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YOUTH
 

 

BY

JOSEPH CONRAD

AUTHOR OF

THE CHILDREN OF THE SEA,
THE TYPHOON, Etc.

«s ..)h)~«CBut the dwarf answered: No;
something human is dearer to me tian the
) wealth of all the world.”’—GRIMM’S TALES.

ae

7G ROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

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URIS LIBRARY

‘tim 0 9 41000
Uys

058

3 Pe THA ¢ ny

Coryricur, 1903, BY
\ 402 Oo. DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
TO

MY WIFE
CONTENTS

PaGe

YOUTH: A NARRATIVE ~. : : . 3S
HEART OF DARKNESS * s . - SE
° 2 18¢

THE END OF THE TETHER
YOUTH: A NARRATIVE
YOUTH

|

Tuts could have occurred nowhere but in England,
where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea
entering into the life of most men, and the men know-
ing something or everything about the sea, in the way
of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.

We were sitting round a mahogany table that reflected.
the bottle, the claret-glasses, and our faces as we leaned
on our elbows. There was a director of companies, am
accountant, a lawyer, Marlow, and myself. The direc-
tor had been a Conway boy, the accountant had served
four years at sea, the lawyer—a fine crusted Tory, High
Churchman, the best of old fellows, the soul of honor—
had been chief officer in the P. & O. service in the good
old days when mail-boats were square-rigged at least om
two masts, and used to come down the China Sea before
a fair monsoon with stun’sails set alow and aloft. We
all began life in the merchant service. Between the five
of us there was the strong bond of the sea, and also the
fellowship of the craft, which no amount of enthusiasm
for yachting, cruising, and so on can give, since one is
only the amusement of life and the other is life itself.

Marlow (at least I think that is how he spelt his name}
told the story, or rather the chronicle, of a voyage:

“ Yes, I have seen a little of the Eastern seas; but whak
% remember best is my first voyage there. You fellows

[3]
YOUTH

know there are those voyages that seem ordered for the
illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of
existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself,
sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish some-
thing—and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours.
You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little—
not a thing in the world—not even marry an old maid, or
get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of desti-
nation.

“Tt was altogether a memorable affair. It was my
first voyage to the East, and my first voyage as second
mate; it was also my skipper’s first command. You'll
admit it was time. He was sixty if a day; a little man,
with a broad, not very straight back, with bowed shoul-
ders and one leg more bandy than the other, he had that
queer twisted-about appearance you see so often in men
who work in the fields. He had a nut-cracker face—chin
and nose trying to come together over a sunken mouth—
and it was framed in iron-gray fluffy hair, that looked
like a chin strap of cotton-wool sprinkled with coal-dust.
And he had blue eyes in that old face of his, which were
amazingly like a boy’s, with that candid expression some
quite common men preserve to the end of their days by
a rare internal gift of simplicity of heart and rectitude
of soul. What induced him to accept me was a wonder.
I had come out of a crack Australian clipper, where I
had been third officer, and he seemed to have a prejudice
against crack clippers as aristocratic and high-toned.
‘He said to me, ‘ You know, in this ship you will have to
work.’ J said I had to work in every ship I had ever

-*]
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been in. ‘ Ah, but this is different, and you gentlemen.
out of them big ships; . . . but there! I dare say you
will do. Join to-morrow.’

“JT joined to-morrow. It was twenty-two years ago;
and I was just twenty. How time passes! It was one
of the happiest days of my life. Fancy! Second mate
for the first time—a really responsible officer! IT wouldn’t
have thrown up my new billet for a fortune. The mate
looked me over carefully. He was also an old chap, but
of another stamp. die had a Roman nose, a snow-white,
long beard, and his name was Mahon, but he insisted that
it should be pronounced Mann. He was well connected ;
yet there was something wrong with his luck, and he
had never got on.

* As to the captain, he had been for years in coasters,
then in the Mediterranean, and last in the West Indian
trade. He had never been round the Capes. He could
just write a kind of sketchy hand, and didn’t care for
writing at all. Both were thorough good seamen of
course, and between those two old chaps I felt like a
small boy between two grandfathers.

“ The ship also was old. Her name was tis Judea.
Queer name, isn’t it? She belonged to a man Wilmer,
Wilcox—some name like that; but he has been bankrupt
and dead these twenty years or more, and his name don’t
matter. She had been laid up in Shadwell basin for ever
so long. You can imagine her state. She was all rust,
dust, grime—soot aloft, dirt on deck. To me it was
like coming out of a palace into a ruined cottage. She
was about 400 tons, had a primitive windlass, wooden

C5]
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Tntches ye we avers, aot a bit of brass about her, and a
big square stern. There was on it, below her name im
big letters, a lot of scroll work, with the gilt off, and some
sort of a coat of arms, with the motto ‘ Do or Die’ under-
neath. I remember it took my fancy immensely. There
was a touch of romance in it, something that made me
love the old thing—something that appealed to my
youth!

“ We left London in ballast—sand ballast—to load a
cargo of coal in a northern port for Bankok. Bankok!
I thrilled. I had been six years at sea, but had only seen
Meibourne and Sydney, very good places, cerning
places in their way—but Bankok! \

“We worked out of the Thames under canvas, with a
North Sea pilot on board. His name was Jermyn, and
he dodged all day long about the galley drying his hand-
kerchief before the stove. Apparently he never slept.
We was a dismal man, with a perpetual tear sparkling
at the end of his nose, who either had been in trouble, or
was in trouble, or expected to be in trouble—couldn’t be
happy unless something went wrong. He mistrusted
my youth, my common-sense, and my seamanship, and
made a point of showing it in a hundred little ways. I
dare say he was right. It seems to me I knew very little
then, and I know not much more now; but I cherish a
bate for that Jermyn to this day.

““'We were a week working up as far as Yarmouth
Roads, and then we got into a gale—the famous October
gale of twenty-two years ago. It was wind, lightning,
sleet, snow, and a terrific sea. We were flying light, and

[6]
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you may imagine how bad it was when I tell you we had
smashed bulwarks and a flooded deck. On the second
night she shifted her ballast into the lee bow, and by
that time we had been blown off somewhere on the Degger
Bank. There was nothing for it but go below with
shovels and try to right her, and there we were in that
vast hold, gloomy like a cavern, the tallow dips stuck
and flickering on the beams, the gale howling above, the
ship tossing about like mad on her side; there we all
were, Jermyn, the captain, everyone, hardly able to keep
our feet, engaged on that gravedigger’s work, and try-
ing to toss shovelfuls of wet sand up to windward. At
every tumble of the ship you could see vaguely im the
dim light men falling down with a great flourish of shov-
els. One of the ship’s boys (we had two), impressed by
the weirdness of the scene, wept as if his heart would
break. We could hear him blubbering somewhere im the
shadows.

“On the third day the gale died out, and by-and-by «
north-country tug picked us up. We took sixteen days
in all to get from London to the Tyne! When we got
into dock we had lost our turn for loading, and they
hauled us off to a tier where we remained for a month.
Mrs. Beard (the captain’s name was Beard). came from
Colchester to see the old man. She lived on board. The
crew of runners had left, and there remained only the
officers, one boy, and the steward, a mulatto whe an-
swered to the name of Abraham. Mrs. Beard was an ald
woman, with a face all wrinkled and ruddy like a winter
apple, and the figure of a young girl. She eaught sight

C7]
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of re once, sewing on a button, and insisted on having
my shirts to repair. This was something different from
the captains’ wives I had known on board crack clippers.
When I brought her the shirts, she said: ‘And the
socks? They want mending, I am sure, and John’s—
Captain Beard’s—things are all in order now. I would
be glad of something to do.’ Bless the old woman. She
overhauled my outfit for me, and meantime I read for the
first time ‘Sartor Resartus’ and Burnaby’s ‘ Ride to
Khiva.’ I didn’t understand much of the first then;
but I remember I preferred the soldier to the philosopher
at the time; a preference which life has only confirmed.
One was a man, and the other was either more—or less.
However, they are both dead, and Mrs. Beard is dead,
and youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements
simple hearts—all die. . . . No matter.

“ They loaded us at last. We shipped a crew. Eighé
able seamen and two boys. We hauled off one evening
to the buoys at the dock-gates, ready to go out, and with
a fair prospect of beginning the voyage next day. Mrs.
Beard was to start for home by a late train. When the
ship was fast we went to tea. We sat rather silent
through the meal—Mahon, the old couple, and I. I
finished first, and slipped away for a smoke, my cabin
being in a deck-house just against the poop. It was high
water, blowing fresh with a drizzle; the double dock-
gates were opened, and the steam colliers were going in
and out in the darkness with their lights burning
bright, a great plashing of propellers, rattling of
‘winches, and a lot of hailing on the pier-heads. I watched

(8 ]
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the procession of head-lights gliding high and of green
lights gliding low in the night, when suddenly a red
gleam flashed at me, vanished, came into view again, and _
remained. The fore-end of a steamer loomed up close.
I shouted down the cabin, ‘ Come up, quick!’ and then
heard a startled voice saying afar in the dark, ‘ Stop her,
sir.” A bell jingled. Another voice cried warningly,
“We are going right into that bark, sir.’ The answer to
this was a gruff ‘ All right,’ and the next thing was a
heavy crash as the steamer struck a glancing blow with
the bluff of her bow about our fore-rigging. There was
a moment cf confusion, yelling, and running about.
Steam roared. Then somebody was heard saying, ‘ All
clear, sir.’ . . . ‘Are you all right?’ asked the gruff
voice. I had jumped forward to see the damage, and
hailed back, ‘I think so.’ ‘ Easy astern,’ said the gruff
voice. A bell jingled. ‘What steamer is that?’
screamed Mahon. By that time she was no more to us
than a bulky shadow maneuvering a little way off. They
shouted at us some name—a woman’s name, Miranda or
Melissa—or some such thing. ‘This means another
month in this beastly hole,’ said Mahon to me, as we
peered with lamps about the splintered bulwarks and
broken braces. ‘ But where’s the captain?’

“We had not heard or seen anything of him all that
time. We went aft to look. A doleful voice arose hail-
ing somewhere in the middle of the dock, ‘ Judea ahoy!’
- - » How the devil did he get there? . . . * Hallo!’
we shouted. ‘I am adrift in our boat without oars,’ he
eried. A belated waterman offered his services, and

[9]
YOUTH

Mahon struck a bargain with him for half-a-crown to
tow our skipper alongside; but it was Mrs. Beard that
came up the ladder first. They had been floating about
the dock in that mizzly cold rain for nearly an hour. I
was never so surprised in my life.

“It appears that when he heard my shout * Come up,’
he understood at once what was the matter, caught up
his wife, ran on deck, and across, and down into our boat, .
which was fast to the ladder. Not bad for a sixty-year-
old. Just imagine that old fellow saving heroically in
his arms that old woman—the woman of his life. He
set her down on a thwart, and was ready to climb back
on board when the painter came adrift somehow, and
away they went together. Of course in the confusion
we did not hear him shouting. He looked abashed. She
said cheerfully, ‘ I suppose it does not matter my losing
the train now?’ ‘No, Jenny—you go below and get
warm,’ he growled. Then to us: ‘ A sailor has no busi-
ness with a wife—I say. There I was, out of the ship.
Well, no harm done this time. Let’s go and look at what
that fool of a steamer smashed.’

“Tt wasn’t much, but it delayed us three weeks. At
_the end of that time, the captain being engaged with his
agents, I carried Mrs. Beard’s bag to the railway-sta-
tion and put her all comfy into a third-class carriage.
She lowered the window to say, ‘ You are a good young
man. If you see John—Captain Beard—without his
muffler at night, just remind him from me to keep his
throat well wrapped up.’ ‘ Certainly, Mrs. Beard,’ I
said. ‘ You are a good young man; I noticed how at-

{ 10 ]
YOUTH

tentive you are to John—to Captain——’ The train
pulled out suddenly; I took my cap off to the old
woman: I never saw her again. . . . Pass the bottle.

“We went to sea next day. When we made that start
for Bankok we had been already three months out of
London. We had expected to be a fortnight or so—at
the outside.

“Tt was January, and the weather was beautiful—the
beautiful sunny winter weather that has more charm
than in the summer-time, because it is unexpected, and
crisp, and you know it won’t, it can’t, last long. It’s
like a windfall, like a godsend, like an unexpected piece
of luck.

“ ¥t lasted all down the North Sea, all down Channel;
and it lasted till we were three hundred miles or so to the
westward of the Lizards: then the wind went round to
the sou’west and began to pipe up. In two days it blew
a gale. The Judea, hove to, wallowed on the Atlantic
like an old candlebox. It blew day after day: it blew
with spite, without interval, without mercy, without rest.
The world was nothing but an immensity of great foam-
ing waves rushing at us, under a sky low enough to
touch with the hand and dirty like a smoked ceiling. In
the stormy space surrounding us there was as much flying
spray as air. Day after day and night after night there
was nothing round the ship but the howl of the wind,
the tumult of the sea, the noise of water pouring over
her deck. There was no rest for her and no rest for us.
She tossed, she pitched, she stood on her head, she sat on
her tail, she rolled, she groaned, and we had to hold on

{ 11]

 
YOUTH

while on deck and cling to our bunks when below, in &
constant effort’of body and worry of mind.

“One night Mahon spoke through the small window
of my berth. It opened right into my very bed, and I
was lying there sleepless, in my boots, feeling as though.
I had not slept for years, and could not if I tried. He
said excitedly—

“You got the sounding-rod in here, Marlow? I can’t
get the pumps to suck. By God! it’s no child’s play.’

“I gave him the sounding-rod and lay down again,
trying to think of various things—but I thought only
of the pumps. When I came on deck they were still at
it, and my watch relieved at the pumps. By the light of
the lantern brought on deck to examine the sounding-
rod I caught a glimpse of their weary, serious faces.
We pumped all the four hours. We pumped all night,
all day, all the week,—watch and watch. She was work-
ing herself loose, and leaked badly—not enough to
drown us at once, but enough to kill us with the work at
the pumps. And while we pumped the ship was going
from us piecemeal: the bulwarks went, the stanchions
were torn out, the ventilators smashed, the cabin-door
burst in. There was not a dry spot in the ship. She was
being gutted bit by bit. The long-boat changed, as if
by magic, into matchwood where she stood in her gripes.
T had lashed her myself, and was rather proud of my
handiwork, which had withstood so long the malice of
the sea. And we pumped. And there was no break in
the weather. The sea was white like a sheet of foam,
like a caldron of boiling milk; there was not a break in

[ 12 ]
YOUTH

the clouds, no—not the size of a man’s hand—no, not
for so much as ten seconds. There was for us no sky,
there were for us no stars, no sun, no universe—nothing
but angry clouds and an infuriated sea. We pumped
watch and watch, for dear life; and it seemed to last for
months, for years, for all eternity, as though we had been
dead and gone to a hell for sailors. We forgot the day
of the week, the name of the month, what year it was,
and whether we had ever been ashore. The sails blew
away, she lay broadside on under a weather-cloth, the
ocean poured over her, and we did not care. We turned
those handles, and had the eyes of idiots. As soon as we
had crawled on deck I used to take a round turn with a
rope about the men, the pumps, and the mainmast, and
we turned, we turned incessantly, with the water to our
waists, to our necks, over our heads. It was all one.
We had forgotten how it felt to be dry.

“And there was somewhere in me the thought: By
Jove! this is the deuce of an adventure—something you
read about; and it is my first voyage as second mate—
and I am only twenty—and here I am lasting it out as
well as any of these men, and keeping my chaps up to
the mark. I was pleased. I would not have given up
the experience for worlds. I had moments of. exultation.
Whenever the old dismantled craft pitched heavily with
her counter high in the air, she seemed to me to throw
up, like an appeal, like a defiance, like a cry to the cleuds
without mercy, the words written on her stern: ‘ Judea,
Londcn. Do or Die.’

“© youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the

[ 13 ]
YOUTH

imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap
carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight—to
me she was the endeavor, the test, the trial of life. I
think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret—
as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I
shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle.

“ One night when tied to the mast, as I explained, we
were pumping on, deafened with the wind, and without
spirit enough in us to wish ourselves dead, a heavy sea
crashed aboard and swept clean over us. As soon as I
got my breath I shouted, as in duty bound, ‘ Keep on,
boys!’ when suddenly I felt something hard floating on
deck strike the calf of my leg. I made a grab at it and
missed. It was so dark, we could not see each other’s
faces within a foot—you understand.

“ After that thump the ship kept quiet for a while,
and the thing, whatever it was, struck my leg again.
This time I caught it—and it was a sauce-pan. At first,
being stupid with fatigue and thinking of nothing but
the pumps, I did not understand what I had in my hand.
Suddenly it dawned upon me, and I shouted, ‘ Boys, the
house on deck is gone. Leave this, and let’s look for the
cook.’

“There was a deck-house forward, which contained
the galley, the cook’s berth, and the quarters of the
crew. As we had expected for days to see it swept away,
the hands had been ordered to sleep in the cabin—the
only safe place in the ship. The steward, Abraham,
however, persisted in clinging to his berth, stupidly, like
a mule—from sheer fright I believe, like an animal that

[ 14]
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won't leave a stable falling in an earthquake. So we
went to look for him. It was chancing death, since once
out of our lashings we were as exposed as if on a raft.
But we went. The house was shattered as if a shell had
exploded inside. Most of it had gone overboard—stove,
men’s quarters, and their property, all was gone; but
two posts, holding a portion of the bulkhead to which
Abraham’s bunk was attached, remained as if by a mir-
acle. We groped in the ruins and came upon this, and
there he was, sitting in his bunk, surrounded by foam and
wreckage, jabbering cheerfully to himself. He was out
of his mind; completely and for ever mad, with this
sudden shock coming upon the fag-end of his endurance.
We snatched him up, lugged him aft, and pitched him
head-first down the cabin companion. You understand
there was no time to carry him down with infinite pre-
cautions and wait to see how he got on. Those below
would pick him up at the bottom of the stairs all right.
We were in a hurry to go back to the pumps. That busi-
ness could not wait. A bad leak is an inhuman thing.

“ One would think that the sole purpose of that fiend-
ish gale had been to make a lunatic of that poor devil of
a mulatto. It eased before morning, and next day the
sky cleared, and as the sea went down the leak took up.
When it came to bending a fresh set of sails the crew
demanded to put back—and really there was nothing else
todo. Boats gone, decks swept clean, cabin gutted, men
without a stitch but what they stood in, stores spoiled,
ship strained. We put her head for home, and—would
you believe it? The wind came east right in our teeth.

i 15 J
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It blew fresh, it blew continuously. We had to beat up
every inch of the way, but she did not leak so badly,
the water keeping comparatively smooth. Two hours’
pumping in every four is no joke—but it kept her afloat
as far as Falmouth.

“The good people there live on casualties of the sea,
and no doubt were glad to see us. A hungry crowd of
shipwrights sharpened their chisels at the sight of that
carcass of a ship. And, by Jove! they had pretty pick-
ings off us before they were done. I fancy the owner
was already in a tight place. There were delays. Then
it was decided to take part of the.cargo out and calk her
topsides. ‘This was done, the repairs finished, cargo re
shipped; a new crew came on board, and we went out—
for Bankok. At the end of a week we were back again.
The crew said they weren’t going to Bankok—a hundred
and fifty days’ passage—in a something hooker that
wanted pumping eight hours out of the twenty-four;
and the nautical papers inserted again the little para-
graph: ‘Judea. Bark. Tyne to Bankok; coals; put
back to Falmouth leaky and with crew refusing duty.’

