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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," &amp;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, &amp; 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, &amp; 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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