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- <p>For a long time after the course of the steamer <em>Sofala</em> had been
- altered for the land, the low swampy coast had retained its appearance
- of a mere smudge of darkness beyond a belt of glitter. The sunrays
- seemed to fall violently upon the calm sea--seemed to shatter themselves
- upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapor
- of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady
- brightness.</p>
- <p>Captain Whalley did not look at it. When his Serang, approaching the
- roomy cane arm-chair which he filled capably, had informed him in a low
- voice that the course was to be altered, he had risen at once and had
- remained on his feet, face forward, while the head of his ship swung
- through a quarter of a circle. He had not uttered a single word, not
- even the word to steady the helm. It was the Serang, an elderly, alert,
- little Malay, with a very dark skin, who murmured the order to the
- helmsman. And then slowly Captain Whalley sat down again in the
- arm-chair on the bridge and fixed his eyes on the deck between his feet.</p>
- <p>He could not hope to see anything new upon this lane of the sea. He had
- been on these coasts for the last three years. From Low Cape to Malantan
- the distance was fifty miles, six hours' steaming for the old ship with
- the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and
- by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim, and with
- their disheveled heads in a bunch, as if in confidential criticism of
- the dark mangroves. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber
- strip of the coast, which at a given moment, as the ship closed with
- it obliquely, would show several clean shining fractures--the brimful
- estuary of a river. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water
- and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts
- black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way
- up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or
- more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever
- thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages.
- The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had
- not been kept so long at it without a change; better than the faithful
- Serang, whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the
- captain's watch; better than he himself, who had been her captain for
- the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her
- courses. Her compasses were never out. She was no trouble at all to
- take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom, and
- steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing, and
- almost to a minute of her allowed time. At any moment, as he sat on
- the bridge without looking up, or lay sleepless in his bed, simply by
- reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was--the precise
- spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous huckster's
- round, up and down the Straits; he knew its order and its sights and its
- people. Malacca to begin with, in at daylight and out at dusk, to cross
- over with a rigid phosphorescent wake this highway of the Far East.
- Darkness and gleams on the water, clear stars on a black sky, perhaps
- the lights of a home steamer keeping her unswerving course in the
- middle, or maybe the elusive shadow of a native craft with her mat sails
- flitting by silently--and the low land on the other side in sight
- at daylight. At noon the three palms of the next place of call, up a
- sluggish river. The only white man residing there was a retired young
- sailor, with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages.
- Sixty miles farther on there was another place of call, a deep bay with
- only a couple of houses on the beach. And so on, in and out, picking
- up coastwise cargo here and there, and finishing with a hundred miles'
- steady steaming through the maze of an archipelago of small islands up
- to a large native town at the end of the beat. There was a three days'
- rest for the old ship before he started her again in inverse order,
- seeing the same shores from another bearing, hearing the same voices
- in the same places, back again to the Sofala's port of registry on
- the great highway to the East, where he would take up a berth nearly
- opposite the big stone pile of the harbor office till it was time to
- start again on the old round of 1600 miles and thirty days. Not a very
- enterprising life, this, for Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise
- Dare-devil Harry--Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day.
- No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms,
- who had sailed famous ships (more than one or two of them his own); who
- had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new
- trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas,
- and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea, and
- forty out in the East ("a pretty thorough apprenticeship," he used
- to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of
- shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to
- where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas.
- His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the
- Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a
- Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the
- celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and
- crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as
- it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time
- neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the
- officers of her Majesty's steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a
- survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the
- enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone
- who cares may see, the "General Directory," vol. ii. p. 410, begins the
- description of the "Malotu or Whalley Passage" with the words: "This
- advantageous route, first discovered in 1850 by Captain Whalley in the
- ship Condor," &c., and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels
- leaving the China ports for the south in the months from December to
- April inclusive.</p>
- <p>This was the clearest gain he had out of life. Nothing could rob him
- of this kind of fame. The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the
- breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new
- men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas
- and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant
- nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.</p>
- <p>In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his
- employers' money and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law
- a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners,
- charterers, and underwriters. He had never lost a ship or consented to
- a shady transaction; and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the
- conditions that had gone to the making of his name. He had buried his
- wife (in the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to the man
- of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than an ample competence in the
- crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose
- downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake. And he was sixty-five
- years old.</p>
- <p>His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed.
- He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking
- Corporation. Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert as
- his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had
- themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference
- between him and them was that he had lost his all. And yet not his all.
