Old Featherstone’s home was a dull, ugly, solid, inconvenient Victorian
house in a dull crescent of similar houses. It stands there still--it
has been more fortunate than Featherstone’s Wharf in Limehouse and the
little dark office in Billiter Square with “T. Featherstone” on its
dusty wire blinds and the half model of the “Parisina” facing you as you
went in. They are gone; but the house I saw only the other day--its
rhododendrons perhaps a shade dingier, a trifle more straggly, and
“bright young society” (for the place is a select boarding
establishment for City gents nowadays) gyrating to the blare of a
loudspeaker in what was aforetime old Thomas Featherstone’s dining-room.
And the legend “Pulo Way,” in tarnished gilt on black, still gleams in
the light of the street lamp opposite on the two square stone
gateposts--bringing a sudden momentary vision of dark seas and strange
stars, of ships becalmed under the lee of the land, of light puffs of
warm, spicy air stealing out from unseen shores as if they breathed
fragrance in their sleep; so that the vague shapes of “Lyndhurst” and
“Chatsworth” and “Bellavista” seem the humped outlines of islands
sheltering one knows not what of wonder and peril and romance....
A maidservant had come in and lighted the gas in the dining-room,
lowered the drab venetian blinds in the bay window, and drawn the heavy
stamped plush curtains which hung stiffly under the gilt cornice.
Broughton sipped his glass of wine and ate a sandwich, surveying the
familiar room with that curious illogical sense of surprised resentment
which humanity always feels in the presence of the calm indifference of
inanimate things to its own transiency and mortality.
He knew it well, that rather gloomy apartment with its solid Victorian
air of ugly, substantial comfort. He had been there before many times.
It had been one of Thomas Featherstone’s unvarying customs to invite his
skippers to a ceremonial dinner whenever their ships were in London
River. An awful sort of business, Broughton had always secretly thought
these functions; and, like the lawyer on the present occasion, had been
heartily glad when they were over. The bill of fare never varied--roast
beef, baked potatoes, some kind of a boiled pudding, almonds and
raisins, and a bottle of port to follow. “Special Captain’s port,” that
turbulent Irishman, Pat Shaughnessy, of the “Mazeppa,” irreverently
termed it: adding, with his great laugh, “You bet the old divvle don’t
fetch out his best vintage for hairy shellbacks like us!”
Thirteen--no, it must be fourteen--of those dinners Broughton could
remember. They had been annual affairs so long as the “Maid of Athens”
could hold her own against the steamers in the Australian wool trade.
Latterly, since she had been driven to tramping the world for charters,
they had become movable feasts, and between the last two there had been
a gap of nearly three years.
Broughton’s eyes travelled slowly from one detail to another--the
mahogany chairs ranged at precise intervals against the dull red of the
flock-papered walls; the round table whose gleaming brass toes peeped
modestly from beneath the voluminous tapestry table cover; the “lady’s
and gent’s easies” sitting primly on opposite sides of the vast yawning
cavern of the fire-place; the mantelpiece where the black marble clock
ticked leisurely between its flanking Marly horses and the pair of
pagoda vases, with their smirking ladies and fierce bewhiskered
warriors, that one of the old man’s captains had brought years ago from
Foochow; the mahogany sideboard whose plate-glass mirror gave back every
minutest detail of the room in reverse; the inlaid glass-fronted
bookcase with its smug rows of gilt-tooled, leather-bound books--the
Waverley Novels, Falconer’s “Shipwreck,” Byron’s poems.
Thomas Featherstone seldom used any other room but this. He possessed a
drawing-room: a bleak chill shrine of the middle-class elegancies where
the twittering Victorian niece who kept house for him--a characterless
worthy woman with the red nose which bespeaks a defective digestion--was
wont to dispense tepid tea and flabby muffins on her periodical “At
Home” days. He had no study: he had his office for his work, he said,
and that was enough for him. He had been brought up to sit in the
dining-room at home in his father’s, the ship-chandler’s, house in
Stepney, and he had carried the custom with him into the days of his
prosperity.
So there he had sat, evening after evening, with his gold spectacles
perched on his high nose, reading “Lloyd’s List” and the commercial
columns of “The Times,” the current issues of which were even now in the
brass newspaper rack by his empty chair: occasionally playing a hand of
picquet with the twittering niece. He was a man of an almost inhuman
punctuality of habit. People had been known to set their watches by Old
Featherstone. At nine o’clock every morning of the week round came the
brougham to drive him into the City. At twelve o’clock he sallied forth
from Billiter Square to the “London Tavern,” and the table that he
always occupied there. At half-past one, back to the office; or, if one
of his ships were due, to the West India Docks, where they generally
berthed. At five the brougham appeared in Billiter Square to transport
him to “Pulo Way” again.