“There were more delays—more tinkering. The
owner came down for a day, and said she was as right as
a little fiddle. Poor old Captain Beard looked like the
ghost of a Geordie skipper—through the worry and
humiliation of it. Remember he was sixty, and it was his
first command. Mahon said it was a foolish business,
and would end badly. I loved the ship more than ever,
and wanted awfully to get to Benkok. To Bankok!
Magic name, blessed name. Mesopotamia wasn’t a patch

[ 16 ]
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on it. Remember I was twenty, and it was my first second
mate’s billet, and the East was waiting for. me.

‘** We went out and anchored in the outer roads with a
fresh crew—the third. She leaked worse than ever.
It was as if those confounded shipwrights had actually
made a hole in her. This time we did not even
go outside. The crew simply refused to man the
windlass.

“ They towed us back to the inner harbor, and we be-
came a fixture, a feature, an institution of the place.
People pointed us out to visitors as ‘ That ’ere bark
that’s going to Bankok—has been here six months—put
back three times.’ On holidays the small boys pulling
about in beats would hail, ‘ Judea, ahoy!’ and if a head
showed above the rail shouted, ‘ Where you bound to? —
Bankok?’ and jeered. We were only three on board.
The poor old skipper mooned in the cabin. Mahon un-
dertook the cooking, and unexpectedly developed all a
Frenchman’s genius for preparing nice little messes. I
looked languidly after the rigging. We became citizens
of Falmouth. Every shopkeeper knew us. At the bar-
ber’s or tobacconist’s they asked familiarly, ‘Do you
think you will ever get to Bankok?’ Meantime the
owner, the underwriters, and the charterers squabbled
amongst themselves in London, and our pay went on.
. . - Pass the bottle.

“Tt was horrid. Morally it was worse than pumping
for life. It seemed as though we had been forgotten by
the world, belonged to nobody, would get nowhere; it
seemed that, as if bewitched; we would have to live for

[17 ]
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ever and ever in that inner harbor, a derision and a by-
word to generations of long-shore loafers and dishonest
boatmen. I obtained three months’ pay and a. five days’
leave, and made a rush for London. It took me.a day
to get there and pretty well another to come back—but
three months’ pay went all the same. I don’t know what
I did with it. I went to a music-hall, I believe, lunched,
dined, and supped in a swell place in Regent Street, and
was back to time, with nothing but a complete set of
Byron’s works and a new railway rug to show for three
months’ work. The boatman who pulled me off to the
ship said: ‘ Hallo! I thought you had left the old thing.
She will never get to Bankok.’ ‘ That’s all you know
about it,’ I said scornfully—but I didn’t like that proph-
ecy at all.

** Suddenly a man, some kind of agent to somebody,
appeared with full powers. He had grog blossoms all
over his face, an indomitable energy, and was a jolly
soul. We leaped into life again. A hulk came along-
side, took our cargo, and then we went into dry dock to
get our copper stripped. No wonder she leaked. The
poor thing, strained beyond endurance by the gale, had,
as if in disgust, spat out all the oakum of her lower
seams. She was recalked, new coppered, and made as
tight as a bottle. We went back to the hulk and re-
shipped our cargo.

“Then on a fine moonlight night, all the rats left the
ship.

“ We had been infested with them. They had destroyed
our sails, consumed more stores than the crew, affably

[ 18 ]
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shared our beds and our dangers, and now, when the
ship was made seaworthy, concluded to clear out. I
called Mahon to enjoy the spectacle. Rat after rat ap-
peared on our rail, took a last look over his shoulder,
and leaped with a hollow thud into the empty hulk. —
We tried to count them, but soon lost the tale. Mahon
said: ‘ Well, well! don’t talk to me about the intelligence ;
of rats. They ought to have left before, when we had
that narrow squeak from foundering. There you have
the proof how silly is the superstition about them. They
leave'a good ship for an old rotten hulk, where there is
nothing to eat, too, the fools! . . . I don’t believe they
know what is safe or what is good for them, any more
than you or I.’

“ And after some more talk we agreed that the wisdom
of rats had been grossly overrated, being in fact no
greater than that of men.

“The story of the ship was known, by this, all up the
Channel from Land’s End to the Forelands, and we
could get no crew on the south coast. They sent us one
all complete from Liverpool, and we left once more—for
Bankok.

“We had fair breezes, smooth water right into the
tropics, and the old Judea lumbered along in the sun-
shine. When she went eight knots everything cracked
aloft, and we tied our caps to our heads; but mostly she
strolled on at the rate of three miles an hour. What
could you expect? She was tired—that old ship. Her
youth was where mine is—where yours is—you fellows
who listen to this yarn; and what friend would: throw

[ 19 ]
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your years and your weariness in your face? We didn’t
grumble at her. To us aft, at least, it seemed as though
we had been born in her, reared in her, had lived in her
for ages, had never known any other ship. I would
just as soon have abused the old village church at home
for not being a cathedral.

“‘ And for me there was also my youth to make me pa-
tient. There was all the East before me, and all life, and
the thought that I had been tried in that ship and had
come out pretty well. And I thought of men of old who,
centuries ago, went that road in ships that sailed no
better, to the land of palms, and spices, and yellow sands,
and of brown nations ruled by kings more cruel than
Nero the Roman and more splendid than Solomon the
Jew. The old bark lumbered on, heavy with her age
and the burden of her cargo, while I lived the life of
youth in ignorance and hope. She lumbered on through
an interminable procession of days; and the fresh gild-
ing flashed back at the setting sun, seemed to cry out
over the darkening sea the words painted on her stern,
‘ Judea, London. Do or Die.’

“Then we entered the Indian Ocean and steered north-

-erly for Java Head. The winds were light. Weeks
slipped by. She crawled on, do or die, and people at
home began to think of posting us as overdue.

“One Saturday evening, I being off duty, the men
asked me to give them an extra bucket of water or so—
for washing clothes. As I did not wish to screw on the
fresh-water pump so late, I went forward whistling, and
with a key in my hand to unlock the forepeak scuttle,

[ 20 ]
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intending to serve the water out of a spare tank we kept
there.

“The smell down below was as unexpected as it was
frightful. One would have thought hundreds of par-
affin-lamps had been fiaring and smoking in that hole
for days. I was glad to get out. The man with me
coughed and said, ‘ Funny smell, sir.” I answered negli-
gently, “It’s good for the health, they say,’ and walked
aft.

“The first thing I did was to put my head down the
square of the midship ventilator. As I lifted the lid a
visible breath, something like a thin fog, a puff of faint
haze, rose from the opening. The ascending air was hot,
and had a heavy, sooty, paraffiny smell. I gave one sniff,
and put down the lid gently. It was no use choking my-
self. The cargo was on fire.

*“* Next day she began to smoke in earnest. You see it
was to be expected, for though the coal was of a safe
kind, that cargo had been so handled, so broken up with
handling, that it looked more like smithy coal than any-
thing else. Then it had been wetted—more than once.
It rained all the time we were taking it back from the
hulk, and now with this long passage it got heated, and
there was another case of spontaneous combustion.

“The captain called us into the cabin. He had a chart
spread on the table, and looked unhappy. He said, ‘ The
coast of West Australia is near, but I mean to proceed
to our destination. It is the hurricane month too; but
we will just keep her head for Bankok, and fight the fire.
No more putting back anywhere, if we all get roasted.

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We will try first to stifle this *ere damned combustion by
want of air.’

“We tried. We battened down everything, and still
she smoked. The smoke kept coming out through im-
perceptible crevices; it forced itself through bulkheads
and covers; it oozed here and there and everywhere in
slender threads, in an invisible film, in an incomprehen-
sible manner. It made its way into the cabin, into the
forecastle; it poisoned the sheltered places on the deck,
it could be sniffed as high as the mainyard. It was
clear that if the smoke came out the air came in. This
was disheartening. This combustion refused to be stifled.

“We resolved to try water, and took the hatches off.
Enormous volumes of smoke, whitish, yellowish, thick,
greasy, misty, choking, ascended as high as the trucks.
All hands cleared out aft. Then the poisonous cloud
blew away, and we went back to work in a smoke that
’ was no thicker now than that of an ordinary factory
chimney. :

“We rigged the force pump, got the hose along, and
by-and-by it burst. Well, it was as old as the ship—a
prehistoric hose, and past repair. Then we pumped with
the feeble head-pump, drew water with buckets, and in
this way managed in time to pour lots of Indian Ocean
into the main hatch. The bright stream flashed in sun-
shine, fell into a layer of white crawling smoke, and van-
ished on the black surface of coal. Steam ascended
mingling with the smoke. We poured salt water as into
a barrel without a bottom. It was our fate to pump in
that ship, to pump out of her, to pump into her; and

[ 22 ]
YOUTH

after keeping water out of her to save ourselves from
being drowned, we frantically poured water into her to
save ourselves from being burnt.

“ And she crawled on, do or die, in the serene weather.
The sky was a miracle of purity, a miracle of azure.
The sea was polished, was blue, was pellucid, was spark-
ling like a precious stone, extending on all sides, all
round to the horizon—as if the whole terrestrial globe
had been one jewel, one colossal sapphire, a single gem
fashioned into a planet. And on the luster of the great
calm waters the Judea glided imperceptibly, enveloped
in languid and unclean vapors, in a lazy cloud that
drifted to leeward, light and slow: a pestiferous cloud
defiling the splendor of sea and sky.

* All this time of course we saw no fire. The cargo
smoldered at the bottom somewhere. Once Mahon, as
we were working side by side, said to me with a queer
smile: ‘ Now, if she only would spring a tidy leak—
like that time when we first left the Channel—it would
put a stopper on this fire. Wouldn’t it?’ I remarked
irrelevantly, ‘Do you remember the rats?’

“ We fought the fire and sailed the ship too as carefully
as though nothing had been the matter. The steward
cooked and attended on us. Of the other twelve men,
eight worked while four rested. Everyone took his
turn, captain included. There was equality, and if not
exactly fraternity, then a deal of good feeling. Some-
times a man, as he dashed a bucketful of water down the
hatchway, would yell out, ‘ Hurrah for Bankok!’ and the
rest laughed. But generally we were taciturn and seri-

J 23 y
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ous—and thirsty. Oh! how thirsty! And we had to be
careful with the water. Strict allowance. The ship
smoked, the sun blazed. . . . Pass the bottle.

“We tried everything. We even made an attempt to
dig down to the fire. No good, of course. No man
could remain more than a minute below. Mahon, who
went first, fainted there, and the man who went to fetch
him out did likewise. We lugged them out on deck.
Then I leaped down to show how easily it could be done.
They had learned wisdom by that time, and contented
themselves by fishing for me with a chain-hook tied to a
broom-handle, I believe. I did not offer to go and fetch
up my shovel, which was left down below.

“Things began to look bad. We put the long-boat
into the water. The second boat was ready to swing out.
We had also another, a fourteen-foot thing, on davits
aft, where it was quite safe.

*“* Then behold, the smoke suddenly decreased.. We re-
doubled our efforts to flood the bottom of the ship. In
two days there was no smoke at all. Everybody was on
the broad grin. This was on a Friday. On Saturday no
work, but sailing the ship of course was done. The men
washed their clothes and their faces for the first time in
a fortnight, and had a special dinner given them. They
spoke of spontaneous combustion with contempt, and
implied they were the boys to put out combustions. Some-
how we all felt as though we each had inherited a large
fortune. But a beastly smell of burning hung about the
ship. Captain Beard had hollow eyes and sunken cheeks.
. I had never noticed so much before how twisted and

[ 24]
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bowed he was. He and Mahon prowled soberly about
hatches and ventilators, sniffing. It struck me suddenly
poor Mahon was a very, very old chap. As to me, I was
as pleased and proud as though I had helped to win a
great naval battle. O! Youth!

“The night was fine. In the morning a homeward-
bound ship passed us hull down,—the first we had seen
for months; but we were nearing the land at last, Java
Head being about 190 miles off, and nearly due
north. \

“Next day it was my watch on deck from eight to
twelve. At breakfast the captain observed, ‘ It’s wonder-
ful how that smell hangs about the cabin.’ About ten,
the mate being on the poop, I stepped down on the main-
deck for a moment. The carpenter’s bench stood abaft
the mainmast: I leaned against it sucking at my pipe,
and the carpenter, a young chap, came to talk tome. He
remarked, ‘ I think we have done very well, haven’t we?’
and then I perceived with annoyance the fool was try-
ing to tilt the bench. I said curtly, ‘ Don’t, Chips,’ and
immediately became aware of a queer sensation, of ar
absurd delusion,—I seemed somehow to be in the air. I
heard all round me like a pent-up breath released—as.
if a thousand giants simultaneously had said Phoo _
and felt a dull concussion which made my ribs ache sud-
denly. No doubt about it—I was in the air, and my
body was describing a short parabola. But short as it
was, I had the time to think several thoughts in, as far
as I can remember, the following order: ‘ This can’t be
the carpenter—What is it?—Some accident—Submarine

[ 25 ]
YOUTH

volcano?—Coals, gas!—By Jove! we are being blown
up—Everybody’s dead—I am falling into the after-
hatch—I see fire in it.’

“The coal-dust suspended in the air of the hold had
glowed dull-red at the moment of the explosion. In
the twinkling of an eye, in an infinitesimal fraction of a
second since the first tilt of the bench, I was sprawling
full length on the cargo. I picked myself up and scram-
bled out. It was quick like a rebound. The deck was a
wilderness of smashed timber, lying crosswise like trees in
a wood after a hurricane; an immense curtain of soiled
rags waved gently before me—it was the mainsail blows
to strips. I thought, The masts will be toppling over
directly ; and to get out of the way bolted on all-fours
towards the poop-ladder. The first person I saw was
Mahon, with eyes like saucers, his mouth open, and the
long white hair standing straight on end round his head
like a silver halo. He was just about to go down when
the sight of the main-deck stirring, heaving up, and

_changing into splinters before his eyes, petrified him on
the top step. I stared at him in unbelief, and he stared
at me with a queer kind of shocked curiosity. I did not
know that I had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes, that
my young mustache was burnt off, that my face was
black, one cheek laid open, my nose cut, and my chim
bleeding. I had lost my cap, one of my slippers, and
my shirt was torn to rags. Of all this I was not aware.

I was amazed to see the ship still afloat, the poop-deck

whole—and, most of all, to see anybody alive. Also
the peace of the sky and the serenity of the sea were

[ 26 ]
YOUTH

distinctly surprising. I suppose I expected to see them
convulsed with horror. . . . Pass the bottle.

“There was a voice hailing the ship from somewhere
—in the air, in the sky—I couldn’t tell. Presently I
saw the captain—and he was mad. He asked me eagerly,
“ Where’s the cabin-table? ? and to hear such a question
was a frightful shock. I had just been blown up, you
understand, and vibrated with that experience,—I wasn’t
quite sure whether I was alive. Mahon began to stamp
with both feet and yelled at him, ‘ Good God! don’t you
see the deck’s blown out of her?’ I found my voice, and
stammered out as if conscious of some gross neglect of
duty, ‘I don’t know where the cabin-table is.’ It was
like an absurd dream.

“Do you know what. he wanted next? Well, he
wanted to trim the yards. Very placidly, and as if lost
in thought, he insisted on having the foreyard squared.
‘I don’t know if there’s anybody alive,’ said Mahon,
almost tearfully. ‘Surely,’ he said, gently, ‘ there will
be enough left to square the foreyard.’

“The old chap, it seems, was in his own berth, wind-
ing up the chronometers, when the shock sent him spin-
ning. Immediately it occurred to him—as he said after-
wards—that the ship had struck something, and he ran
out into the cabin. There, he saw, the cabin-table had
vanished somewhere. The deck being blown up, it had
fallen down into the lazarette of course. Where we had
our breakfast that morning he saw only a great hole in
the floor. This appeared to him so awfully mysterious,
and impressed him so immensely, that what he saw and

. [ 27 ]
YOUTH

heard after he got on deck were mere trifles in com-
parison. And, mark, he noticed directly the wheel de-
serted and his bark off her course—and his only
thought was to get that miserable, stripped, undecked,
smoldering shell of a ship back again with her head
pointing at her port of destination. Bankok! That’s
what he was after. I tell you this quiet, bowed, bandy-
legged, almest deformed little man was immense in the
singleness of his idea and in his placid ignorance of
our agitation. He motioned us forward with a com-
manding gesture, and went to take the wheel him-
self.

“Yes; that was the first thing we did—trim the yards
of that wreck! No one was killed, or even disabled, but
everyone was more or less hurt. You should have seen.
them! Some were in rags, with black faces, like coal-
cheavers, like sweeps, and had bullet heads that seemed
closely cropped, but were in fact singed to the skin.
Others, of the watch below, awakened by being shot out
from their collapsing bunks, shivered incessantly, and:
kept on groaning even as we went about our work. But
they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had
in them the right stuff. It’s my experience they always
have. It is the sea that gives it—the vastness, the lone-
liness. surrounding their dark stolid souls. Ah! Well!
we stumbled, we crept, we fell, we barked our shins on
the wreckage, we hauled. The masts stood, but we did
not know how much they might be charred down below.
It was nearly calm, but a long swell ran from the west
and made her roll. They might go at any moment. We

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looked at them with apprehension. One could not fore-
see which way they would fall.

“Then we retreated aft and looked about us. .The
deck was a tangle of planks on edge, of planks on end,
of splinters, of ruined woodwork. The masts rose from
that chaos like big trees above a matted undergrowth.
The interstices of that mass of wreckage were full of
something whitish, sluggish, stirring—of something that
was like a greasy fog. The smoke of the invisible fire
was coming up again, was trailing, like a poisonous thick
mist in some valley choked with dead wood. Already
lazy wisps were beginning to curl upwards amongst the
mass of splinters. Here and there a piece of .timber,
stuck upright, resembled a post. Half of a fife-rail had
been shot through the foresail, and the sky made a
patch of glorious blue in the ignobly soiled canvas. A
portion of several boards holding together had fallen
across the rail, and one end protruded overboard, like a
gangway leading upon nothing, like a gangway leading
over the deep sea, leading to death—as if inviting us to
walk the plank at once and be done with our ridiculous
troubles. And still the air, the sky—a ghost, something
invisible was hailing the ship.

“ Someone had the sense to look over, and there was
the helmsman, who had impulsively jumped overboard,
anxious to come back. He yelled and swam lustily like
a merman, keeping up with the\ship. We threw him a
rope, and presently he stood amongst us streaming with
water and very crest-fallen. The captain had surren-
dered the wheel, and apart, elbow on rail and chin in

[ 29 ]
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hand, gazed at the sea wistfully. We asked ourselves,
What next? I thought, Now, this is something like.
This is great. I wonder what will happen. O youth!

“‘ Suddenly Mahon sighted a steamer far astern. Cap-
tain Beard said, ‘We may do something with her yet.’
We hoisted two flags, which said in the international
language of the sea, ‘On fire. Want immediate assis-
tance.” The steamer grew bigger rapidly, and by-and-
by spoke with two flags on her foremast, ‘I am coming
to your assistance.’

“In half an hour she was abreast, to windward, within
hail, and rolling slightly, with her engines stopped. We
lost our composure, and yelled all together with excite-
ment, ‘ We’ve been blown up.” A man in a white helmet,
on the bridge, cried, ‘ Yes! All right! all right!’ and
he nodded his head, and smiled, and made soothing mo-
tions with his hand as though at a lot of frightened chil-
dren. One of the boats dropped in the water, and
walked towards us upon the sea with her long oars. Four
Calashes pulled a swinging stroke. This was my first
sight of Malay seamen. T’ve known them since, but
what struck me then was their unconcern: they came
alongside, and even the bowman standing up and holding
to our main-chains with the boat-hook did not deign to
lift his head for a glance. I thought people who had
been blown up deserved more attention.

