“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 lineaments 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.”