- There had remained to him from his lost fortune a very pretty little
- bark, Fair Maid, which he had bought to occupy his leisure of a retired
- sailor--"to play with," as he expressed it himself.</p>
- <p>He had formally declared himself tired of the sea the year preceding his
- daughter's marriage. But after the young couple had gone to settle in
- Melbourne he found out that he could not make himself happy on shore. He
- was too much of a merchant sea-captain for mere yachting to satisfy him.
- He wanted the illusion of affairs; and his acquisition of the Fair
- Maid preserved the continuity of his life. He introduced her to his
- acquaintances in various ports as "my last command." When he grew too
- old to be trusted with a ship, he would lay her up and go ashore to be
- buried, leaving directions in his will to have the bark towed out and
- scuttled decently in deep water on the day of the funeral. His daughter
- would not grudge him the satisfaction of knowing that no stranger would
- handle his last command after him. With the fortune he was able to leave
- her, the value of a 500-ton bark was neither here nor there. All this
- would be said with a jocular twinkle in his eye: the vigorous old man
- had too much vitality for the sentimentalism of regret; and a little
- wistfully withal, because he was at home in life, taking a genuine
- pleasure in its feelings and its possessions; in the dignity of his
- reputation and his wealth, in his love for his daughter, and in his
- satisfaction with the ship--the plaything of his lonely leisure.</p>
- <p>He had the cabin arranged in accordance with his simple ideal of comfort
- at sea. A big bookcase (he was a great reader) occupied one side of his
- stateroom; the portrait of his late wife, a flat bituminous oil-painting
- representing the profile and one long black ringlet of a young woman,
- faced his bed-place. Three chronometers ticked him to sleep and greeted
- him on waking with the tiny competition of their beats. He rose at five
- every day. The officer of the morning watch, drinking his early cup
- of coffee aft by the wheel, would hear through the wide orifice of the
- copper ventilators all the splashings, blowings, and splutterings of
- his captain's toilet. These noises would be followed by a sustained
- deep murmur of the Lord's Prayer recited in a loud earnest voice. Five
- minutes afterwards the head and shoulders of Captain Whalley emerged
- out of the companion-hatchway. Invariably he paused for a while on the
- stairs, looking all round at the horizon; upwards at the trim of the
- sails; inhaling deep draughts of the fresh air. Only then he would step
- out on the poop, acknowledging the hand raised to the peak of the cap
- with a majestic and benign "Good morning to you." He walked the deck
- till eight scrupulously. Sometimes, not above twice a year, he had to
- use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip--a
- slight touch of rheumatism, he supposed. Otherwise he knew nothing of
- the ills of the flesh. At the ringing of the breakfast bell he went
- below to feed his canaries, wind up the chronometers, and take the
- head of the table. From there he had before his eyes the big carbon
- photographs of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies
- --his grandchildren--set in black frames into the maplewood bulkheads
- of the cuddy. After breakfast he dusted the glass over these portraits
- himself with a cloth, and brushed the oil painting of his wife with a
- plumate kept suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the heavy
- gold frame. Then with the door of his stateroom shut, he would sit down
- on the couch under the portrait to read a chapter out of a thick pocket
- Bible--her Bible. But on some days he only sat there for half an hour
- with his finger between the leaves and the closed book resting on his
- knees. Perhaps he had remembered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she
- used to be.</p>
- <p>She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too. It was like an
- article of faith with him that there never had been, and never could be,
- a brighter, cheerier home anywhere afloat or ashore than his home under
- the poop-deck of the Condor, with the big main cabin all white and gold,
- garlanded as if for a perpetual festival with an unfading wreath. She
- had decorated the center of every panel with a cluster of home flowers.
- It took her a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor of love.
- To him it had remained a marvel of painting, the highest achievement of
- taste and skill; and as to old Swinburne, his mate, every time he
- came down to his meals he stood transfixed with admiration before the
- progress of the work. You could almost smell these roses, he declared,
- sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded the
- saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made him somewhat less hearty
- than usual in tackling his food. But there was nothing of the sort to
- interfere with his enjoyment of her singing. "Mrs. Whalley is a regular
- out-and-out nightingale, sir," he would pronounce with a judicial air
- after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the
- piece. In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear
- her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in
- the cabin. On the very day they got engaged he had written to London
- for the instrument; but they had been married for over a year before it
- reached them, coming out round the Cape. The big case made part of the
- first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor--an event that to
- the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as
- the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of
- solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its
- sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the
- ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read
- the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his
- voice. When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him
- with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten,
- impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red
- granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry.