“ A little man, dry like a chip and agile like a monkey,
clambered up. It was the mate of the steamer. He
gave one look, and cried, *O boys—you had better quit.’

“We were silent. He talked apart with the captain

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for a time,—seemed to argue with him. Then they went
away together to the steamer.

‘When our skipper came back we learned that the
steamer was the Sommerville, Captain Nash, from West
Australia to Singapore vid Batavia with mails, and that
the agreement was she should tow us to Anjer or Ba-"
tavia, if possible, where we could extinguish the fire by
scuttling, and then proceed on our voyage—to Bankok!

.The old man seemed excited. “We will do it yet,’ he
said to Mahon, fiercely. He shook his fist at the sky.
Nobody else said a word.

“ At noon the steamer began to tow. She went ahead
slim and high, and what was left of the Judea followed
at the end of seventy fathom of tow-rope,—followed
her swiftly like a cloud of smoke with mastheads pro-
truding above. We went aloft to furl the sails. We
coughed on the yards, and were careful about the bunts.

. Do you see the lot of us there, putting a neat furl on the
sails of that ship doomed to arrive nowhere? There
was not a man who didn’t think that at any moment the
masts would topple over. From aloft we could not see
the ship for smoke, and they worked carefully, passing
the gaskets with evea turns. ‘Harbor furl—aloft
there!’ cried Mahon from below.

“You understand this? I don’t think one of those
chaps expected to get down in the usual way. When
we did I heard them saying to each other, ‘ Well, I
thought we would come down overboard, in a lump-—
sticks and all—blame me if I didn’t.’ ‘'That’s what I
was thinking to myself,’ would answer wearily another

F 31 ]

!
: YOUTH

battered and bandaged scarecrow. And, mind, these were
men without the drilled-in habit of obedience. To/an
onlooker they would be a lot of profane scally as
without a redeeming point. What made them dc
what made them obey me when I, thinking eae
how fine it was, made them drop the bunt of the foresail
twice to try and do it better? What? They had no pro-
fessional reputation—no examples, no praise. It wasn’t
@ sense of duty; they all knew well enough how to shirk,
gind laze, and dodge—when they had a mind to it—and
mostly they had. Was it the two pounds ten a month
that sent them there? They didn’t think their pay half
good enough. No; it was something in them, something
inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don’t say posi-
tively that the crew of a French or German merchant-
man wouldn’t have done it, but I doubt whether it would
have been done in the same way. There was a complete-
ness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful
like an instinct—a disclosure of something secret—of
that hidden something, that gift, of good or evil that
makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations.
“Tt was that night at ten that, for the first time since
we had been fighting it, we saw the fire. The speed of
the towing had ‘fanned the smoldering destruction. A
blue gleam appeared forward, shining below the wreck
of the deck. It wavered in patches, it seemed to stir and
creep like the light of a glowworm. I saw it first, and
told Mahon. ‘Then the game’s up,’ he said. ‘ We had
better stop this towing, or she will burst out suddenly
fore and aft before we can clear out.’ We set up a yell;

{ 82 ]
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rang bells to attract,their attention; they towed on. At.
last Mahon and I had to crawl forward and cut the rope
with an ax. There was no time to cast off the lashings.
Red tongues could be seen licking the wilderness of
splinters under our feet as we made our way back to the
poop.

“Of course they very soon found out in the steamer
that the rope was gone. She gave a loud blast of her
whistle, her lights were seen sweeping in a wide circle, she
came up ranging close alongside, and stopped. We were:
all in a tight group on the poop looking at her. Every
man had saved a little bundle or a bag. Suddenly a con-
ical flame with a twisted top shot up forward and threw
upon the black sea a circle of light, with the two vessels
side by side and heaving gently in its center. Captain.
Beard had been sitting on the gratings still and mute for:
hours, but now he rose slowly and advanced in front of
us, to the mizzen-shrouds. Captain Nash hailed: ‘ Come
along! Look sharp. I have mail-bags on board. I will
take you and your boats to Singapore.’

““* Thank you! No!’ said our skipper. ‘We must see
the last of the ship.’

“*T can’t stand by any longer,’ shouted the other:
: Mails—you know.’

“* Ay! ay! We are all right.’

“Very well! Dll report you in Singapore... .
Good-by !’

“He waved his hand. Our men dropped their bundles.
quietly. The steamer moved ahead, and passing out of'
the circle of light, vanished at once from our sight, daz--

{ 83 ]
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zled by the fire which burned fiercely. And then I knew
that I would see the East first as commander of a small
boat. I thought it fine; and the fidelity to the old ship
was fine. We should see the last of her. Oh the glamcur
of youth! Oh the fire of it, more dazzling than the
flames of the burning ship, throwing a magic light on the
wide earth, leaping audaciously to the sky, presently to
be quenched by time, more cruel, more pitiless, mose
bitter than the sea—and like the flames of the burning
ship surrounded by an impenetrable night.

“The old man warned us in his gentle and inflexible
way that it was part of our duty to save for the under-
writers as much as we could of the ship’s gear. Accord-
ing we went to work aft, while she blazed forward to give
us plenty of light. We lugged out a lot of rubbish.
What didn’t we save? An old barometer fixed with am
absurd quantity of screws nearly cost me my life: a
sudden rush of smoke came upon me, and I just get
away in time. There were various stores, bolts of eanvas,
coils of rope; the poop looked like a marine bazaar, and
the boats were lumbered to the gunwales. One would
have thought the old man wanted to take as much as he
could of his first command with him. He was very, very
quiet, but off his balance evidently. Would you believe
it? He wanted to take a length of old stream-cable and
a kedge-anchor with him in the long-boat. We said,
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ deferentially, and on the quiet let the
thing slip overboard. The heavy medicine-chest went,

[ 34 ]

1
YOUTH

that way, two bags of green coffee, tins of paint—fancy,
paint!—a whole lot of things. Then I was ordered with
two hands into the boats to make a stowage and get. them
ready against the time it would be proper for us to leave
the ship. — :

“We put everything straight, stepped the long-boat’s
mast for out skipper, who was to take charge of her, and
I was not sorry to sit down for a moment. My face felt
raw, every limb ached as if broken, I was aware of all
my ribs, and would have sworn to a twist in the back-
bone. The beats, fast astern, lay in a deep shadow, and
all around I could see the circle of the sea lighted by the
fire. A gigantic flame arose forward straight and clear.
It flared fierce, with noises like the whir of wings, with
rumbles as of thunder. There were cracks, detonations,
and from the cone of flame the sparks flew upwards, as
man is born to trouble, to leaky ships, and to ships that
burn.

‘* What bothered me was that the ship, lying broadside
to the swell and to such wind as there was—a mere breath
—the boats would not keep astern where they were safe,
but persisted, in a pig-headed way boats have, in getting
under the counter and then swinging alongside. They
were knocking about dangerously and coming near the
flame, while the ship rolled on them, and, of course, there
was always the danger of the masts going over the side
at any moment. I and my twe boat-keepers kept them
off as best we could with oars and boat-hooks; but to be
constantly at it became exasperating, since there was no
reason why we should not leave at once. We could not

[ 35 J
YOUTH

see those on board, nor could we imagine what caused the
delay. The boat-keepers were swearing feebly, and I
had not only my share-of the work, but also had to keep
at it two men who showed a constant inclination to lay
themselves down and let things slide.

“ At last I hailed ‘ On deck there,’ and someone looked
over. ‘ We're ready here,’ I said. ‘The head disap-
peared, and very soon popped up again. ‘ The captain
says, All right, sir, and to keep the boats well clear of the
ship.’

“ Half an hour passed. Suddenly there was a frightful
racket, rattle, clanking of chain, hiss of water, and mil-
lions of sparks flew up into the shivering column of smoke
that stood leaning slightly above the ship. The cat-
heads had burned away, and the two red-hot anchors had
gone to the bottom, tearing out after them two hundred
fathom of red-hot chain. The ship trembled, the mass of
flame swayed as if ready to collapse, and the fore top-
gallant-mast fell. It darted down like an arrow of fire,
shot under, and instantly leaping up within an oar’s-
length of the boats, floated quietly, very black on the
luminous sea. I hailed the deck again. After some time
a man in an unexpectedly cheerful but also mufiled tone,
as though he had been trying to speak with his mouth
shut, informed me, ‘ Coming directly, sir,’ and vanished.
For a long time I heard nothing but the whir and roar
of the fire. There were also whistling sounds. The boats
jumped, tugged at the painters, ran at each other play-
fully, knocked their sides together, or, do what we would,
swuug in a bunch against the ship’s side. I couldn’t

[ 86 ]
YOUTH

stand it any longer, and swarming up a rope, clambered
aboard over the stern.

“It was as bright as day. Coming up like this, the
sheet of fire facing me, was a terrifying sight, and the
heat seemed hardly bearable at first. On a settee cushion
dragged out of the cabin, Captain Beard, with his legs
drawn up and one arm under his head, slept with the light
playing on him. Do you, know what the rest were busy
about? They were sitting on deck right aft, round an
open case, eating bread and cheese and drinking bottled
stout.

* On the background of flames twisting in fierce tongues
above their heads they seemed at home like salamanders,
and looked like a band of desperate pirates. The fire
sparkled in the whites of their eyes, gleamed on patches
of white skin seen through the torn shirts. Each had
the marks as of a battle about him—bandaged heads,
tied-up arms, a strip of dirty rag round a knee—and
each man had a bottle between his legs and a chunk of
cheese in his hand. Mahon got up. With his handsome
and disreputable head, his hooked profile, his long white
beard, and with an uncorked bottle in his hand, he re-
sembled one of those reckless sea-robbers of old making
merry amidst violence and disaster. ‘The last meal on
board,’ he explained solemnly. ‘ We had nothing to eat
all day, and it was no use leaving all this.’ He flourished
the bottle and indicated the sleeping skipper. ‘ He said
he couldn’t swallow anything, so I got him to lie down,’
he went on; and as I stared, ‘I don’t know whether you
are aware, young fellow, the man had no sleep to speak

[ 87 ]
YOUTH

of for days—and there will be dam’ little sleep in the
boats.’ ‘ There will be no boats by-and-by if you fool
about much longer,’ I said, indignantly. I walked up to
the skipper and shook him by the shoulder. At last he
opened his eyes, but did not move. ‘Time to leave her,
sir,’ I said, quietly.

“He got up painfully, looked at the flames, at the sea
sparkling round the ship, and black, black as ink farther
away; he looked at the stars shining dim through a thin
veil of smoke in a sky black, black as Erebus.

“ * Youngest first,’ he said.

“ And the ordinary seaman, wiping his mouth with the
back of his hand, got up, clambered over the taffrail, and
vanished. Others followed. One, on the point of going
over, stopped short to drain his bottle, and with a great
swing of his arm flung it at the fire. ‘Take this!’ he
cried.

“The skipper lingered disconsolately, and we left him
to commune alone for awhile with his first command.
Then I went up again and brought him away at last. It
was time. The ironwork on the poop was hot to the
touch.

“Then the painter of the long-boat was cut, and the
three boats, tied together, drifted clear of the ship. It
was just sixteen hours after the explosion when we aban-
doned her. Mahon had charge of the second boat, and I
had the smallest—the 14-foot thing. The long-boat
would have taken the lot of us; but the skipper said we
must save as much property as we could—for the under-
writers—and so I got my first command. I had two men

{ 88 ]
YOUTH

with me, a bag of biscuits, a few tins of meat, and a
breaker of water. I was ordered to keep close to the
loag-boat, that in case of bad weather we might be taken
iato her.

“And do you know what I thought? I thought I
weuld part company as soon as I could. I wanted to
have my first command all to myself. I wasn’t going to
sail in a squadron if there were a chance for independ-
ent cruising. I would make land by myself. I would
beat the other boats. Youth! All youth! The silly,
charming, beautiful youth.

“ But we did not make a start at once. We must see
the last of the ship. And so the boats drifted about that
night, heaving and setting on the swell. The men dozed,
waked, sighed, groaned. I looked at the burning ship.

“ Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was
burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the
blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glitter-
ing and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and
leaely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its sum-
mit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She
burned furiously, mournful and imposing like a funeral
pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched
over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a
grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the
ead of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary
ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the
sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before
daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and tur-
moil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the mght

{ 39 1
YOUTH

patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon
the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, float-
ing still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing
mass of coal within.

“ Then the oars were got out, and the boats forming in
a line moved round her remains as if in procession—the
long-boat leading. As we pulled across her stern a slim
dart of fire shot out viciously at us, and suddenly she
went down, head first, in a great hiss of steam. The
unconsumed stern was the last to sink; but the paint had
gone, had cracked, had peeled off, and there were no
letters, there was no word, no stubborn device that was
like her soul, to flash at the rising sun her creed and her
name.

““'We made our way north. A breeze sprang up, and
about noon all the boats came together for the last time.
I had no mast or sail in mine, but I made a mast out of a
spare oar and hoisted a boat-awning for a sajl, with a
boat-hook for a yard. She was certainly over-masted,
but I had the satisfaction of knowing that with the wind
aft I could beat the other two. I had to wait for them.
Then we all had a look at the captain’s chart, and, after
a sociable meal of hard bread and water, got our last
instructions. These were simple: steer north, and keep
together as much as possible. ‘Be careful with that
jury rig, Marlow,’ said the captain; and Mahon, as I
sailed proudly past his boat, wrinkled his curved nose
and hailed, ‘ You will sail that ship of yours under
water, if you don’t look out, young fellow.’ He was a
malicious old man—and may the deep sea where he sleeps

[ 40 ]
YOUTH

now rock him gently, rock him ‘tenderly to the erd of
time!

“ Before sunset a thick rain-squall passed over the two
boats, which were far astern, and that was the last I
saw of them for a time. Next day I sat steering my
cockle-shell—my first command—with nothing but water
and sky around me. I did sight in the afternoon the
upper sails of a ship far away, but said nothing, and my
men did not notice her. You see I was afraid she might
be homeward bound, and I had no mind to'turn back
from the portals of the East. I was steering for Java—
another blessed name—like Bankok, you know. I steered
many days.

“T need not tell you what it is to be knocking about in
wn open boat. I remember nights and days of calm when
‘we pulled, we pulled, and the boat seemed to stand still,
as if bewitched within the circle of the sea horizon. I
remember the heat, the deluge of rain-squalls that kept
us baling for dear life (but filled our water-cask), and I
remember sixteen hours on end with a mouth dry as a
cinder and a steering-oar over the stern to keep my first
command head on to a breaking sea. I did not know how
good a man I was till then. I remember the drawn faces,
the dejected figures of my two men, and I remember my
youth and the feeling that will never come back any
more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the
sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that
lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to
death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat
of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that

[ 41 ]
YOUTH

with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and ex-
pires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.

“ And this is how I see the East. I have seen its secret '
places and have looked into its very soul; but now I see
it always from a small boat, a high outline of mountains,
blue and afar in the morning; like faint mist at noon; a
jagged wall of purple at sunset. I have the feel of the
oar in my hand, the vision of a scorching blue sea in my
eyes. And I see a bay, a wide bay, smooth as glass and
polished like ice, shimmering in the dark. A red light
burns far off upon the gloom of the land, and the night:
is soft and warm. We drag at the oars with aching arms,
and suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and
laden with strange odors of blossoms, of aromatic wood, |
cames out of the still night—the first sigh of the East on
my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable
aad enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of
mysterious delight.

‘“* We had been pulling this finishing spell for eleven
hours. Two pulled, and he whose turn it was to rest sat
at the tiller. We had made out the red light in that bay
aad steered for it, guessing it must mark some small
coasting port. We passed two vessels, outlandish and
high-sterned, sleeping at anchor, and, approaching the
light, now very dim, ran the boat’s nose against the end
of a jutting wharf. We were blind with fatigue. My
men dropped the oars and fell off the thwarts as if dead.
I made fast to a pile. A current rippled softly. The
seented obscurity of the shore was grouped intd vast
masses, a density of colossal clumps of vegetation, prob-

[ 42 ]
YOUTH

ably——mute and fantastic shapes. And at their foot the
semicircle of a beach gleamed faintly, like an illusion.
There was not a light, not a stir, not a sound. The mys-
terious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like
death, dark like a grave.

“ And I sat weary beyond expression, exulting like a
conqueror, sleepless and entranced as if before a pro-
found, a fateful enigma.

“A splashing of oars, a measured dip reverberating
on the level of water, intensified by the silence of the
shore into loud claps, made me jump up. A boat, a
European boat, was coming in. I invoked the name
of the dead; I hailed: Judea ahoy! A thin shout an-
swered.

“It was the captain. I had beaten the flagship by three
hours, and I was glad to hear the old man’s voice again,
tremulous and tired. ‘Is it you, Marlow?’ ‘Mind the
end of that jetty, sir,’ I cried.

“He approached cautiously, and brought up with the
deép-sea lead-line which we had saved—for the under-
writers. I eased my painter and fell alongside. He
sat, a broken figure at the stern, wet with dew, his hands
clasped in his lap. His men were asleep already. ‘I
had a terrible time of it,’ he murmured. ‘ Mahon is be-
hind—not very far.’ We conversed in whispers, in low
whispers, as if afraid to wake up the land. Guns, thun-
der, earthquakes would not have awakened the men just
then.

“ Looking around as we talked, I saw away at sea a
bright light traveling in the night. ‘ There’s a steamer

7° [48]
YOUTH

passing the bay,’ I said. She was not passing, she was
entering, and, she even came close and anchored. ‘I
wish,’ said the old man, ‘ you would find out whether she
is English. Perhaps they could give us a passage some-
where.” He seemed nervously anxious. So by dint of
punching and kicking I started one of my men into a
state of somnambulism, and giving him an oar, took
another and pulled towards the lights of the steamer.

“ There was a murmur of voices in her, metallic hollow
clangs of the engine-room, footsteps on the deck. Her
ports shone, round like dilated eyes. Shapes moved
about, and there was a shadowy man high up on the
bridge. He heard my oars.-

*“* And then, before I could open my lips, the East ane
to me, but it was in a Western voice. A torrent of words
,was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence;
outlandish, angry words, mixed with words and even
whole sentences of good English, less strange but even
more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently ;
it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of
abuse. It began by calling me Pig, and from that went
crescendo into unmentionable adjectives—in English.
The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and
with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I
had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the
universe. I could hardly see him, but began to think he
would work himself into a fit.

** Suddenly he ceased, and I could hear him snorting and
blowing like a porpoise. I said—

“* What steamer is this, pray? ?

[ 44 ]
YOUTH

“¢ Eh? What's this? And who are you?’

“* Castaway crew of an English bark burnt at sea.
We came here to-night. I am the second mate. The
captain is in the long-boat, and wishes to know if you
would give us a passage somewhere.’

“Qh, my goodness! I say. . . . This is the Celestial
from Singapore on her return trip. Til arrange with
your captain in the morning, ...and,...I say,.
. . . did you hear me just now?’

“ ¢T should think the whole bay heard you.’

‘“*T thought you were a shore-boat. Now, look here—
this infernal lazy scoundrel of a caretaker has gone to
sleep again—curse him. The light is out, and I nearly
ran foul of the end of this damned jetty. This is the
third time he plays me this trick. Now, I ask you, can
anybody stand this kind of thing? It’s enough to drive
aman out of his mind. I'll report him. . . . I'll get the
Assistant Resident to give him the sack, by . . . See—
there’s no light. It’s out, isn’t it? I take you to witness
the light’s out. There should be a light, you know. A
red light on the——

“¢ There was a light,’ I said, mildly.

“¢ But it’s out, man! What’s the use of talking like
this? You can see for yourself it’s out—don’t you? If
you had to take a valuable steamer along this God-for-
saken coast you would want a light too. I'll kick him
from end to end of his miserable wharf. You'll see if I
don’t. I wil

“© So I may tell my captain you'll take us? ’ I broke in.