A strange, colourless, monotonous sort of life, one would think; and one
which had singularly little in common with the wider aspects of the
business in which his money had been made. Of the romantic side of
shipping, or indeed of its human side, he seemed to have no conception
at all. A consignment of balas rubies, of white elephants, of Manchester
goods, of pig iron, they were all one to him--so many items in a bill of
lading, no more, no less. Ships carried his house-flag to the four
corners of the earth: no one of them had ever carried him farther than
the outward-bound pilot. No matter what outlandish ports they visited,
it stirred his blood not a whit. Perhaps it was one of the secrets of
his success: for imagination, nine times out of ten, is a dangerous sort
of commodity, commercially considered; and if Old Featherstone had gone
a-gallivanting off to Tuticorin or Amoy or Punta Arenas or Penang or
Port au Prince or any other alluringly-named place with which his ships
trafficked, instead of sitting in Billiter Square and looking after his
business--why, no doubt his business would have been vastly the
sufferer! And, indeed, since he found such adventure as his soul needed
no farther afield than between the marbled covers of his own ledgers,
there would have been no sense in looking for it elsewhere.
You saw the old man’s portrait yonder over the mantelpiece, behind the
marble clock and the Marly horses--keen eyes under bushy eyebrows, side
whiskers, Gladstone collar, slightly sardonic smile. Broughton indulged
in a passing speculation as to what they did with his glass eye when
they buried him. The picture was the work of an unknown artist. “If I’d
been fool enough to pay for a big name,” old Thomas had been wont to
say, “I’d have got a worse picture for three times the money”; and the
old man had not forgotten to drive a hard bargain, the recollection of
which had perhaps a little coloured the artist’s mood. The unknown had
caught his sitter in a characteristic attitude: sitting erect and rigid,
his hands clasped one above the other on the silver knob of his
favourite Malacca walking-stick. A shrewd old man, you would say, a
shrewd, hard, narrow old man, and not have been far wrong in your
estimate; though, as even his enemies were bound to admit, he was not
without his moments of vision, his odd surprising streaks of generosity.
A man of but little education--he had run as a child daily to a little
school in Stepney, kept by the widow and daughters of a shipmaster, and
later had gone for a year or two to an Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen
somewhere off the East India Dock Road--he was wont to say, and to say
as if it were something to boast of, that he had never read but two
books in his life--Falconer’s “Shipwreck” and Byron’s poems, both of
which he knew from cover to cover. For the latter he had a profound and
astonishing admiration, so much so that all his ships were named after
Byronic heroes and heroines.
The “junk store” some wag once called the Featherstone fleet: and the
gibe was not far wide of the mark. Anyone who has the patience and the
curiosity to search the pages of a fifty-or sixty-year-old “Lloyd’s
Register” will find in that melancholy record of human achievement and
human effort blown like dead leaves on the winds of time and change
sufficient reason for the nickname. Everywhere it is the same
tale--“Mazeppa” _ex_ “Electric Telegraph,” “Bride of Abydos” _ex_
“Navarino,” “Zuleika” _ex_ “Roderick Random,” “Thyrza” _ex_ “Rebel
Maid.” Old Featherstone had at one time more than fifty ships under his
house-flag, not one of which had been built to his order. “The man who
succeeds,” was one of his sayings, “is the man who knows best how to
profit by other men’s mistakes.”
The doctrine was one which he put very effectively into practice. He had
an almost uncanny nose for bargains; but, what was more than that, he
was gifted in a most amazing degree with that peculiar and indefinable
quality best described as “ship sense”--an ability amounting well-nigh
to a genius for knowing a good ship from a bad one which is seldom found
but in seamen, and is rare even among them.
Someone once asked him the secret of his gift, but I doubt if he got
much satisfaction out of the answer.
“Ask me another,” snapped out the old man in his dry, staccato fashion.
“I’ve got a brother can waggle his ears like a jackass. How does _he_ do
that? _I_ don’t know. _He_ don’t know. Same thing in my case, exactly.”
And certainly where he got it is something of a mystery. But since there
had been Featherstones buried for generations where time and grime
combine to make a hallowed shade in the old parish church of Stepney,
there may well have been seafaring blood in the family, and likely
enough the founder of the little bow-windowed shop in Wapping Wall was
himself a retired ship’s carpenter.
Whatever the explanation, there was undeniably the fact. He bought
steamers that didn’t pay and had never paid and that experts said never
would pay: ripped the guts out of them, and in a couple of years they
had paid for themselves. He bought unlucky ships, difficult ships, ships
with a bad name of every sort and kind. Ships that broke their captains’
hearts and their owners’ fortunes, ships that wouldn’t steer, that
wouldn’t wear, that wouldn’t stay. And never once did his bargain turn
out a bad one.