- He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember
- much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sailor of the
- crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child
- out of one of her black skirts.</p>
- <p>He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish
- stream. It will break out and flow over a man's troubles, it will close
- upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has
- gone to the bottom. And the world is not bad. People had been very
- kind to him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior partner
- in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of the Condor. It was she who
- volunteered to look after the little one, and in due course took her to
- England (something of a journey in those days, even by the overland
- mail route) with her own girls to finish her education. It was ten years
- before he saw her again.</p>
- <p>As a little child she had never been frightened of bad weather; she
- would beg to be taken up on deck in the bosom of his oilskin coat to
- watch the big seas hurling themselves upon the Condor. The swirl and
- crash of the waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless
- delight. "A good boy spoiled," he used to say of her in joke. He had
- named her Ivy because of the sound of the word, and obscurely fascinated
- by a vague association of ideas. She had twined herself tightly round
- his heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as to a
- tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little, that in the nature
- of things she would probably elect to cling to someone else. But
- he loved life well enough for even that event to give him a certain
- satisfaction, apart from his more intimate feeling of loss.</p>
- <p>After he had purchased the Fair Maid to occupy his loneliness, he
- hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for
- the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home. What made him
- dissatisfied there was not to see that she clung now to somebody else,
- but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination "a
- rather poor stick"--even in the matter of health. He disliked his
- son-in-law's studied civility perhaps more than his method of
- handling the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage. But of his
- apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day of his departure, with
- the hall-door open already, holding her hands and looking steadily into
- her eyes, he had said, "You know, my dear, all I have is for you and the
- chicks. Mind you write to me openly." She had answered him by an almost
- imperceptible movement of her head. She resembled her mother in
- the color of her eyes, and in character--and also in this, that she
- understood him without many words.</p>
- <p>Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters made Captain
- Whalley lift his white eye-brows. For the rest he considered he was
- reaping the true reward of his life by being thus able to produce on
- demand whatever was needed. He had not enjoyed himself so much in a
- way since his wife had died. Characteristically enough his son-in-law's
- punctuality in failure caused him at a distance to feel a sort of
- kindness towards the man. The fellow was so perpetually being jammed on
- a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation would be
- manifestly unfair. No, no! He knew well what that meant. It was bad
- luck. His own had been simply marvelous, but he had seen in his life too
- many good men--seamen and others--go under with the sheer weight of bad
- luck not to recognize the fatal signs. For all that, he was cogitating
- on the best way of tying up very strictly every penny he had to leave,
- when, with a preliminary rumble of rumors (whose first sound reached
- him in Shanghai as it happened), the shock of the big failure came;
- and, after passing through the phases of stupor, of incredulity, of
- indignation, he had to accept the fact that he had nothing to speak of
- to leave.</p>
- <p>Upon that, as if he had only waited for this catastrophe, the unlucky
- man, away there in Melbourne, gave up his unprofitable game, and sat
- down--in an invalid's bath-chair at that too. "He will never walk
- again," wrote the wife. For the first time in his life Captain Whalley
- was a bit staggered.</p>
- <p>The Fair Maid had to go to work in bitter earnest now. It was no longer
- a matter of preserving alive the memory of Dare-devil Harry Whalley in
- the Eastern Seas, or of keeping an old man in pocket-money and clothes,
- with, perhaps, a bill for a few hundred first-class cigars thrown in at
- the end of the year. He would have to buckle-to, and keep her going hard
- on a scant allowance of gilt for the ginger-bread scrolls at her stem
- and stern.</p>
- <p>This necessity opened his eyes to the fundamental changes of the world.
- Of his past only the familiar names remained, here and there, but
- the things and the men, as he had known them, were gone. The name of
- Gardner, Patteson, & Co. was still displayed on the walls of warehouses
- by the waterside, on the brass plates and window-panes in the business
- quarters of more than one Eastern port, but there was no longer a
- Gardner or a Patteson in the firm. There was no longer for Captain
- Whalley an arm-chair and a welcome in the private office, with a bit of
- business ready to be put in the way of an old friend, for the sake of
- bygone services. The husbands of the Gardner girls sat behind the desks
- in that room where, long after he had left the employ, he had kept his
- right of entrance in the old man's time. Their ships now had yellow
- funnels with black tops, and a time-table of appointed routes like a
- confounded service of tramways. The winds of December and June were all
- one to them; their captains (excellent young men he doubted not) were,
- to be sure, familiar with Whalley Island, because of late years the
- Government had established a white fixed light on the north end (with
- a red danger sector over the Condor Reef), but most of them would have
- been extremely surprised to hear that a flesh-and-blood Whalley still
- existed--an old man going about the world trying to pick up a cargo here
- and there for his little bark.</p>
- <p>And everywhere it was the same. Departed the men who would have nodded
- appreciatively at the mention of his name, and would have thought
- themselves bound in honor to do something for Dare-devil Harry Whalley.