“6 Yes, [’ll take you. Good night,’ he said, brusquely.

[ 45 ]

 
YOUTH

“¥ pulled back, made fast again to the jetty, and then.
went to sleep at last. I had faced the silence of the
East. I had heard some of its languages. But when I
opened my eyes again the silence was as complete. as
though it had never been broken. I was lying in a
flood of light, and the sky had never looked so far, so
high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving.

“‘ And then I saw the men of the East—they were
looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was
full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces,
the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern
crowd. And all these beings stared without a mur-
mur, without a sigh, without a movement. They
stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at
night had come to them from the sea. Nething moved.
The frands of palms stood still against the sky. Not a
branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of
hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through
the big leaves that hung shining and still hke leaves
forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the ancient
navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and.
somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and prom-
ise. And these were the men. I sat up suddenly. A
wave of movement passed through the crowd from end
to end, passed along the heads, swayed the bodies, ran
along the jetty like a ripple on the water, like a breath
of wind on a field—and all was still again. I see it now
, ——the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the
wealth of green infinite and varied, the sea blue like the
sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of

[ 46 ]
YOUTH

vivid color—the water reflecting it all, the curve of the
shore, the jetty, the high-sterned outlandish craft float-
ing still, and the three boats with tired men from the
West sleeping unconscious of the land and the people
and of the violence of sunshine. They slept thrown
across the thwarts, curled on bottom-boards, in the care-
less attitudes of death. The head of the old skipper,
leaning back in the stern of the long-boat, had fallen on
his breast, and he looked as though he would never wake.
Farther out old Mahon’s face was upturned to the sky,
with the long white beard spread out on his breast, as
though he been shot where he sat at the tiller; and a
man, all in a heap in the bows of the boat, slept with both
arms embracing the stem-head and with his cheek laid on
the gunwale. The East looked at them without a sound.

“T have known its fascinations since: I have seen the
mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown na-
tions, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues,
overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud
of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength.
But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my
youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young
eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea—
and I was young—and I saw it looking at me. And this
is all that is left of it! Only a moment; a moment of
strength, of romance, of glamour—of youth!... A
flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to re-
member, the time for a sigh, and—good-by !—Night—
Good-by . . . 1”

He drank.

( 47]
YOUTH ;

“ Ah! The good old time—the good old time. Youth
and the sea. Glamour and the sea! The good, strong
sea, the salt, bitter sea, that could whisper to you and
roar at you and knock your breath out of you.”

He drank again.

“ By all that’s wonderful, it is the sea, I believe, the sea
itself—or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you
here—you all had something out of life: money, love—
whatever one gets on shore—and, tell me, wasn’t that the
best time, that time when we were young at sea; young
and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except
hard knocks—and sometimes a chance to feel your
strength—that only—what you all regret? ”

And we ail nodded at him: the man of finance, the man
of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over
the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water
reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked
by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary
eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously fer
something out of life, that while it is expected is already
gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a: fash—together
with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of
illusions.

[ 48!
 

FPEART Of DARKNESS
HEART OF DARKNESS
I ‘

Tue Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor with-
out a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. ‘The flood
had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound
down the river, the only thing for it was to come to
and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like
the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the
offing the sea and the sky were welded together without
a joint, and ir the luminous space the tanned sails of
the barges drifting up with the tiae seemea to stand
still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with
gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low
shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The
air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still
seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding mo-
tionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The Director of Companies was our captain and our
host. We four affectionately watched, his back as ‘he
stood in the bows. looking to seaward. On the whole
river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He
resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness
personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not
out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within
the brooding gloom.

[ 51 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

' Between us there was, as I have already said some-
where, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts
together through long periods of separation, it had the
effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns—and
even convictions. The Lawyer—the best of old fellows
—had, because of his many years and many virtues, the
only cushion on deck, and. was lying on the only rug.
The Accountant had brought out already a box of
dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones.
Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the
mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complex-
ion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his
arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled
an idol. The Director, satisfied the anchor had good
hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We
exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was
silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other
we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt medi-
tative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day
was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance.
The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck,
was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very
mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant
fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping
the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to
the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more
somber every minute, as if angered by the approach
of the sun.

And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the
sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a

[ 52 ]

 
XN
HEART OF DARKNESS

dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to
go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that
gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the
serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The
old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline
of day, after ages of good service done to the race that
peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of
a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush
of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in
the august light of abiding memories. And indeed
nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes,
** followed the sea ” with reverence and affection, than
to evoke the great ‘spirit of the past upon the lower
reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and
fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of
men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the
battles of the sea. It had known and served all the
men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis
Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and un-
titled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had
borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing
in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning
with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by
the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic
tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests
—and that never returned. It had known the ships and
the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Green-
wich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers;

[ 58 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

kings’ ships and the ships of men on ’Change; captains,
admirals, the dark “ interlopers ” of the Eastern trade,
and the commissioned “ generals” of East India fleets.
Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone
out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the
torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers
of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had
not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of
an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed
of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights
began to appear along the shore. The Chapman light-
house, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone
strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a
great stir of lights going up and going down. And
farther west on the upper reaches the place of the mon-
strous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a
brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the
stars.

“ And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been
one of the dark places of the earth.”

He was the only man of us who still “ followed the
sea.”” The worst that could be said of him was that
he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he
was a wanderer too, while most seamen lead, if one may
so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the
stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them
-—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship
is very much like another, and the sea is always the same.
In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign

[ 54 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life,
glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a
slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mys-
terious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is
the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or
a casual spree om shore suffices to unfold for him the
secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the
secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a
direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within
the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to
him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a
kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of
one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible
by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was
just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one
took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said,
very slow —

“TI was thinking of very old times, when the Romans
first came here, nineteen hundred years age—the’ other
day. . . . Light came out of this river since—you
say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a
plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live
in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps
rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine
the feelings of a commander of a fine—what d’ye call
*em?—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly

[ 55 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry;
put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries,—a
wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too—
used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month
or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him
here—the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead,
a sky the color of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid
as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or
orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests,
savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man,
nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine
here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp
lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—
cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death,—death
skulking in the air, in the ‘water, in the bush. They
must have been dying like flies here. Oh yes—he did it.
Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking
much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what
he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were
men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was
cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to
the fleet at Ravenna by-and-by, if he had good friends
in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of
a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too much
dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some
prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his
fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods,
and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter
savagery, had closed round him,—all that mysterious
life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the

[ 56 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation
either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst
of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And
it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him.
The fascination of the abomination—you know.
Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the
powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

He paused.

“ Mind,” he began again, lifting one arm from the
elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his
legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha
preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-
flower— Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this..
What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency.
But these chaps were not much account, really. They
were no colonists; their administration was merely a.
squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were con-
querors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing’
to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is
just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what.
was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggra~
vated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind
—as is-very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The
conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking
it away from those who have a different complexion or
slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing
when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the
idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental
pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea.

[ 57 |
HEART OF DARKNESS

something you can set up, and bow down before, and
offer a sacrifice to. . . .”

He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green
flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking,
joining, crossing each other—then.separating slowly or
hastily. The traffic of the great city went on in the
deepening night upon the sleepless river. We looked.
on, waiting patiently—there was nothing else to do till
the end of the flood; but it was only after a long silence,
when he said, in a hesitating voice, ‘“‘ I suppose you fel-
lows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a
bit,” that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began
to run, to hear about one of Marlow’s inconclusive ex-
periences.

“T don’t want to bother you much with what hap-
pened to me personally,” he began, showing in this re-
mark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem
so often unaware of what their audience would best like
to hear; “ yet to understand the effect of it on me you
ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I
went up that river to the place where I first met the
poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and
the culminating point of my experience. It seemed some-
‘how to throw a kind of light on everything about me—
and into my thoughts. It was somber enough too—and
pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear
either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw
a kind of light.

“‘T had then, as you remember, just returned to Lon-
eon after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas—

[ 58 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

a regular dose of the East—six years or so, and I was
loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and
invading your homes, just as though I had got a
heavenly mission to civilize you. It was very fine for
a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Then
I began to look for a ship—I should think the hardest
work on earth. But the ships wouldn’t even look at me.
And I got tired of that game too.

“ Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for
maps. -I would look for hours at South America, or
Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories
of exploration. At that time there were many blank
spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked
particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that).
I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up
I will go there. The North Pole was one of these places,
I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall
not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were.
scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of lati-
tude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some
of them, and . . . well, we won’t talk about that. But
there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to
speak—that I had a hankering after.

“True, by this time it was not a blank space any _
more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers
and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space
of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream
gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But
there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river,
that you could see on the map, resembling an immense

[ 59 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at
rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost
in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map
of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would
a bird—a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was
a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash
it all! I thought to myself, they can’t trade without
using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water—
steamboats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of
one. I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake
off the idea. The snake had charmed me.

“You understand it was a Continental concern, that
‘Trading society; but I have a lot of relations living
on the Continent, because it’s cheap and not so nasty
as it looks, they say.

“Tam sorry to own I began to worry them. This was
already a fresh departure for me. I was not used to
get things that way, you know. I always went my own
road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I
wouldn’t have believed it of myself; but, then—you see
—I felt somehow I must get there by hook or by crook.
So I worried them. ‘The men said ‘ My dear fellow,’ and
did nothing. Then—would you believe it?—TI tried the
women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work—to
get a job. Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove
me.. I had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic soul. She wrote:
‘It will be delightful. I am ready to do anything, any-
thing for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife
of a very high personage in the Administration, and
also a man who has lots of influence with,’ &c., &c. She

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HEART OF DARKNESS

was determined to make no end of fuss to get me ap-
pointed skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my.
fancy.

“I got my appointment—of course; and I got it very
quick. It appears the Company had received news that
one of their captains had been killed in a scuffle with
the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the
more anxious to go. It was only months and months
afterwards, when I made the attempt to recover what
was left of the body, that I heard the original quarrel
arose from a misunderstanding about some hens. Yves,
two black hens. Fresleven—that was the fellow’s name,
a Dane—thought himself wronged somehow in the bar-
gain, so he went ashore and started to hammer the chief
of the village with a stick. Oh, it didn’t surprise me
in the least to hear this, and at the same time to be told:
that Fresleven was the gentlest, quietest creature that
ever walked on two legs. No doubt he was; but he
had been a couple of years already out there engaged
in the noble cause, you know, and he probably felt the
need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way..
Therefore he whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while
a big crowd of his people watched him, thunderstruck,
till some man,—I was told the chief’s son,—in despera-
tion at hearing the old chap yell, made a tentative jab
with a spear at the white man—and of course it went
quite easy between the shoulder-blades. Then the whole
population cleared into the forest, expecting all kinds
of calamities to happen, while, on the other hand, the
steamer Fresleven commanded left also in a bad panic,

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HEART OF DARKNESS

in charge of the engineer, I believe. Afterwards nobody:
seemed to trouble much about Fresleven’s remains, till
I got out and stepped into his shoes. I couldn’t let
it rest, though; but when an opportunity, offered at last
to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his
ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all
there. The supernatural being had not been touched
after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts
gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen en-
closures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The
people had vanished. Mad terror had scattered them,
men, women, and children, through the bush, and they
had never returned. What became of the hens I don’t”
know either. I should think the cause of progress got
them, anyhow. However, through this glorious affair I
got my appointment, before I had fairly begun'to hope
for it,

“TI flew around like mad to get ready, and before forty-
eight hours I was crossing the Channel to show mysclf
to my employers, and sign the contract. In a very few
hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of
a whited sepulcher. Prejudice no doubt. T had no
difficulty in finding the Company’s offices. It was the
biggest thing in the town, and eyerybody I met was
full of it. They were going to run an over-sea empire,
and make no end of coin by trade.

“A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high
houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead
silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing
carriage archways right and left, immense double doors

[ 62 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of
these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase,
as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to.
Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-
bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got
up and walked straight at me—still knitting with down-
cast eyes—and only just as I began to think of getting
out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood
still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an um-
brella-cover, and she turned round without a word and
preceded me into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and
looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all
round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked
with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast
amount of red—good to see at any time, because one
knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a
lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the
East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly
pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. How-
ever, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going
into the yellow. Dead in the center. And the river
was there—fascinating—deadly—like a snake. Ough!
A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but
wearing a compassionate expression, appeared, and a
skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary. Its
light was dim, and a heavy writing-desk squatted in the
middle. From behind that structure came out an im-
pression of pale plumpness in a frock-coat. The great
man himself. He was five feet six, I should judge, and
had his grip on the handle-end of ever so many millions.

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HEART OF DARKNESS

He shook hands, I fancy, murmured vaguely, was satis-
fied with my French. Bon voyage.

“In about forty-five seconds I found myself again in
the waiting-room with the compassionate secretary, who,
full of desolation and sympathy, made me sign some
document. I believe I undertook amongst other things
not to disclose any trade secrets. Well, I am not going
to.
“T began to feel slightly uneasy. You know I am
hot used to such ceremonies, and there was something
ominous in the atmosphere. It was just as though I
had been let into some conspiracy—I don’t know—some-
thing not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In
the outer room the two women knitted black wool fever-
ishly. People were arriving, and the younger one was
walking back and forth introducing them. The old
one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were
propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed on
her lap. She wore a starched white affair on her head,
had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed spectacles
hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above
the glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that
look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery
‘countenances were being piloted over, and she threw at
them the same quick glance of unconcerned’wisdom. She
seemed to know all about them and about me too. An
eerie- feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and
fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two,
guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as
for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continu-

[ 64 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS
ously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery
and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old
knitter of black wool.  Morituri te salutant. Not many
of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half,
by a long way.

“ There was yet a visit to the doctor. ‘A simple for-
mality,’ assured me the secretary, with an air of taking
an immense part in all my sorrows. Accordingly a
young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some
clerk I suppose,—there must have been clerks in the busi-
ness, though the house was as still as a house in a city
of the dead,—came from somewhere up-stairs, and led
me forth. He was shabby and careless, with ink-stains
on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and
billowy, under a chin shaped like the, toe of an old boot.
It was a little too early for the doctor, so I proposed
a drink, and thereupon he developed a vein of joviality.
As we sat over our vermouths he glorified the Company’s
business, and by-and-by I expressed casually my sur-
prise at him not going out there. He became very cool
and collected all at once. ‘I am not such a fool as I
look, quoth Plato to his disciples,’ he said sententiously,
emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose.

“The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of
something else the while. ‘Good, good for there,” he
mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me
whether I would let him measure my head. Rather sur-
prised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers
and got the dimensions back and front and every ways
taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little mam

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HEART OF DARKNESS

in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in
slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. ‘I always
ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the
crania of those going out there,’ he said. ‘And when
they come back too?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I never see them,’
he remarked ; ‘ and, moreover, the changes take place in-
side, you know.’ He smiled, as if at some quiet joke.
‘So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting too.’
He gave me a searching glance, and made another note.
‘Ever any madness in your family?’ he asked, in a
matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. *Is that
question in the interests of science too?’ ‘It would be,’
he said, without taking notice of my irritation, ‘ interest-
ing for science to watch the mental changes of individ-
uals, on the spot, but . . .” ‘ Are you an alienist?’ I
interrupted. ‘Every doctor should be—a little,’ an-
swered that original, imperturbably. ‘I have a little
theory which you Messieurs who go out there must help
me to prove. This is my share in the advantages my
country shall reap from the possession of such a mag-
nificent dependency. The mere wealth I leave to others.
Pardon my questions, but you are the first Englishman
coming under my observation. . . .? I hastened to
assure him I was not in the least typical. ‘If I were,’
said I, ‘ I wouldn’t be talking like this with you.’ ‘ What
you say is rather profdund, and probably erroneous,’ he
said, with a laugh. ‘ Avoid irritation more than expos-
ure to the sun. Adieu. How do you English say, eh?
Good-by. Ah! Good-by. Adieu. In the tropics one
must before everything keep calm.” . . . He lifted a

[ 66 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

warning forefinger. . . . ‘Du calme, du calme
Adieu.’

“One thing more remained to do—say gocd-by to
my excellent aunt. I found her triumphant. I had a
cup of tea—the last decent cup of tea for many days
—and in a roem that most soothingly looked just as you
would expect a lady’s drawing-room to look, we had a
long quiet chat by the fireside. In the course of these
confidences it became quite plain to me I had been repre-
sented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness
knows to how many more people besides, as an excep-
tional and gifted creature—a piece of good fortune for
the Company—a man you don’t get hold of every day.
Good heavens! and I was going to take charge of a
two-penny-halfpenny river-steamboat with a penny
whistle attached! It appeared, however, I was also one
of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something
like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort
of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let. loose
in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent
woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got
carried off her feet. She talked about ‘ weaning those
ignorant millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my
word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to
hint that the Company was run for profit.

“* You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy
of his hire,’ she said, brightly. It’s queer how out of
touch with truth women are. They live in a world of
their own, and there had never been anything like it,
and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and

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HEART OF DARKNESS

iff they were to set it up it would go to pieces before
the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have
been living contentedly with ever since the day of cre-
ation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

“ After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be
sure to write often, and so on—and I left. In the street
—1 don’t know why—a queer feeling came to me that I
was an impostor. Odd thing that I, who used to clear
@at for any part of the world at twenty-four hours’
motice, with less thought than most men give to the cross-
ing of a street, had a moment—I won’t say of hesitation,
but of startled pause, before this commonplace affair.
The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that,
for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of gomg
to the center of a continent, I were about to set off for
the center of the earth.

“TJ left in a French steamer, and she called in every
blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could
see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-
house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast
as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma.
There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting,
grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with
am air of whispering, Come and find out. This one was
almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an
aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal
jangle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed
with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far
away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a
exeeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to

[ 68 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayisk-
whitish specks showed up, clustered inside the white surf,
with a flag flying above them perhaps. Settlements some
centuries old, and still no bigger than pin-heads on the
untouched expanse of their background. We pounded
along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-
house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-for-
saken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost im
it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-
house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned.
in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed
particularly to care. They were just flung out there,
and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same,
as though we had not moved; but we passed various
places—trading places—with names like Gran’ Bassam
Little Popo; names that seemed to belong to some sordid
farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth. The idle-
ness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these mem
with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and Ian-
guid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed .
to keep me away from the truth of things, within the
toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. ‘The voice of
the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure,
like the speech of a brother. It was something natural,
that had its reason, that had a meaning. Now and then
a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact
with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You
could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glisten-
ing. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with
perspiration ; they had faces like grotesque masks—these

[ 69 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an in-
tense energy of movement, that was as natural and true
as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse
for being there. They were a great comfort to look at.
For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of
straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last
long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once,
I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off
the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she
was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one
of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped
limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns
stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell
swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin
masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water,
there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame

‘would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would dis-
appear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—
and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There
was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of
lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissi-
pated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there
was a camp of natives—he called them enemies !—hidden
out of sight somewhere.

“We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that
lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three
a day) and went on. We called at some more places with
farcical names, where the merry dance of death and
trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an

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HEART OF DARKNESS

overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bor-
dered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried
to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of
death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose
waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted man-
groves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of
an impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough
to get a particularized impression, but the general sense
of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was
vike a’ weary pilgrimage amongst hints for night-
mares.

“ It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth
of the big river. We anchored off the seat of the gov-
ernment. But my work would not begin till some two
hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made
a start for a place thirty miles higher up.

