far over the grass repeating
his stride.
The discretion of it. Was there
a choice? He seemed already to have lost something
of himself; to have given up to a hungry specter something
of his truth and dignity in order to live. But
his life was necessary. Let poverty do its worst
in exacting its toll of humiliation. It was certain
that Ned Eliott had rendered him, without knowing it,
a service for which it would have been impossible
to ask. He hoped Ned would not think there had
been something underhand in his action. He supposed
that now when he heard of it he would understand or
perhaps he would only think Whalley an eccentric old
fool. What would have been the good of telling
him any more than of blurting the whole
tale to that man Massy? Five hundred pounds ready
to invest. Let him make the best of that.
Let him wonder. You want a captain I
want a ship. That’s enough. B-r-r-r-r.
What a disagreeable impression that empty, dark, echoing
steamer had made upon him. . . .
A laid-up steamer was a dead thing
and no mistake; a sailing-ship somehow seems always
ready to spring into life with the breath of the incorruptible
heaven; but a teamer, thought Captain Whalley, with
her fires out, without the warm whiffs from below
meeting you on her decks, without the hiss of steam,
the clangs of iron in her breast lies there
as cold and still and pulseless as a corpse.
In the solitude of the avenue, all
black above and lighted below, Captain Whalley, considering
the discretion of his course, met, as it were incidentally,
the thought of death. He pushed it aside with
dislike and contempt. He almost laughed at it;
and in the unquenchable vitality of his age only thought
with a kind of exultation how little he needed to
keep body and soul together. Not a bad investment
for the poor woman this solid carcass of her father.
And for the rest in case of anything the
agreement should be clear: the whole five hundred
to be paid back to her integrally within three months.
Integrally. Every penny. He was not to lose
any of her money whatever else had to go a
little dignity some of his self-respect.
He had never before allowed anybody to remain under
any sort of false impression as to himself. Well,
let that go for her sake. After all,
he had never said anything misleading and
Captain Whalley felt himself corrupt to the marrow
of his bones. He laughed a little with the intimate
scorn of his worldly prudence. Clearly, with
a fellow of that sort, and in the peculiar relation
they were to stand to each other, it would not have
done to blurt out everything. He did not like
the fellow. He did not like his spells of fawning
loquacity and bursts of resentfulness. In the
end a poor devil. He would not have
liked to stand in his shoes. Men were not evil,
after all. He did not like his sleek hair, his
queer way of standing at right angles, with his nose
in the air, and glancing along his shoulder at you.
No. On the whole, men were not bad they
were only silly or unhappy.
Captain Whalley had finished considering
the discretion of that step and there was
the whole long night before him. In the full light
his long beard would glisten like a silver breastplate
covering his heart; in the spaces between the lamps
his burly figure passed less distinct, loomed very
big, wandering, and mysterious. No; there was
not much real harm in men: and all the time a
shadow marched with him, slanting on his left hand which
in the East is a presage of evil.
“Can you make out the clump
of palms yet, Serang?” asked Captain Whalley
from his chair on the bridge of the Sofala approaching
the bar of Batu Beru.
“No, Tuan. By-and-by see.”
The old Malay, in a blue dungaree suit, planted on
his bony dark feet under the bridge awning, put his
hands behind his back and stared ahead out of the
innumerable wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
Captain Whalley sat still, without
lifting his head to look for himself. Three years thirty-six
times. He had made these palms thirty-six times
from the southward. They would come into view
at the proper time. Thank God, the old ship made
her courses and distances trip after trip, as correct
as clockwork. At last he murmured again
“In sight yet?”
“The sun makes a very great glare, Tuan.”
“Watch well, Serang.”
“Ya, Tuan.”
A white man had ascended the ladder
from the deck noiselessly, and had listened quietly
to this short colloquy. Then he stepped out on
the bridge and began to walk from end to end, holding
up the long cherrywood stem of a pipe. His black
hair lay plastered in long lanky wisps across the
bald summit of his head; he had a furrowed brow, a
yellow complexion, and a thick shapeless nose.
A scanty growth of whisker did not conceal the contour
of his jaw. His aspect was of brooding care;
and sucking at a curved black mouthpiece, he presented
such a heavy overhanging profile that even the Serang
could not help reflecting sometimes upon the extreme
unloveliness of some white men.
Captain Whalley seemed to brace himself
up in his chair, but gave no recognition whatever
to his presence. The other puffed jets of smoke;
then suddenly
“I could never understand that
new mania of yours of having this Malay here for your
shadow, partner.”
Captain Whalley got up from the chair
in all his imposing stature and walked across to the
binnacle, holding such an unswerving course that the
other had to back away hurriedly, and remained as if
intimidated, with the pipe trembling in his hand.
“Walk over me now,” he muttered in a sort
of astounded and discomfited whisper. Then slowly
and distinctly he said
“I am not dirt.”
And then added defiantly, “As you seem to think.”
The Serang jerked out
“See the palms now, Tuan.”
Captain Whalley strode forward to
the rail; but his eyes, instead of going straight
to the point, with the assured keen glance of a sailor,
wandered irresolutely in space, as though he, the discoverer
of new routes, had lost his way upon this narrow sea.
Another white man, the mate, came
up on the bridge. He was tall, young, lean, with
a mustache like a trooper, and something malicious
in the eye. He took up a position beside the
engineer. Captain Whalley, with his back to them,
inquired
“What’s on the log?”
“Eighty-five,” answered
the mate quickly, and nudged the engineer with his
elbow.
Captain Whalley’s muscular hands
squeezed the iron rail with an extraordinary force;
his eyes glared with an enormous effort; he knitted
his eyebrows, the perspiration fell from under his
hat, and in a faint voice he murmured,
“Steady her, Serang when she is on
the proper bearing.”
The silent Malay stepped back, waited
a little, and lifted his arm warningly to the helmsman.
The wheel revolved rapidly to meet the swing of the
ship. Again the made nudged the engineer.
But Massy turned upon him.
“Mr. Sterne,” he said
violently, “let me tell you as a shipowner that
you are no better than a confounded fool.”