- Departed the opportunities which he would have known how to seize; and
- gone with them the white-winged flock of clippers that lived in the
- boisterous uncertain life of the winds, skimming big fortunes out of
- the foam of the sea. In a world that pared down the profits to an
- irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count its disengaged
- tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean charters were snapped up
- by cable three months in advance, there were no chances of fortune for
- an individual wandering haphazard with a little bark--hardly indeed any
- room to exist.</p>
- <p>He found it more difficult from year to year. He suffered greatly from
- the smallness of remittances he was able to send his daughter. Meantime
- he had given up good cigars, and even in the matter of inferior cheroots
- limited himself to six a day. He never told her of his difficulties, and
- she never enlarged upon her struggle to live. Their confidence in each
- other needed no explanations, and their perfect understanding endured
- without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would have been shocked
- if she had taken it into her head to thank him in so many words, but
- he found it perfectly natural that she should tell him she needed two
- hundred pounds.</p>
- <p>He had come in with the Fair Maid in ballast to look for a freight in
- the Sofala's port of registry, and her letter met him there. Its tenor
- was that it was no use mincing matters. Her only resource was in opening
- a boarding-house, for which the prospects, she judged, were good. Good
- enough, at any rate, to make her tell him frankly that with two hundred
- pounds she could make a start. He had torn the envelope open, hastily,
- on deck, where it was handed to him by the ship-chandler's runner, who
- had brought his mail at the moment of anchoring. For the second time
- in his life he was appalled, and remained stock-still at the cabin door
- with the paper trembling between his fingers. Open a boarding-house! Two
- hundred pounds for a start! The only resource! And he did not know where
- to lay his hands on two hundred pence.</p>
- <p>All that night Captain Whalley walked the poop of his anchored ship, as
- though he had been about to close with the land in thick weather, and
- uncertain of his position after a run of many gray days without a sight
- of sun, moon, or stars. The black night twinkled with the guiding lights
- of seamen and the steady straight lines of lights on shore; and all
- around the Fair Maid the riding lights of ships cast trembling trails
- upon the water of the roadstead. Captain Whalley saw not a gleam
- anywhere till the dawn broke and he found out that his clothing was
- soaked through with the heavy dew.</p>
- <p>His ship was awake. He stopped short, stroked his wet beard, and
- descended the poop ladder backwards, with tired feet. At the sight
- of him the chief officer, lounging about sleepily on the quarterdeck,
- remained open-mouthed in the middle of a great early-morning yawn.</p>
- <p>"Good morning to you," pronounced Captain Whalley solemnly, passing into
- the cabin. But he checked himself in the doorway, and without looking
- back, "By the bye," he said, "there should be an empty wooden case put
- away in the lazarette. It has not been broken up--has it?"</p>
- <p>The mate shut his mouth, and then asked as if dazed, "What empty case,
- sir?"</p>
- <p>"A big flat packing-case belonging to that painting in my room. Let it
- be taken up on deck and tell the carpenter to look it over. I may want
- to use it before long."</p>
- <p>The chief officer did not stir a limb till he had heard the door of the
- captain's state-room slam within the cuddy. Then he beckoned aft the
- second mate with his forefinger to tell him that there was something "in
- the wind."</p>
- <p>When the bell rang Captain Whalley's authoritative voice boomed out
- through a closed door, "Sit down and don't wait for me." And his
- impressed officers took their places, exchanging looks and whispers
- across the table. What! No breakfast? And after apparently knocking
- about all night on deck, too! Clearly, there was something in the wind.
- In the skylight above their heads, bowed earnestly over the plates,
- three wire cages rocked and rattled to the restless jumping of the
- hungry canaries; and they could detect the sounds of their "old
- man's" deliberate movements within his state-room. Captain Whalley was
- methodically winding up the chronometers, dusting the portrait of
- his late wife, getting a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making
- himself ready in his punctilious unhurried manner to go ashore. He could
- not have swallowed a single mouthful of food that morning. He had made
- up his mind to sell the Fair Maid.</p>
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- if (bar.top < coord.top && bar.bottom > coord.top){
- spans[i].classList.add('hover');
- } else if (spans[i].classList.contains('hover')) {
- spans[i].classList.remove('hover');
- }
- }
- requestAnimationFrame(highlight);
- }
- highlight();
- document.body.addEventListener('click', function(){
- var els = document.querySelectorAll('.hover');
- for (var i=els.length; i--;)
- els[i].classList.toggle('highlight');
- });
- </script>
- </body>
- </html>
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