“T had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her
captain was a Swede, and knowing me for a seaman,
invited me on the bridge. He was a young man, lean,
fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait.
As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his head
contemptuously at the shore. ‘ Been living there?’ he
asked. I said, ‘ Yes.’ ‘ Fine lot these government chaps
—are they not?’ he went on, speaking English with
great precision and considerable bitterness. ‘It is funny
what some people will do for a few francs a month. I
wonder what becomes of that kind when it goes up coun-
‘try?’ I said to him I expected to see that soon. ‘ So-o-o!”
he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye
ahead vigilantly. ‘Don’t be too sure,’ he continued.

[71]
“at
#5

HEART OF DARKNESS
“The other day I took up a man who hanged himself
on the road. He was a Swede, too.” ‘ Hanged himself!
Why, in God’s name?’ I cried. He kept on looking out
watchfully. ‘Who knows? The sun too much for him,
or the country perhaps.’

At last we opened a reach. A sis cliff appeared,
mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses or a
hill, others, with iron roofs, amongst a waste of excava-
tions, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise
of the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited
devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked,
moved about like ants. A jetty projected into the river.
A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden
recrudescence of glare. ‘ 'There’s your Company’s sta-
tion,’ said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack-
like structures on the rocky slope. ‘I will send your
things up. Four boxes did you say? So. Farewell.’

**I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then
found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for
the bowlders, and also for an undersized railway-truck
lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One
was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of
some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying ma-
chinery, a stack of rusty rails. To the left a clump of
trees made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to
stir feebly. I blinked, the path was steep. A horn tooted
‘to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy
and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke
came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change ap-
peared on the face of the rock. They were building a

[ 72 ]
HEAR'T OF DARKNESS

railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but
this objectless blasting was all the work going on.

“ A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head.
Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path.
They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets
full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with
their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their
loins, and the short ends behind'waggled to and fro like
tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs
were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on
his neck, and all were connected together with a chain
whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking.
Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly
of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent.
It was the same kind of ominous voice; but these men
could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies.
They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like
the bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mys-
tery from the sea. All their meager breasts panted
together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes
stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches,
without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indif-
ference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter
one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at
work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its
middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off,
and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon
to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence,
white men being so much alike at a distance that he could
not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and

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HEART OF DARKNESS

with a large, white, rascally grin, and a glance at his
charge, seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted
trust. After all, I also was a part of the great cause
of these high and just proceedings.

“Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the
left. My idea was to let that chain-gang get out of
sight before I climbed the hill. You know I am not par-
ticularly tender ; I’ve had to strike and to fend off. I’ve
had to resist and to attack sometimes—that’s only one
way of resisting—without counting the exact cost, ac-
cording to the demands of such sort of life as I had blun-
dered into. I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil
of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the
stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that
swayed and drove men—men, I tell you. But as I stood
on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine
of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby,
pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless
folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to
find out several months later and a thousand miles
farther. For a moment I stood appalled, as though by
a warning. Finally I descended the hill, obliquely, to-
wards the trees I had seen.

“T avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been
digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it
impossible to divine. It wasn’t a quarry or a sandpit,
anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been con-
nected with the philanthropic desire of giving the crim-
inals something to do. I don’t know. Then I nearly
fell into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a

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HEART OF DARKNESS

scar in the hillside. I discovered that a lot of imported
drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in
there. ‘There wasn’t one that was not broken. It was
a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the trees. My
purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but
no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped
into a gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were
near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing
noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not
a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious
sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched earth
had suddenly become audible.

“ Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees,
leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half
coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the
attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another
mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder
of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The
work! And this was the place where some of the helpers
had withdrawn to die.

“They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They
were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were
nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of
disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish
gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all
the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial sur-
roundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, be-
came inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and
rest.. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly
as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes

[ 75 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face
near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length
with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eye-
lids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous
and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths
of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed
young—almost a boy—but you know with them it’s hard
to tell. I found nothing else to do but to. offer him one
of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket.
The fingers closed slowly on it and held—there was no
other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit
of white worsted round ‘his neck—-Why? Where did he
get it? Was it a badge—an ornament—a charm—a
propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected
with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this
bit of white thread from beyond the seas.

“ Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles
sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin
propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intoler-
able and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested
its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and
all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted.
collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.
While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose
to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards
the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat
up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him,
and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breast-
bone. é

“TI didn’t want any more loitering in the shade, and

[ 76 }
HEART OF DARKNESS

I made haste towards the station. When near the build-
ings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance
of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort
of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a
light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and
varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled,
under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand.
He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.

“ J shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was
the Company’s chief accountant, and that all the book-
keeping was done at this station. He had come out for
a moment, he said, ‘to get a breath of fresh air.’ The
expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion
of sedentary desk-life. I wouldn’t have mentioned the
fellow to you at all, only it was from his lips that I
first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly
connected with the memories of that time. Moreover, I
respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his
vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was cer-
tainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great
demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance.
That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-
fronts were achievements of character. He had been out
nearly three years; and, later on, I could not help ask-
ing him how he managed to sport such linen. He had
just the faintest blush, and said modestly, “I’ve been
teaching one of the native women about the station. Tt
was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.’ Thus
this man had verily accomplished something. And he
was devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order.

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HEART OF DARKNESS

“Everything else in the station was in a muddle,—
heads, things, buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with
splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manu-
factured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire
set into the depths of darkness, and in return came a
vrecious trickle of ivory.

“ T had to wait in the station for ten days—an eternity.
I lived in a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos
I would sometimes get into the accountant’s office. It
was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put together
that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from
neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. There was
no need to open the big shutter to see. It was hot
there too; big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting,
but stabbed. I sat generally on the floor, while, of
faultless appearance (and even slightly scented), perch-
ing on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote. Sometimes he
stcod up for exercise. When a truckle-bed with a sick
man (some invalided agent from up-country) was put in
there, he exhibited a poled annoyance. ‘ The groans of
this sick person,” he said, ‘ distract my attention. And
without that it is extremely difficult to guard against
clerical errors in this climate.’

“One day he remarked, without lifting his head, ‘ In
the interior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.? On my
asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he said he was a first-class
agent; and seeing my disappointment at this informa-
tion, he added slowly, laying down his pen, ‘ He is a very
remarkable person.’ Further questions elicited from him
that Mr. Kurtz was at present in charge of a trading

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HEART OF DARKNESS

post, a very important one, in the true ivory-country,
at ‘the very bottom of there. Sends in as much ivory
as all the others put together. . . .” He began to
write again. The sick man was too ill to groan. The
flies buzzed in a great peace.

‘“* Suddenly there was a growing murmur of voices and
a great tramping of feet. A caravan had come in. A
violent babble of uncouth sounds burst out on the other
side of the planks. All the carriers were speaking to-
gether, and in the midst of the uproar the lamentable
voice of the chief agent was heard ‘ giving it up’ tear-
fully for the twentieth time that day. . . . He rose
slowly. ‘What a frightful row,’ he said. He crossed
the room gently to look at the sick man, and returning,

, said to me, ‘He does not hear.” ‘What! Dead?’ J
asked, startled. ‘ No, not yet,’ he answered, with great
composure. Then, alluding with a toss of the head to
the tumult in the station-yard, ‘ When one has got to
make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages—
hate them to the death.’ He remained thoughtful fora
moment. ‘ When you see Mr. Kurtz,’ he went on, ‘tell
him from me that everything here ’—he gianced at the.
desk—* is very satisfactory. I don’t like to write to him
—with those messengers of ours you never know who
may get hold of your letter—at that Central Station.’
He stared at me for a moment with his mild, bulging
eyes. ‘Oh, he will go far, very far,’ he began again.
‘He will be a somebody in the Administration before
long. They, above—the Council in Europe, you know
—mean him to be.’

{79 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

“ He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased,
and presently in going out I stopped at the door. In
the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was
lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his
books,’ was making’ correct entries of perfectly correct
transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could
see the still tree-tops of the grove of death.

* Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan
of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp.

“No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths,
everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading
over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt
grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up
and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude,
a solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had
cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious
niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons sud-
denly took to traveling on the road between Deal and
Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry
heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage
thereabouts would get empty very soon. Only here the
dwellings were gone too. Still I passed through several
abandoned villages. There’s something pathetically
childish in the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with
the stamp and shuffle of sixty pair of bare fect behind
me, each pair under a 60-Ib. load. Camp, cook, sleep,
strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead in
harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with
an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his
side. A great silence around and above. Perhaps on

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HEART OF DARKNESS

some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking,
swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing,
suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a
meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.
Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping
on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris,
very hospitable and festive—not to say drunk. Was
looking after the upkeep of the road, he declared. Can’t
say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a
middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead,
upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles. farther on,
may be considered as a permanent improvement. I had
a white companion too, not a bad chap, but rather too
fleshy and with the exasperating habit of fainting on
the hot hillsides, miles away from the least bit of shade
and water. Annoying, you know, to hold your own coat
like a parasol over a man’s head while he is coming-to.
I couldn’t help asking him once what he meant by coming
there at all. ‘To make money, of course. What do
you think? ’ he said, scornfully. Then he got fever, and
had to be carried in a hammock slung under a pole. As
he weighed sixteen stone I had no end of rows with the _
carriers. They jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their
loads in the night—quite a mutiny. , So, one evening,
I made a speech in English with gestures, not one of
which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes before me, and
the next morning I started the hammock off in front all
right. An hour afterwards I came upon the whole con-
cern wrecked in a bush—man, hammock, groans, blankets, ,
horrors. The heavy pole had skinned his poor nose. He

[ 81 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

was very anxious for me to kill somebody, but there
wasn’t the shadow of a carrier near. _I remembered the
old doctor,—‘ It would be’ interesting for science to
watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.’
I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. How-
ever, all that is to no purpose. On the fifteenth day I
came in sight of the big river again, and hobbled into
the Central Station. It was on a back water surrounded
by scrub and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud
on one side, and on the three others inclosed by a crazy
fence of rushes. A neglected gap was all the gate it
had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let
you see the flabby devil was running that show. White
men with long staves in their hands appeared languidly.
from amongst the buildings, strolling up to take a look
at me, and then retired out of sight somewhere. One
of them, a stout, excitable chap with black mustaches,
informed me with great volubility and many digressions,
as soon as I told him who I was, that my steamer was at
the bottom of the river. I was thunderstruck. What,
how, why? Oh, it was ‘all right.’ The ‘ manager him-
self’ was there. All quite correct. ‘Everybody had
behaved splendidly! splendidly !’—‘ you must,’ he said
in agitation, ‘ go and see the general manager at once.
He is waiting!’

““T did not see the real significance of that wreck at
once. I fancy I see it now, but I am not sure—not at
all. Certainly the affair was too stupid—when I think
of it—to be altogether natural. Still. . . . But at the
moment it presented itself simply as a confounded nui-

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HEART OF DARKNESS

sance. The steamer was sunk. They had started two
days before in a sudden hurry up the river with the
manager on board, in charge of some volunteer skipper,
and before they had been out three hours they tore the
bottom out of her on stones, and she sank near the south
bank. I asked myself what I was to do there, now my
boat was lost. As a matter of fact, I had plenty to do
in fishing my command out of the river. I had to set
about it the very next day. That, and the repairs when
I brought the pieces to the station, took some months.
“ My first interview with the manager was curious. He
did not ask me to sit down after my twenty-mile walk
that morning. He was commonplace in complexion, in.
feature, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle
size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue,
were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could
make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as
an ax. But even at these times the rest of his person
seemed to disclaim the intention. Otherwise there was
only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, some-
thing stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I remember it, but
I can’t explain. It was unconscious, this smile was,
though just after he had said something it got intensified
for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches like
a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the
commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable. He
was a common trader, from his youth up employed in
these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he in-
spired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He in-
spired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a~

[ 83 ]} .
HEART OF DARKNESS

definite mistrust—just uneasiness—nothing more. You
have no idea how effective sucha . . . a. . - fac
ulty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for
initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such
things as the deplorable state of the station. He had
no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come
to him—why? Perhaps because he was never ill .

He had served three terms of three years out there . . .
Because triumphant health in the general rout of con-
stitutions is a kind of power in itself. When he went
home on leave he rioted on a large scale—pompously.
Jack ashore—with a difference—in externals only. This
one could gather from his casual talk. He originated
nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all.
But he was great. He was great by this little thing that
it was impossible to tell what could control such a man.
He never gave that secret away. Perhaps there was
nothing within him. Such a suspicion made one pause
—for out there there were no external checks. Once
when various tropical diseases had laid low almost every
‘agent’ in the station, he was heard to say, ‘ Men who
come out here should have no entrails.” He sealed the
utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been
a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.
You fancied you had seen things—but the seal was on.
When annoyed at meal-times by the constant quarrels
of the white men about precedence, he ordered an im-
mense round table to be made, for which a special house
had to be built. ‘This was the station’s mess-room. Where
he sat was the first place—the rest were nowhere. One

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HEART OF DARKNESS

felt this to be his unalterable conviction. He was neither
civil nor uncivil. He was quiet. He allowed his ‘ boy ‘
—an overfed young negro from the coast—to treat the
white men, under his very eyes, with provoking insolence.

“He began to speak as soon as he saw me. I had
been very long on the road. He could not wait. Had
to start without me. The up-river stations had to be
relieved. There had been so many delays already that
he did not know who was dead and who was alive, and
how they got on—and so on, and so on. He paid no
attention to my explanations, and, playing with a stick
of sealing-wax, repeated several times that the situation
was ‘very grave, very grave.” There were rumors that
a very important station was in jeopardy, and its chief,
Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Hoped it was not true. Mr. Kurtz
was . . . I felt weary and irritable. Hang Kurtz, I
thought. I interrupted him by saying I had heard of
Mr. Kurtz on the coast. ‘Ah! So they talk of him
down there,’ he murmured to himself. Then he began
again, assuring me Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he
had, an exceptional man, of the greatest importance to
the Company ; therefore I could understand his anxiety.
He was, he said, ‘ very, very uneasy.’ Certainly he
fidgeted on his chair a good deal, exclaimed, ‘ Ah, Mr.
Kurtz!’ broke the stick of sealing-wax and seemed dumb-
founded by the accident. Next thing he wanted to know
‘how long it would take to’ . . . I interrupted him
again. Being hungry, you know, and kept on my feet
too, I was getting savage. ‘ How could I tell,’ I said.
‘TI hadn’t even seen the wreck yet—some months, no

[ 85 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

doubt.’ All this talk seemed to me so futile. ‘Some
months,’ he said. ‘ Well, let us say three months before
we can make a start. Yes. That ought to do the affair.’
I flung out of his hut (he lived all alone in a clay hut
with a sort of veranda) muttering to myself my opinion
of him. He was a chattering idiot. Afterwards I took
it back when it was borne in upon me startlingly with
what extreme nicety he had estimated the time requisite
for the ‘ affair.’

“TI went to work the next day, turning, so to speak,
my back on that station. In that way only it seemed
to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of
life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I
saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in
the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what
it all meant. They wandered here and there with their
absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless
pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word
‘ivory ’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You
would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile
rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some
corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unrcal
in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surround-
ing this cleared speck on the earth struck me as some-
thing great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting
patiently for the passing away of this fantastic in-
vasion.

“Oh, these months! Well, never mind. Various things
happened. One evening a grass shed full of calico, cotton
prints, beads, and I don’t know what else, burst into a

[ 86 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

blaze so suddenly that you would have thought the earth
had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that trash.
I was smoking my pipe quietly by my dismantled steamer,
and saw them all cutting capers in the light, with their
arms lifted high, when the stout man with mustaches
came tearing down to the river, a tin pail in his hand,
assured me that everybody was ‘ behaving splendidly,
splendidly,’ dipped about a quart of water and tore back
again. I noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his
pail.

“JT strolled up. There was no hurry. You see the
thing had gone off like a box of matches. It had been
hopeless from the very first. The flame had leaped high,
driven everybody back, lighted up everything—and col-
lapsed. The shed was already a heap of embers glowing
fiercely. A nigger was being beaten near by. They
said he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it
may, he was screeching most horribly. I saw him, later
on, for several days, sitting in a bit of shade looking
very sick and trying to recover himself: afterwards he
arose and went out—-and the wilderness without a scund
took him into its bosom again. As I approached the
glow from the dark I found myself at the back of two
men, talking. I heard the name of Kurtz pronounced,
then the words, ‘ take advantage of this unfortunate ac-
cident.’ One of the men was the manager. I wished
him a good evening. ‘ Did you ever see anything like
it—eh? it is incredible,’ he said, and walked off. The
other man remained. He was a first-class agent, young,
gentlemanly, a bit reserved, with a forked little beard
[ 87 ]

-
HEART OF DARKNESS

and a hooked nose. He was stand-offish with the other
agents, and they on their side said he was the manager’s
spy upon them. As to me, I had hardly ever, spoken to
him before. We got into talk, and by-and-by we strolled
away from the hissing ruins. Then he asked me to his
room, which was in the main building of the station.
He struck a match, and I perceived that this young
aristocrat had not only a silver-mounted dressing-case
but also a whole candle all to himself. Just at that time
the manager was the only man supposed to have any
right to candles. Native mats covered the clay walls;
a collection of spears, assegais, shields, knives was hung
up in trophies. The business intrusted to this fellow
was the making of bricks—so I had been informed ; but
there wasn’t a fragment of a brick anywhere in the sta-
tion, and he had been there more than a year—waiting.
It seems he could not make bricks without something, I
don’t know what—straw maybe. Anyways, it could not
be found there, and as it was not likely to be sent from
Europe, it did not appear clear to me what he was wait-
ing for. An act of special creation perhaps. However,
they were all waiting—all the sixteen or twenty pilgrims
of them-—fer something; and upon my word it did not
seem an uncongenial occupation, from the way they took
it, though the only thing that ever came to them was
disease—as far as I could see. They beguiled the time
by backbiting and intriguing against each other in a
foolish kind of way. There was an air of plotting about
that station, but nothing came of it, of course. It was
as unreal as everything else—as the philanthropic pre-

I 88)
HEART OF DARKNESS

tense of the whole concern, as their talk, as their gov-
ernment, as their show of work. The only real feeling
was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where
ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages.
They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only
on that account,—but as to effectually lifting a little
finger—oh, no. By heavens! there is something after
all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while
another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight
out. Very well. He has done it. Pethaps he can ride.
But there is a way of looking at a halter that would
provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.
“T had no idea why he wanted to be sociable, but as
we chatted in there it suddenly occurred to me the fel-
low was trying to get at something—in fact, pumping
me. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the people I
was supposed to know there—putting leading questions
as to my acquaintances in the sepulchral city, and so on.
His little eyes glittered like mica discs—with curiosity,
—though he tried to keep up a bit of superciliousness.
At first I was astonished, but very soon I became awfully
curious to see what he would find out from me. I couldn’t
possibly imagine what I had in me to make it worth
his while. It was very pretty to see how he baffled him-
self, for in truth my body was full of chills, and my
head had nothing in it but that wretched steamboat busi-
ness. It was evident he took me for a perfectly shame-
less prevaricator. At last he got angry, and, to conceal
a movement of furious annoyance, he yawned. I rose.
Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, repre-

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HEART OF DARKNESS

senting a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a
lighted torch. The background was somber—almost
black. The movement of the woman was stately, and
the effect of the toychlight on the face was sinister.

“ Tt arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding an empty
half-pint champagne bottle (medical comforts) with the
candle stuck in it. To my question he said Mr. Kurtz
had painted this—in this very station more than a year
.ago—while waiting for means to go to his trading~post.
‘Tell me, pray,’ said I, ‘who is this Mr. Kurtz?’

“¢The chief of the Inner Station,’ he answered in a
short tone, looking away. ‘ Much obliged,’ I said, laugh-

ing. ‘And you are the brickmaker of the Central Sta-
tion. Everyone knows that.’ He was silent for a while.
“ He is a prodigy,’ he said at last. ‘ He is an emissary of
pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what
else. We want,’ he began to declaim suddenly, ‘ for
the guidance of the cause intrusted to us by Europe, so
to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a single-
ness of purpose.’ ‘ Who says that?’ I asked. ‘ Lots of
them,’ he replied. ‘Some even write that; and so he
comes here, 2 special being, as you ought to know.’ ‘ Why
ought I to know?’ I interrupted, really surprised. He
paid no attention. ‘Yes. To-day he is chief of the
best station, next year he will be assistant-manager, two
years more and . . . but I dare say you know what he
will be in two years’ time. You are of the new gang—
the gang of virtue. The same people who sent him
specially also recommended you. Oh, don’t say no. I’ve
my own eyes to trust.’ Light dawned upon me. My

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HEART OF DARKNESS

dear aunt’s influential acquaintances were producing an-
unexpected effect upon that young man. I nearly burst
into a laugh. ‘Do you read the Company’s confidential
correspondence?’ I asked. He hadn’t a word to say. it
was great fun. ‘ When Mr. Kurtz,’ I continued severe];
‘is General Manager, you won’t have the opportunity.’
** He blew the candle out suddenly, and we went out-
side. The moon had risen. Black figures strolled abcut
listlessly, pouring water on the glow, whence proceeded
a sound of hissing; steam ascended in the moonlight, the
beaten nigger groaned somewhere. ‘What a row the:
brute makes!’ said the indefatigable man with the mus-:
taches, appearing near us. ‘Serve him right. Trans-
gression—punishment—bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That’s
the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations fer
the future. I was just telling the manager . . .’ He
noticed my companion, and became crestfallen all-at once.
* Not in bed yet,’ he said, with a kind of servile hearti-.
ness; ‘it’s so natural. Ha! Danger-agitation.’ He
vanished. I went on to the river-side, and the other fol-
lowed me. I heard a scathing murmur at my ear, ‘ Heap-
of muffs—go to.’ The pilgrims could be seen in knots
_gesticulating, discussing. Several had still their staves
in their hands. I verily believe they took these sticks to.
bed with them. Beyond the fence the forest stood up
spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir,
through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard,
the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart,—
“its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its con-
cealed life. The hurt nigger moaned feebly somewhere

[ 91 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that made me
mend my pace away from there. I felt a hand intro-
ducing itself under my arm. ‘ My dear sir,’ said the
fellow, ‘ I don’t want to be misunderstood, and especially
by you, who will see Mr. Kurtz long before I can have
that pleasure. I wouldn’t like him to get a false idea
of my disposition. . 2”

“J let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles,
and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my fore-
finger through him, and would find nothing inside but
a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don’t you see, had been
vlanning to be assistant-manager by-and-by under the
present man, and I could see that the coming of that
Kurtz had upset them both not a little. He talked pre-
cipitately, and I did not try to stop him. I had my
shoulders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on
the slope like a carcass of some big river animal. The
smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my
nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was before
my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creck
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of
silver—over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the
wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall
of a temple, over the great river I could sce through a
somber gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly
by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant,
mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I won-
dered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity
looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a
‘menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could

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HEART OF DARKNESS:

we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I
felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that
couldn’t talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was
in there? I could see a little ivory coming out from.
there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had
heard enough about it too—God knows! Yet somehow
it didn’t bring any image with it—no more than if I
had been told an angel or a fiend was in there. I be-
lieved it in the same way one of you might believe there.
are inhabitants in the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch
sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people:
in Mars. If you asked him for some idea how they
looked and behaved, he would get shy and mutter some-
thing about ‘ walking on all-fours.” If you as much
as smiled, he would—though a man of sixty—offer to.
fight you. I would not have gone so far as to fight
for Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to a lie. You
know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because
I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because
it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of
mortality in lies,—which is exactly what I hate and
detest in the world—what I want to forget. It makes
me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would
do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough
to it by letting the young fool there believe anything
he liked to imagine as to my influence in Europe. I
became in an instant as much of a pretense as the rest
of ‘the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had
a notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom
at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just

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a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any
more’ than you do. Do you see him? Do you
see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me
I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain at-
tempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the
dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, sur-
prise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt,
that notion of being captured by the incredible which is
-of the very essence of dreams. . om

He was silent for a while.

ae . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey
‘the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence,
-—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and
penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we
-dream—alone. . 2

He paused again as if reflecting, then added—

“Of course in this you fellows see more than I could
‘then. You see me, whom you know. . . .”

It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could
hardly see one another. For a long time already he,
sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There
was not a word from anybody. The others might have
‘been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I-listened on
the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give
me the clew to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narra-
‘tive that seemed to shape itself without human lips in
the heavy night-air of the river.

se . Yes—TI let him run on,” Marlow began again,
“and think what he pleased about the powers that were
-behind me. I did! And there was nothing behind me!

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HEART OF DARKNESS

There was nothing but that wretched, old, mangled
steamboat I was leaning against, while he talked fluently
about ‘ the necessity for every man to get on.’ ‘ And
when one comes out here, you conceive, it is not to gaze
at the moon.” Mr. Kurtz was a ‘ universal genius,’ but
even a genius would find it easier to work with ‘ adequate
tools—intelligent men.’ He did not make bricks—why,
there was a physical impossibility in the way—as I was
well aware; and if he did secretarial work for the man-
ager, it was because ‘no sensible man rejects wantonly
the confidence of his superiors.’ Did I see it? I saw it.
What more did I want? What I really wanted was
rivets, by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work—to-
stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. There were cases of
them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split !
You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that
station yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the-
grove of death. You could fill your pockets with rivets
for the trouble of stooping down—and there wasn’t one
rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had plates.
that would do, but nothing to fasten them with. And
every week the messenger, a lone negro, letter-bag on
shoulder and staff in hand, left our station for the coast.
And several times a week a coast caravan came in with
trade goods,—ghastly glazed calico that made you.
shudder only to look at it, glass beads value about a
. penny a quart, confounded spotted cotton handkerchiefs.
And no rivets. Threé carriers could have brought all.
that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.
* He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my’

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b
HEART OF DARKNESS

unresponsive attitude must have exasperated him at last,
for he judged it necessary to inform me he feared neither
God nor. devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could
see that very well, but what I wanted was a certain
quantity of rivets—and rivets were what really Mr.
Kurtz wanted, if he had only known it. Now letters
went to the coast every week. . . . ‘ My dear sir,’ he
cried, ‘ I write from dictation.’ I demanded rivets. There
was a way—for an intelligent man. He changed his
manner; became very cold, and suddenly began to talk
about a hippopotamus; wondered whether sleeping on
board the steamer (I stuck to my salvage night and
day) I wasn’t disturbed. There was an old hippo that
had the bad habit of getting out on the bank and rvam-
ing at night over the station grounds. The pilgrims
used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they
could lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o’
nights for him. All this energy was wasted, though.
‘ That animal has a charmed life,’ he said; ‘ but you can
say this only of brutes in this country. No man—you
apprehend me?—no man here bears a charmed life.’ He
‘stood there for a moment in the moonlight with his deli-
cate hooked nose set a little askew, and his mica eyes
glittering without a wink, then, with a curt Good night,
he strode off. I could see he was disturbed and consid-
erably puzzled, which made me feel more hopeful than
I had been for days. It was a great comfort to turn
from that chap to my influential friend, the battered,
twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on
board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntlev

|
HEART OF DARKNESS

& Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was
_ aothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape,
but I had expended enough hard work on her to make
me love her. No influential friend would have served
me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit
——to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work.
I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things
that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does
—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find
yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others
—what no other man can ever know. They can only
see the mere show, and never can tell what it really
means.

““T was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft; on
the deck, with his legs dangling over the mud. You see
I rather chummed with the few mechanics there were in
that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally despised
—on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose.
This was the foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good
worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with
big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head
was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in
falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had pros-
pered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to
his waist. He was a widower with six young children
(he had left them in charge of a sister of his to come
out there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying.
He was an enthusiast and a connoisseur. He weuld rave
about pigeons. After work hours he used sometimes to
come over from his hut for a talk about his children and.

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his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud
under the bottom of the steamboat, he would tie up that
beard of his in a kind of white serviette he brought for
the purpose. It had loops to go over his ears. In the
evening he could be seen squatted on the bank rinsing
that wrapper in the creek with great care, then spreading
it solemnly on a bush to dry.

“I slapped him on the back and shouted ‘ We shall have
rivets!’ He scrambled to his feet exclaiming ‘ No!
Rivets!’ as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then in
a low voice, ‘You . . . eh?’ I don’t know why we
behaved like lunatics. I put my finger to the side of
my nose and nodded mysteriously. ‘ Good for you!’ he
cried, snapped his fingers above his head, lifting one
foct. I tried a jig. We capered on the iron deck. A
frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin
forest on the other bank of the creek sent it back in a
thundering roll upon the sleeping station. It must have
made some of the pilgrims sit up in their hovels. A
dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the man-
ager’s hut, vanished, then, a second or so after, the
doorway itself vanished too. We stopped, and the silence
driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back
again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of
vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks,
branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the
moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life,
a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to
topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us
out of his little existence. And it moved not. A dead-

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HEART OF DARKNESS

ened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us
from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking
a bath of glitter in the great river. ‘ After all,’ said the
boiler-maker in a reasonable tone, ‘ why shouldn’t we get
the rivets?’ Why not, indeed! I did not know of any
reason why we shouldn’t. ‘ They’ll come in three weeks,’
I said, confidently.

“But they didn’t. Instead of rivets there came an
invasion, an infliction, a visitation. It came in sections
during the next three weeks, each section headed by a
donkey carrying a white man in new clothes and tan
shoes, bowing from that elevation right and left to the
impressed pilgrims. A quarrelsome band of footsore
sulky niggers trod on the heels of the donkey; a lot of
tents, camp-stools, tin boxes, white cases, brown bales
would be shot down in the courtyard, and the air of
mystery would deepen a little over the muddle of the
station. Five such installments came, with their absurd
air of disorderly flight with the loot of innumerable out-
fit shops and provision stores, that, one would think, they
were lugging, after a raid, into the wilderness for equit-
able division. It was an inextricable mess of things
decent in themselves but that human folly made look
like the-spoils of thieving.

“This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Ex-
ploring Expedition, and I believe they were sworn to
secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid
buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy
without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was
not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the

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HEART OF DARKNESS

whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these
things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear
treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire,
with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there
is in burglars breaking into a safe. Who paid the ex-
penses of the noble enterprise I don’t know; but the
uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.

“In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neigh-
borhood, and his eyes had a look of sleepy cunning. He
carried his fat paunch with ostentation on his short legs,
and during the time his gang infested the station spoke
to no one but his nephew. You could see these two roam-
ing about all day long with their heads close together
in an everlasting confab. .

“TY had given up worrying myself about the rivets.
One’s capacity for that kind of folly is more limited
than you would suppose. I said Hang!—and let things
slide. I had plenty of time for meditation, and now
and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn’t
very interested in him. No. Still, I was curious te sce
whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral
ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all, and
how he would set about his work when there.”

II

“‘Qne evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my
steamboat, I heard voices approaching—and there were
the nephew and the ancle strolling along the bank. I
laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost

[ 100 }
HEART OF DARKNESS

myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it
were: ‘I am as harmless as a little child, but I don’t like
to be dictated to. Am I the manager—or am I not? I
was ordered to send him there. It’s incredible.’ .

I became aware that the two were standing on the shore
alongside the forepart of the steamboat, just below my
head. I did not move; it did nat occur to me to move: I
was sleepy. ‘ It is unpleasant,’ grunted the uncle. ‘ He
has asked the Administration to be sent there,’ said the
other, ‘ with the idea of showing what he could do; and
I was instructed accordingly. Look at the influence that
man must have. Is it not frightful?’ They both agreed
it was frightful, then, made several bizarre remarks:
“Make rain and fine weather—one man—the Council—
by the nose’—bits of absurd sentences that got the
better of my drowsiness, so that I had pretty near the
whole of my wits about me when the uncle said, ‘ The
climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he
alone there?’ ‘ Yes,’ answered the manager; ‘ he sent
his assistant down the river with a note to.me in these
terms: “ Clear this poor devil out of the country, and
don’t bother sending more of that sort. I had rather
be alone than have the kind of men you can dispose of
with me.” It was more than a year ago. Can you
imagine such impudence! ’ ‘ Anything since then?’
asked the other, hoarsely. ‘Ivory,’ jerked the nephew;
‘lots of it—prime sort—lots—most annoying, from
him.’ ‘And with that?’ questioned the heavy rumble.
‘Invoice,’ was the reply fired out, so to speak. Then
silence. They had been talking about Kurtz.

[ 101 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

‘“‘T was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly
at ease, remained still, having no inducement to change
my position. ‘How did that ivory come all this way?’
growled the elder man, who seemed very vexed. The
other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in
charge of an English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with
him; that Kurtz had apparently intended to return him-
self, the station being by that-time bare of goods and
stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had sud-
denly decided to go back, which he started to do alone
in a small dug-out with four paddlers, leaving the half-
caste to continue down the river with the ivory. The two
fellows there seemed astounded at anybody attempting
such a thing. They were at a loss for an adequate mo-
tive. As to me, I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time.
It was a distinct glimpse: the dug-out, four paddling
savages, and the lone white man turning his back sud-
denly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of

home—perhaps; setting his face towards the depths of

the wilderness, towards his empty and desolate station.
I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply
a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake. His
name, you understand, had not been pronounced once.
He was ‘that man.’ The half-caste, who, as far as I
could see, had conducted a difficult trip with great pru-
dence and pluck, was invariably alluded to as ‘that
scoundrel.? The ‘scoundrel’ had reported that the
‘man’ had been very ill—had recovered imperfectiy.

. The two below me moved away then a few paces,
and strolled back and forth at some little distance. I

f 102 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

heard: ‘ Military post—doctor—two hundred miles—
quite alone now—unavoidable delays—nine months—ne
news—strange rumors.’ They approached again, just
as the manager was saying, ‘ No one, as far as I know,
unless a species of wandering trader—a pestilential fel-
low, snapping ivory from the natives.’ Who was it they
were talking about now? I gathered in snatches that
this was some man supposed to be in Kurtz’s district, and
of whom the manager did not approve. ‘ We will not be
free from unfair competition till one of these fellows is
hanged for an example,’ he said. ‘ Certainly,’ grunted
the other; ‘ get him hanged! Why not? Anything—
anything can be done in this country. That’s what I
say; nobody here, you understand, here, can endanger
your position. And why? You stand the climate—you
outlast them all. The danger is in Europe; but there
before I left I took care to > They moved off and
whispered, then their voices rose again. ‘ The extraor-
dinary series of delays is not my fault. I did my
possible.” ‘The fat man sighed, ‘ Very sad.’ ‘ And the
pestiferous absurdity of his talk,’ continued the other;
‘he bothered me enough when he was here. “ Each
station should be like a beacon on the road towards better
things, a center for trade of course, but also for human-
izing, improving, instructing.” Conceive you—that ass!
And he wants to be manager! No, it’s * Here he
got choked by excessive indignation, and I lifted my
head the least bit. I was surprised to see how near they
were—right under me. I could have spat upon their
hats. They were locking on the ground, absorbed in

[ 103 3

 

 
HEART OF DARKNESS

thought. The manager was switching his leg with a
slender twig: his sagacious relative lifted his head. * You
have been well since you came out this time?” he asked.
The other gave a start. ‘Who? I? Oh! Like a charm
—like a charm. But the rest—oh, my goodness! All
sick. They die so quick, too, that I haven’t the time
to send them out of the country—it’s incredible!’ “ H’m.
Just so,’ grunted the uncle. ‘ Ah! my boy, trust to this
—I say, trust to this.’ I saw him extend his short flipper
‘of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the
creek, the mud, the river,—seemed to beckon with a dis-
honoring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a
treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden
evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so
startling that I leaped to my feet and looked back at
the edge of the forest, as though I had expected an
answer of some sort to that black display of confidence.
You know the foolish notions that come to one some-
times. The high stillness confronted these two figures
with its ominous patience, waiting for the passing away
of a fantastic invasion.

“They swore aloud together—out of sheer fright, I
believe—then pretending not to know anything of my
existence, turned back to the station. The sun was low;
and leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be
tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows
of unequal length, that trailed behind them slowly over
the tall grass without bending a single blade.

“In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the
patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes

{ 104 }
HEART OF DARKNESS

over a diver. Long afterwards the news came that all»
the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate of
the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest
of us, found what they deserved. I did not inquire. I
was then rather excited at the prospect of meeting Kurtz
very soon. When I say very soon I mean it compara-
tively. It was just two months from the day we left
the creek when we came to the bank below Kurtz’s sta-
tion. =
“Going up that river was like traveling back to tn |
earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted ';
on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty, |
stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air
was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. ‘There was no joy
.In the brilliance of sunshine. The’ long stretches of the
waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of over-
shadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and
alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broaden-
ing waters flowed through a mob of wooded. islands you
lost your way on that river ‘as you would in a desert,’ and
butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the
channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut
off for ever from everything you had known once—some-
where—far away—in another existence perhaps. There
were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it
will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare _
to yourse ut it came in the shape of an_ ‘unrestful _ .
aTOy dream, | remembered with wonder amongst ab the
overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants,
and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did

[ 105 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of
an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable inten-
tion. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got
used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had
no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had
to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden
banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to
clap ‘my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when
I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would
have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and
drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a look-out for
the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for
next day’s steaming. When you have to attend to
things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the sur-
face, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The
_jinner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily. But I felt it
{ allthe same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching
} me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows
i\ performing on your respective tight-ropes for—what is
Kae half-a-crown a tumble——”

“Try to be civil, Marlow,” growled a voice, and I
knew there was at least one listener awake besides my-
self.

“TI beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which
makes up the rest of the price. And indeed what does
the price matter, if the trick be well done? ‘You do
your tricks very well. And I didn’t do badly either,
since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first
trip. It’s a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded
man set to drive a van oyer a bad road. I sweated and

[ 106 1
HEART OF DARKNESS

shivered over that business considerably, I can tell you.
After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing’
that’s supposed to float all the time under his care is
the unpardonable sin. No one may know of it, but you
never forget the thump—eh? A blow on the very heart.
You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night
and think of it—years after—and go hot and cold all
over. I don’t pretend to say that steamboat floated all
the time. More than once she had to wade for a bit,
with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.
We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a
crew. Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They
were men one could work with, and I am grateful to
them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before ,
my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo- ‘
meat which went rotten, and made the mystery of the”
wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it
now. I had the manager on board and three or four
pilgrims with their staves—all complete. Sometimes we
came upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the
skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out
of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and
surprise and welcome, seemed very strange,—had the ap-
pearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word
ivory would ring in the air for a while
again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the
still bends, between the high walls of our winding way,
reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the
stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, -massive,
immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging

[ 107 ]

 

and on we went
HEART OF DARKNESS

the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed
Steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor
of a lofty portico. It made ade you feel very_small, very

lost, and yet it was not not altogether depressing: that, feel-
tage After all, you were small, the grimy beetle
‘crawled on—which was just what you: wanted it to do.
Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don’t know.
To some place where they expected to get something, I
bet! For me it crawled toward Kurtz—exclusively ; but
When the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very
sl6w. The reaches opened before us and closed behind,
‘as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water
to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper
‘arid deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet
thére. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the
euktain of trees would run up the river and remain
sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our
Theads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war,
péace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were
heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-
cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of
a~twig would make you start. We were wanderers on
a’ prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect
of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves
the first of men taking possession of an accursed in-
heritance, to be subdued at. the cost of profound anguish
and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled
round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls,
of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black
limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of

[ 108 ].
HEART OF DARKNESS

bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy
and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly
on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The
prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, wel-
coming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the
comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like
phantoms, wondering and‘secretly appalled, as sane men
would be before an enthusiastje outbreak i in a madhouse.
We could not understand, because we were too far and
could not remember, because we were traveling in the
night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving
hardly a sign—and no memories. G04

“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed.to
iba pe the stack fon of a conquered monster, but
there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and
free. It was unearthly, and the men were—— No, they
were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst
of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. — It
would come slowly to one. _They howled, and leaped, and
spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was
just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the
thought of your remote kinship with this wild and pas-
sionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but
if you were man enough you would admit to yourself
that there was in you just the faintest trace of a re-
sponse to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim
suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—
you so remote from the night of first ages—could com-
prehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable
of anything—because everything is in it, all the past

[ 109 1

 
HEART OF DARKNESS

as well as all the future. What was there after all?
Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage—who can tell?
—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let

_ the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can

look on without a wink. But he must at least be as
much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet
that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn
strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisi-
tions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at
the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.
An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very
well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice too, and for
good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.
Of course, a. fool, what with sheer fright and fine senti-
ments, is always safe. Who’s that grunting? You
wonder I didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well,
no—I didn’t. Fine sentiments, you say? Fine senti-
ments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about
with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping
to put bandages on those leaky steam-pipes—I tell you.
I had to watch the steering, and circumvent those snags,
and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There
was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser
man. And between whiles I had to look after the savage
who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he
could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me,
and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as
seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat,
walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had
done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the

C110 ]

*
HEART OF DARKNESS

steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident
effort of intrepidity—and he had filed teeth too, the
poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer
patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his
cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and
stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was
hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of
improving knowledge. He was useful because he had
been instructed ; and what he knew was this—that should
the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil
spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the
‘greatness of his thirst, and take. a terrible vengeance.
So he sweated and fired, up and watched the glass fear-
fully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to
his arm, and a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch,
stuck flatways through his lower lip), while the wooded
banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left
behind, the interminable miles of silence—and we crept
on, towards Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water
was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed
to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fire-
man nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.

“Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came
upon a hut of reeds, an inclined and melancholy pole,
with the unrecognizable tatters of what had been a flag
of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked wood-
pile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and
on the stack of firewood found a flat piece of board with
some faded pencil-writing on it. When deciphered it
said: ‘ Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.’

Iii
HEART OF DARKNESS

There was a signature, but it was illegible—not Kurtz
—a much longer word. Hurry up. Where? Up the
river? ‘ Approach cautiously.’ We had not done so.
But the warning could not have been meant for the place
where it could be only found after approach. Some- |
thing was wrong above. But. what—and how much?
That was the question. We commented adversely upon
the imbecility of that telegraphic style. The bush around
said nothing, and would not let us look very far, either.
A torn curtain of red twill hung in the doorway of the
hut, and flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was
dismantled; but we could see a white man had lived
there not very long ago. There remained a rude table
——a plank on two posts; a heap of rubbish reposed in a
dark corner, and by the door I picked up a book. It
had lost its covers, and the pages had been thumbed into
a state of extremely dirty softness; but the back had been
lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread, which
‘looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title
was, ‘ An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship,’ by a
man Tower, Towson—some such name—Master in his
Majesty’s Navy. The matter looked dreary reading
enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of
figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this
amazing antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness,
lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson or
Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain
of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not
a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you
could see there a singleness of intention, an honest con-

[ 112 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

eern for the right way of going to work, which :nade
these humble pages,*thought out so many years ago,
luminous with another than a professional light. The
simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases,
made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious
sensation of having come upon something unmistakably
real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough;
but still more astounding were the notes penciled in the
margin, and plainly referring to the text. I couldn’t
believe my eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked
like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a book of
that description into this nowhere and studying it—
and making notes—in cipher at that! It was an ex-
travagant mystery.

“had been dimly aware for some time of a worrying
noise, and when I lifted my eyes I saw the wood-pile
was gone, and the manager, aided by all the pilgrims,
was shouting at me from the river-side. I slipped the
book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading
was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old
and solid friendship.

“JT started the lame engine ahead. ‘It must be this
miserable trader—this intruder,’ exclaimed the manager,
looking back malevolently at the place we had left. ‘ He
must be English,’ I said. ‘ It will not save him from
getting into trouble if he is not careful,’ muttered the
manager darkly.. I observed with assumed innocence that
no man was safe from trouble in this world.

“The current was more rapid now, the steamer seemed
at her last gasp, the stern-wheel flopped languidly, and

[ 113 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

I caught myself listening on tiptoe for the next beat of
the float, for in sober truth I expected the wretched thing
to give up every moment. It was like watching the last
flickers of a life. But still we crawled. Sometimes I
would pick out a tree a little way ahead to measure our
progress towards Kurtz by, but I lost it invariably be-
fore we got abreast. To keep the eyes so long on one
thing was too much for human patience. The manager
displayed a beautiful resignation. I fretted and fumed
and took to arguing with myself whether or no I would
talk openly with Kurtz; but before I could come to any
conclusien it occurred to me that my speech or my silence,
indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
What did it matter what anyone knew or ignored? What
did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes
such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay
deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond
my power of meddling.

“Towards the evening of the second day we judged
ourselves about eight miles from Kurtz’s station. I
wanted to push on; but the manager looked grave, and
told me the navigation up there was so dangerous that it
would be advisable, the sun being very low already, to
wait where we were till next morning. Moreover, he
pointed out that if the warning to approach cautiously
were to be followed, we must approach in daylight—
not at dusk, or in the dark. This was sensible enough.
Eight miles meant nearly three hours’ steaming for us,
and I could also see suspicious ripples at the upper end
of the reach. Nevertheless, I was annoyed beyond ex-

[114 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

pression at the delay, and most unreasonably too, since
one night more could not matter much after so many
months. As we had plenty of wood, and caution was
the word, I brought up in the middle of the stream.
The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a
railway cutting. The dusk came gliding into it long
before the sun had set. The current ran smooth and
swift, but a dumb immobility sat on the banks. The
living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every
living bush of the undergrowth, might have been changed
into stone, even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest
leaf. It was not sleep—it seemed unnatural, like a
state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any kind
could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to
suspect yourself of being deaf—then the night came
suddenly, and struck you blind as well. About three
in the morning some large fish leaped, and the loud
splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired.
When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm
and clammy, and more blinding than the night. It did
not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round
you like something solid. At e‘ght or nine, perhaps, it
lifted as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the tower-
ing multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle,
with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it—
all perfectly still—and then the white shutter came down
again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I
ordered the chain, which we had begun to heave in, to
be paid out again. Before it stopped running with a
muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite

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desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased.
A complaining clamor, modulated in savage discords,
filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made
my hair stir under my cap. I don’t know how it struck
the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself
had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all
sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar
arise. It culminated in a hurried outbreak of almost
intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped short, leav-
ing us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and ob-
stinately listening to the nearly as appalling and ex-
cessive silence. ‘Good God! What is the meaning P?
stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims,—a little
fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore
side-spring boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his
socks. Two others remained open-mouthed a whole min-
ute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out in-
continently and stand darting scared glances, with Win-
chesters at ‘ ready ’ in their hands. What we could see
was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as
though she had been on the point of dissolving, and a
misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around
her—and that was all. The rest of the world was no-
where, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just
nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving
a whisper or a shadow behind.

“T went forward, and ordered the chain to be hauled
in short, so as to be ready to trip the anchor and move
the steamboat at once if necessary. ‘ Will they attack?’
whispered an awed voice. ‘ We will be all butchered in

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this fog,’ murmured another. The faces twitched with
the strain, the hands trembled slightly, the eyes forgot
to wink. It was very curious to see the contrast of ex-
pressions of the white men and of the black fellows of
our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the
river as we, though their homes were only eight hundred
miles away. The whites, of course greatly discomposed,
had besides a curious look of being painfully shocked
by such an outrageous row. The others had an alert,
naturally interested expression; but their faces were es-
sentially quiet, even those of the one or two‘who grinned
as they hauled at the chain. Several exchanged short,
grunting phrases, which seemed to settle the matter to
their satisfaction. Their headman, a young, broad-
chested black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed
cloths, with fierce nostrils and his hair all done up art-
fully in oily ringlets, stood near me. ‘ Aha!’ I said, just
for good fellowship’s sake. ‘Catch ’im,’ he snapped,
with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of
sharp teeth—‘ catch ’im. Give ’im to us.” ‘To yeu,
eh?’ I asked; ‘ what would you do with them?’ ‘ Eat
im!’ he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail,
looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly
pensive attitude. I would no doubt have been properly
horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and his
chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been
growing increasingly hungry for at least this month
past. They had been engaged for six months (I don’t
think a single one of them had any clear idea of time,
as we at the end of countless ages have. They still be-

[17]
HEART OF DARKNESS

longed to the beginnings of time—had no inherited ex-
perience to teach them as it were), and of course, as
long as there was a piece of paper written over in ac-
cordanée with some farcical law or other made down the
river, it didn’t enter anybody’s head to trouble how
they would live. Certainly they had brought with them
some rotten hippo-meat, which couldn’t have lasted very
long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn’t, in the midst
of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity
of it overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceed-
ing; but it was really a case of legitimate self-defense.
You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and
eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip
on existence. Besides that, they had given them every
week three pieces of brass wire, each about nine inches
long; and the theory was they were to buy their pro-
visions with that currency in river-side villages. You
can see how, that worked. There were either no villages,
or the people were hostile, or the director, who like the
rest of us fed out of tins, with an occasional old he-goat
thrown in, didn’t want to stop the steamer for some more
or less recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the
wire itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with,
I don’t see what good their extravagant salary could be
tothem. I must say it was paid with a regularity worthy
of a large and honorable trading company. For the
rest, the only thing to eat—though it didn’t look eat-
able in the least—I saw in their possession was a few
lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty
lavender color, they kept wrapped in leaves, and now and

f 118 1
HEART OF DARKNESS

then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it seemed
done more for the looks of the thing than for any seri-
ous purpose of sustenance. Why in the name of all the
gnawing devils of hunger they didn’t go for us—they
were thirty to five—and have a good tuck in for once,
amazes me now when I think of it. They were big
powerful men, with not much capacity to weigh the con-
sequences, with courage, with strength, even yet, though
their skins were no longer glossy and their muscles no
longer’ hard. And I saw that something restraining, one
of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come
into play there. I looked at them with a swift quicken-
ing of interest—not because it occurred to me I might
be eaten by them before very long, though I own to you
that just then I perceived—in a new light, as it were—
how unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes,
I positively hoped, that my aspect was not so-——what shall
I say ?—so—unappetizing: a towch of fantastic vanity
which fitted well with the dream~sensation that pervaded
all my days at that time. Perhaps I had a little fever
too. One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on
one’s pulse. I had often ‘a little fever,’ or a little touch
of other things—the playful paw-strokes of the wilder-—
ness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious
onslaught which came in due course. Yes; I looked at
them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity
of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when
brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity.
Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it supersti-
tion, disgust, patience, fear—or some kind of primitive

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HEART OF DARKNESS

honor? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience
can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where
hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you
may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.
Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its
exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and
brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his
inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It’s really
easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition
of one’s soul—than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad,
but true. And these chaps too had no earthly reason
for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as
soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling
amongst the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the
fact facing me—the fact dazzling, to be seen, like the
foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an un-
fathomable enigma, a mystery greater—when I thought
of it—-than the curious, mexplicable note of desperate
grief in this savage clamor that had swept by us on the
river-bank, behind the blind whiteness of the fog.
“Two pilgrims were quarreling in hurried whispers
as to which bank. ‘ Left.” ‘No, no; how can you?
Right, right, of course.’ ‘It is very serious,’ said the
manager’s voice behind me; ‘I would be desolated if
anything should happen to Mr. Kurtz before we came
up.” I looked at him, and had not the slightest, doubt
he was sincere. He was just the kind of man who would
wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint.
But when he muttered something about going on at once,
I did not even take the trouble to answer him. I knew,

f 120 j
HEART OF DARKNESS

and he knew, that it was impossible. Were we to let go
our hold of the bottom, we would be absolutely in the
air—in space. We wouldn’t be able to tell where we
were going to—whether up or down stream, or across
—till we fetched against one bank or the other,—and
then we wouldn’t know at first which it was. Of course
I made no move. I had no mind for a smash-up. You
touldn’t imagine a more deadly place for a shipwreck.
Whether drowned at once or not, we were sure to perish
speedily in one way or another. ‘I authorize you to
take all the risks,’ he said, after a short silence. ‘ I refuse
to take any,’ I said shortly; which was just the answer
he expected, though its tone might have surprised him.
‘Well, I must defer to ‘your judgment. You are cap-
tain,’ he said, with marked civility. I turned my shoul-
der to him in sign of my appreciation, and looked into:
the fog. How long would it last? It was the most hope-
less look-out. The approach to this Kurtz grubbing
for ivory in the wretched bush was beset by as many
\dangers as though he had been an enchanted princess.
sleeping in a fabulous castle. ‘ Will they attack, do you
think?’ asked the manager, in a confidential tone.
*T did not think they would attack, for several obvious.
yeascns. The thick fog was one. If they left the bank
in their canoes they would get lost in it, as we would.
be if we attempted to move. Still, I had also judged the
jungle of both banks quite impenetrable—and yet eyes
were in it, eyes that had seen us. The river-side bushes.
were certainly very thick; but the undergrowth behind
was evidently penetrable. However, during the short

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HEART OF DARKNESS
Mift I had seen no canoes anywhere in the reach—eer-
‘tainly not abreast of the steamer. But what made the
idea of attack inconceivable to me was the nature of the
noise—of the cries we had heard. They had not the
fierce character boding of immediate hostile intention.
Unexpected, wild, and violent as they, had been, they had
given me an irresistible impression of sorrow. The
glimpse of the steamboat had for some reason filled those
savages with unrestrained grief. The danger, if any,
I expounded, was from our proximity to a great hu-
man passion let loose. Even extreme grief may ulti-
mately vent itself in violence—but more generally takes
‘the form of apathy. .
“You should have seen the pilgrims stare! They had
‘no heart to grin, or even to revile me; but I believe they
thought me gone mad—with fright; maybe. I delivered
a regular lecture. My dear boys, it was no good bother-
ing. Keep a look-out? Well, you may guess I watched
-the fog for the signs of lifting as a cat watches a mouse;
‘but for anything else our eyes were of no more use to
us than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of
-eotton-wool. It felt like it too—choking, warm, stifling.
Besides, all I said, though it sounded extravagant, was
absolutely true to fact. What we afterwards alluded
to as an attack was really an attempt at repulse. The
action was very far from being aggressivé—it was not
even defensive, in the usual sense: it was undertaken
under the stress of desperation, and in its essence was
“nurely protective.
“It developed itself, I should say, two hours after the
{ 122 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

fog lifted, and its commencement was at a spot, roughly
speaking, about a mile and a half below Kurtz’s station.
We had just floundered and flopped round a bend, when
I saw an islet, a mere grassy hummock of bright green,
in the middle of the stream. “It was the only thing of
, the kind; but as we opened the reach more, I perceived
it was the head of a long sandbank, or rather of a chain
of shallow patches stretching down the middle of the
river. They were discolored, just awash, and the whole
lot was seen just under the water, exactly as a man’s
backbone is seen running down the middle of his back.
under the skin. Now, as far as I did see, I could go
to the right or to the left of this. I didn’t know either
channel, of course. The banks looked pretty well alike,.
the depth appeared the same ; but as I had been informed
the station was on the west side, I naturally headed for
the western passage.

“No sooner had we fairly entered it than I became
aware it was much narrower than I had supposed. To
the left of us there was the long uninterrupted shoal,
and to the right a high, steep bank heavily overgrown .
with bushes. Above the bush the trees stood in serried
ranks. The twigs overhung the current thickly, and
from distance to distance a large limb of some tree pro-
jected rigidly over the stream. It was then well on in
the afternoon, the face of the forest was gloomy, and.
a broad strip of shadow had already fallen on the water.
In this shadow we steamed up—very slowly, as you may
imagine. I sheered her well inshore—the water being
deepest near the bank, as the sounding-pole informed me.

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HEART OF DARKNESS

i “ One of my hungry and forbearing friends was sound-
ing in the bows just below me. ‘This steamboat was
exactly like a decked scow.’ On the deck there were two
little teak-wood houses, with doors and windows. The
boiler was in the fore-end, and the machinery right
astern. Over the whole there was a light roof, supported
on stanchions. The funnel projected through that roof,
and in front of the funnel a small cabin built of light
planks served for a pilot-house. It contained a couch,
two camp-stools, a loaded Martini-Henry leaning in one
corner, a tiny table, and the steering-wheel. It had a
wide door in front and a broad shutter at each side. All
these were always thrown open, of course. I spent my
days perched up there on the extreme fore-end of that
roof, before the door. At night I slept, or tried to, on
the couch. An athletic black belonging to some coast
tribe, and educated by my poor predecessor, was the
helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore a
blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and
thought all the world of himself. He was the most
unstable kind of fool I had ever seen. He steered with
no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost
sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject
funk, and would let that cripple of a steamboat get the
sypper hand of him in a minute.

“I was looking down at the sounding-pole, and feel-
img much annoyed to see at each try a little more of it
stick out of that river, when I saw my poleman give up
the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on
the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his

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HEART OF DARKNESS

pole in. He kept hold on it though, and it trailed in
the water. At the same time the fireman, whom I could
also see below me, sat down abruptly before his furnace
and ducked his head. Iwas amazed. Then I had to look
at the river mighty quick, because there was a snag in
the fairway. Sticks, little sticks, were flying about—
thick: they were whizzing before my nose, dropping be-
low me, striking behind me against my pilot-house. All
this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet—
perfectly quiet. I could only hear the heavy splashing
thump of the stern-wheel and the patter of these things.
We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by Jove! We
were being shot at! I stepped in quickly to close the
shutter on the land side. That fool-helmsman, his hands
on the spokes, was lifting his knées high, stamping his
feet, champing his mouth, like a reined-in horse. Con-
found him! And we were staggering within ten feet of
the bank. I had to lean right out to swing the heavy
shutter, and I saw a face amongst the leaves on the
level with my own, looking at me very fierce and steady ;
and then suddenly, as though a veil had been removed
from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled gloom,
naked breasts, arms, legs, glaring eyes,—the bush was
swarming with human limbs in movement, glistening, of
bronze color. The twigs shook, swayed, and rustled, the
arrows flew out of them, and then the shutter came to.
‘Steer her straight,’ I said to the helmsman. He held
his head rigid, face forward; but his eyes rolled, he
kept on lifting and setting down his feet gently, his
mouth foamed a little. ‘Keep quiet!’ I said in a fury.

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HEART OF DARKNESS

I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway
in the wind. I darted out. Below me there was a great
scuffle of feet on the iron deck; confused exclamations;
aa voice screamed, ‘ Can you turn back?’ .I caught sight
of a V-shaped ripple on the water ahead. What? An-
other snag! A fusillade burst out under my feet. The
pilgrims had opened with their Winchesters, and were
‘simply squirting lead into that bush. A deuce of a
Jot of smoke came up and drove slowly forward. I
‘swore at it. Now I couldn’t see the ripple or the snag
either. I stood in the doorway, peering, and the arrows
‘came in swarms. They might have been poisoned, but
they looked as though they wouldn’t kill a cat. The
‘bush began to howl. Our wood-cutters raised a warlike
whoop; the report of a rifle just at my back deafened
me. I glanced over my shoulder, and the pilot-house
was yet full of noise and smoke when I made a dash
at the wheel. The fool-nigger had dropped everything,
to throw the shutter open and let off that Martini-Henry.
He stood before the wide opening, glaring, and I yelled
at him to come back, while I straightened the sudden
twist out of that steamboat. There was no room to
turn even if I had wanted to, the snag was somewhere
very near ahead in that confounded smoke, there
was no time to lose, so I just crowded her into the
bank—right into the bank, where I knew the water
was deep.

“We tore slowly along the overhanging bushes in a
whirl of broken twigs and flying leaves. The fusillade
below stopped short, as I had foreseen it would when

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HEART OF DARKNESS

the squirts got empty. I threw my head back to a glint~-
ing whizz that traversed the pilot-house, in at one shutter-
hole and out at the other. Looking past that mad helms-
man, who was shaking the empty rifle and yelling at
the shore, I saw vague forms of men running bent double,
leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent. Some-
thing big appeared in the air before the shutter, the
rifle went overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly, .
looked at me over his shoulder in an extraordinary, pro-
found, familiar manner, and fell upon my feet. The-
side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what
appeared a long cane clattered round and knocked over:
a little camp-stool. It looked as though after wrench--
ing that thing from somebody ashore he had lost his
balance in the effort. 'The thin smoke had blown away,-
we were clear of the snag, and looking ahead I could see:
that in another hundred yards or so I would be free to-
sheer off, away from the bank; but my feet felt so very
warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had’
‘rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both.
his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a
spear that, either thrown or lunged through the open-
ing, had caught him in the side just below the ribs; the:
blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful’
gash; my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still,.
gleaming dark-red under the wheel; his eyes shone with:
an amazing luster. The fusillade burst out again. He
looked at me anxiously, gripping the spear like some—
thing precious, with an air of being afraid I would try
to take it away from him. I had to make an effort to:

[ 127 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS.

free my eyes from his gaze and attend to the steering.
With one hand I felt above my head for the line of the
steam-whistle, and jerked out screech after screech hur-
riedly. The tumult of angry and warlike yells was
checked instantly, and then from the depths of the woods
went out such a tremulous and prolonged wail of mourn-
ful fear and utter despair as may be imagined to follow
the flight of the last hope from the earth. There was
a great commotion in the bush; the shower of arrows
stopped, a few dropping shots rang out sharply—then
silence, in which the languid beat of the stern-wheel
came plainly to my ears. I put the helm hard a-star-
board at the moment when the pilgrim in pink pyjamas,
very hot and agitated, appeared in the doorway. ‘ The
manager sends me——’ he began in an official tone, and
stopped short. ‘Good God!’ he said, glaring at the
wounded man.

6 We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and
inquiring glance enveloped us both. I declare it looked
as though he would presently put to us some question in
an understandable language; but he died without utter-
ing a sound, without moving a limb, without twitching
a muscle. Only in the very last moment, as though in
response to some sign we could not see, to some whisper
we could not hear, he frowned heavily, and that frown
gave to his black death-mask an inconceivably somber,
brooding, and menacing expression. The luster of in-
quiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness. ‘ Can
you steer?’ I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very
dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he under-

[ 128 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

stood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To
tell you the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change
my shoes and socks. ‘He is dead,’ murmured the fel-
low, immensely impressed. ‘No doubt about it,’ said I,
tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. ‘ And, by the way,
I suppose Mr. Kurtz is dead as well by this time.’

“For the moment that was the dominant thought.
There was a sense of extreme disappointment, as though
I had found out I had been striving after something al-
together without a substance. I couldn’t have been more
_ disgusted if I had traveled all this way for the sole
purpose of talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talking with.

. - I flung one shoe overboard, and became aware
that that was exactly what I had been looking forward
to—a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery
that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but
as discoursing. I didn’t say to myself, ‘Now I will
never see him,’ or ‘ Now I will never shake him by the
hand,’ but, ‘ Now I will never hear him.’ The man pre-
sented himself as a voice. Not of course that I did not
connect him with some sort of action. Hadn’t I been
told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he
had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory _
than all the other agents together? That was not the
point. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and
that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-
eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence,
was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression,

the most contemptible, the pulsating stream ‘of light, or
f 129 ]

Lod

the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and K
HEART OF DARKNESS

fixe deceitful fiow from the heart of an impenetrable
darkness.

“The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that
wiver. I thought, By Jove! it’s all over. We are too
date; he has vanished—the gift has vanished, by means
wf some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that
chap speak after all_—and my sorrow had a startling
extravagance of emotion, even such as I had noticed in
Whe howling sorrow of these savages in the bush. I
wouldnt have felt more of lonely desolation somehow,
jhad I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny
am fife. . . . Why do you sigh in this beastly way,
somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord!
wmusin’t a man ever Here, give me some to-
baceo.” . . .

‘There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match
flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared, worn, hollow,
with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect
of concentrated attention ; and as he took vigorous: draws
at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the
might in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match
went out.

“ Absurd!” he cried. “This is the worst of trying
to tell . . . Here you all a are, each moored with two
ggoud addresses, like a_hulk with two anchors
wound one ‘corner, a policeman round another, excellent
appetites, and temperature normal—you hear—normal
from year’s end to year’s-end.. And you say, Absurd!
Abcard be—exploded! Absurd! My dear boys, what.
@am ‘you expect from a man who out of sheer nervous-

{ 130 |]

 

  

 
HEART OF DARKNESS

ness had just flung overboard a pair of new shoes.
Now I think of it, it is amazing I did not shed tears.
I am, upon the whole, proud of my fortitude. I was
cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable
privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course
I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Ok
yes, I heard more than enough. And I was right, too.
A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And
I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices—all of them:
were so little more than voices—and the memory of that
time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dymg~
vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid,
savage, or simply mean, without any kimd of sense..
Voices, voices—even the girl herself—now- 2

He was silent for a long time.

“T laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,” he.
began suddenly. ‘Girl! What? Did I mention «
girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the:
women I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We
must_help them to stay in that beautiful world of their
pyn,—lest-ours_gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it.
You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr.
Kurtz saying, ‘My Intended.’ You would have per-~
ceived directly then how completely she was out of it.
And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! 'Fhey say
the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this—ah—-
specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had)
patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball
—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—le'—he hadi
withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him,

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HEART OF DARKNESS

got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his
soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some
devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered
favorite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it,
stacks of it. The cld mud shanty was bursting with.it.
You would think there was not a single tusk left either
above or below the ground in the whole country. ‘ Mostly
fossil,’ the manager had remarked disparagingly. It
was no more fossil than I am; but they call it ‘fossil
when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury
the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn’t bury
this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz
from his fate. We filled the steamboat with it, and had
to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could see and enjoy
as long as he could see, because the appreciation of
this favor had remained with him to the last. You should
have heard him say, ‘ My ivory.’ Oh yes, I heard him.
* My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my: y
everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath
in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a
prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixéd
stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but
that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he be-
longed to, how many powers of darkness claimed him
for their own. That was the reflection that made you
creepy all over. It was impossible—it was not good for
one either—trying to imagine. He had taken a high
seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally.
You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid
pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neigh-

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HEART OF DARKNESS

bors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping
delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the
holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums
—how can you imagine what particular region of the
first ages a man’s untrammeled feet may take him into
by the way of soli ice~
_man—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no
warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whisper-
ing of public opinion? These little things make all the
great difference. When they are gone you must fall
back upon your own innate strength, upon your own
capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too
much of a fool to go wrong-—too dull even to know you
are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take
it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the
devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too
much of a devil—I don’t know which. Or you may be
such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether
deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and
' sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place
—and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I
won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one
nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in,
where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with
smells too, by Jove !—breathe dead hippo, so to speak,
and not be contaminated. And there, don’t you see?
your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the
digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—
your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an
- obscure, back-breaking business. And that’s difficult

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HEART OF DARKNESS

enough. Mind, I am not trying 'to excuse or even ex-
plain—I am trying to account to myself for—for—Mr.
Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated
wraith from the back of Nowhere honored me with its
amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This
was because it could speak English to me. The original
Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as
he was good enough to say himself—his sympathies were
én the right place. His mother was half-English, his
father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the
making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most
appropriately, the International Society for the Sup-
pression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the
making of a report, for its future guidance. And he
had written it too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was
eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung,
Ethmk. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found
time for! But this must have been before his—let us
say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at
wertain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites,
which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I
heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you
umderstand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beau-
‘tifal piece of writing. The opening paragraph, how-
sever, in the light of later information, strikes me now
as Ominous. He began with the argument that we whites,
from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘ must
wecessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of
supernatural beings—we approach them with the might
as of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘ By the simple

[ 184 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

exercise of our will we can exert a power for gond
practically unbounded,’ &c., &c. From that poimt. he
soared and took me with him. The peroration was mage-
' gificent, though difficult to remember, you know. it
gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by
an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with em-
thusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence:
—of words—of burning noble words. There were mm
practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases,
unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page,
scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand,
may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It
. was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeat
to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous:
and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky=
*Exterminate all the brutes!’ The curious part wass
that he had apparently forgotten all about that vata-
able postscriptum, because, later on, when he m a sense
came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take
good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was
sure to have in the future a good. influence upon be
career. I had full information about alk these things,
and, besides, as it turned out, I was to: have the care of
his memory. I’ve done enough for it to give me the
indisputable right to lay it, if I choose, for an everlast-
ing rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst all the
sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead eats
of civilization. But then, you see, I can’t choose. He
won’t be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not com-
mom. He had the power to charm or frighten radk-

[ 135 }
HEART OF DARKNESS:

mentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance i his
honor; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims
with bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at
least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that
was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking. .
No; I can’t forget him, though I am not prepared to
affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in
getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully,—
I missed him even while his body was still lying in the
pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing strange
this regret for'a savage who was no more account than
a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see,
he had done something, he had steered; for months I
had him at my back—a help—an instrument. It was
a kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to
look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus
a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became
aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate
profundity of that look he gave me when he received
his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim
of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.
“Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone.
He had no restraint, no restraint—just like Kurtz—a
tree swayed by the wind. As soon as I had put on a dry
pair of slippers, I dragged him out, after first jerking
the spear out of his side, which operation I confess I
performed with my eyes shut tight. His heels leaped
together over the little door-step; his shoulders were
pressed to my breast; I hugged him from behind des-
perately. Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heavier than any

lr 136 j
HEART OF DARKNESS

man on earth, I should imagine. Then without more
ado I tipped him overboard. The current snatched him
as though he had been a wisp of grass, and I saw the ,
body roll over twice before I lost sight of it for ever. -:
All the pilgrims and the manager were then congregated
on the awning-deck about the pilot-house, chattering at
each other like a flock of excited magpics, and there was
a scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude.
What they wanted to keep that body hanging about for
I can’t guess. Embalm it, maybe. But I had also heard
another, and a very ominous, murmur on the deck below.
My friends the wood-cutters were likewise scandalized,
and with a better show of reason—though I admit that
the reason itself was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I
had made up my mind that if my late helmsman was to
be eaten, the fishes alone should have him. He had
been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now
he was dead he might have become a first-class tempta-
tion, and possibly cause some startling trouble. Besides,
I was anxious to take the wheel, the man in pink pyjamas
showing himself a hopeless duffer at the business.
“This I did directly the simple funeral was over. We
were going half-speed, keeping right in the middle of
the stream, and I listened to the talk about me. They
had given up Kurtz, they had given up the station;
Kurtz was dead, and the station had been burnt—and
so on—and so on. The red-haired pilgrim was beside
himself with the thought that at least this poor Kurtz
had been properly revenged. ‘Say! We must have
made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush. Eh?

[137 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

What do you think? Say?’ He positively danced, the
bloodthirsty little gingery beggar. And he had nearly
fainted when he saw the wounded man! I could not
help saying, ‘You made a glorious lot of smoke, any-
how.’ I had seen, from the way the tops of the bushes
rustled and flew, that almost all the shots had gone too
high. You can’t hit anything unless you take aim and
fire from the shoulder; but these chaps fired from the
hip with their eyes shut. The retreat, I maintained—
and I was right—was caused by the screeching of the
steam-whistle. Upon this they forgot Kurtz, and began
to howl at me with indignant protests.

“The manager stood by the wheel murmuring confi-
dentially about the necessity of getting well away down
the river before dark at all events, when I saw in the
distance a clearing on the river-side and the outlines of
some sort of building. ‘ What’s this?’ I asked. He
clapped his hands in wonder. ‘ The station!’ he cried.
I edged in at once, still going half-speed.

“ Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill inter-
spersed with rare trees and perfectly free from under-
growth. A long decaying building on the summit was
half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the
peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and
the woods made a background. There was no inclosure
or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently,
for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in
a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends orna-
mented with round carved balls. The rails, or what-
ever there had been between, had disappeared. Of

[ 138 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

course the forest surrounded all that. The river-bank
was clear, and on the water-side I saw a white man under
a hat like a cart-wheel beckoning persistently with his
whole arm. Examining the edge of the forest above and
below, I was almost certain I could see movements—
human forms gliding here and there. I steamed past
prudently, then stopped the engines and let her drift
down. The man on the shore began to shout, urging us
to land. ‘ We have been attacked,’ screamed the man-
ager. ‘I know—I know. It’s all right,’ yelled back the
other, as cheerful as you please. ‘Come along. It’s all
right. I am glad.’

“ His aspect reminded me of something I had seen—
something funny I had seen somewhere. As I maneuvered
to get alongside, I was asking myself, ‘ What does this
fellow look like?’ Suddenly I got it. He looked like a
harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff
that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with
patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yel-
low,—patches on the back, patches on front, patches on
elbows, on knees; colored binding round his jacket, scar-
let edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sun-
shine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat
withal, because you could see how beautifully all this
patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face, very
fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue
eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that
open countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-
swept plain. ‘ Look out, captain!’ he cried; ‘ there’s a
snag lodged in here last night.? What! Another

[ 1389 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

snag? I confess I swore shamefully. I had nearly holed
my cripple, to finish off that charming trip. The harle-
quin on the bank turned his little pug nose up to me.
‘You English?’ he asked, all smiles. ‘Are you?’ I
shouted from the wheel. The smiles vanished, and he
shook his head as if sorry for my disappointment. Then
he brightened up. ‘Never mind!’ he cried encourag-
‘ingly. “Are we in time?’ I asked. ‘ He is up there,’
he replied, with a toss of the head up the hill, and
becoming gloomy all of a sudden. His face was like
the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the
next.

“When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of
them armed to the teeth, had gone to the house, this
chap came on board. ‘I say, I don’t like this. These
natives are in the bush,’ I said. He assured me earnestly
it was all right. ‘They are simple people,’ he added;
‘well, Iam glad you came. It took me all my time to
keep them off.’ ‘ But you said it was all right,’ I cried.
* Oh, they meant no harm,’ he said; and as I stared he
corrected himself, ‘Not exactly.? Then vivaciously,
-* My faith, your pilot-house wants a clean up!’ In the
next breath he advised me to keep enough steam on the
boiler to blow the whistle in case of any trouble. ‘ One
good screech will do more for you than all your rifles.
They are simple people,’ he repeated. He rattled away
at such a rate he quite overwhelmed me. He seemed to
be trying to make up for lots of silence, and actually
hinted, laughing, that such was the case. ‘Don’t you
talk with Mr. Kurtz?’ I said. ‘You don’t talk with

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HEART OF DARKNESS

that man—you listen to him,’ he exclaimed with scvere
exaltation. ‘ But now: ° He waved his arm, and in
the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost depths of
despondency. In a moment he came up again with a
jump, possessed himself of both my hands, shook them
continuously, while he gabbled: ‘ Brother sailor .

 

honor . . . pleasure ... . delight . . . introduce
myself . . . Russian . . . son of an arch-priest
. Government of Tambov . . . What? Tobacco!

Hinglich tobacco; the excellent English tobacco! Now,
that’s brotherly. Smoke? Where’s a sailor that does
not smoke? ’

“The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out he
had run away from school, had gone to sea in a Russian
ship; ran away again; served some time in English
ships; was now reconciled with the arch-priest. He made
a point of that. ‘But when one is young one must see
things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.’
‘Here!’ I interrupted. ‘ You can never tell! Here I
have met Mr. Kurtz,’ he said, youthfully solemn and
reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears
he had persuaded a Dutch trading-house on the coast
to fit him out with stores and goods, and had started for
the interior with a light heart, and no more idea of what
would happen to him than a baby. He had been wan-
dering about that river for nearly two years alone, cut
off from everybody and everything. ‘I am not so young
as I look. I am twenty-five,’ he said. ‘ At first old Van
Shuy.en would tell me to go to the devil,’ he narrated
with keen enjoyment; ‘ but I stuck to him, and talked

[ 141 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

and talked, till at last he got afraid I would talk the
hind-leg off his favorite dog, so he gave me some cheap
things and a few guns, and told me he hoped he would
never see my face again. Good old Dutchman, Van
Shuyten. I’ve sent him one small lot of ivory a year
ago, so that he can’t call me a little thief when I get
back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don’t care.
I had some wood stacked for you. That was my old
Louse. Did you see?’

“T gave him Towson’s book. He made as though he
would kiss me, but restrained himself. ‘The only book
I had left, and I thought I had lost it,’ he said, looking
at it ecstatically. ‘So many accidents happen to a man
going about alone, you know. Canoes get upset some-
times—-and sometimes you’ve gov to clear out so quick
when the people get angry.” He thumbed the pages.
*You made notes in Russian?’ I asked. He nodded.
‘I thought they were written in cipher,’ I said. He
laughed, then became serious. ‘I had lots of trouble
to keep these people off,’ he said. ‘Did they want to
kill you? ’ I asked. ‘ Oh no!’ he cried, and checked him-
self. ‘ Why did they attack us?’ I pursued. He hesi-
tated, then said shamefacedly, ‘ They don’t want him to
go.” “Don’t they?’ I said, curiously. He nodded a
nod full of mystery and wisdom. ‘I tell you,’ he cried,
* this man has enlarged my mind.” He opened his arms
wide, staring at me with his little blue eyes that were
perfectly round.”

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HEART OF DARKNESS

Ill

“JT looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he
was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded
from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His
very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and alto-
gether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It
was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had sue-
ceeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain
—why he did not instantly disappear. ‘I went a little
farther,’ he said, ‘ then still a little farther—till I had
gone so far that I don’t know how I'll ever get back.
Never mind. Plenty time. I can manage. You take
Kurtz away quick—quick—I tell you.’ The glamour of
youth enveloped his particolored rags, his destitution, his
Joneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wander-
ings. For months—for years—his life hadn’t been
worth a day’s purchase; and there he was gallantly,
thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely
by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting
audacity: I was seduced into something like admiration
—like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him
unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilder-
ness but space to breathe in and to push on through.
His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the great-
est possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If
the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of
adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this
be-patched youth. I almost envied him the possession

[ 143 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have con-
sumed all thought of self so completely, that, even while
he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he—the
man before your eyes—who had gone through these
things. I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz,
though. He had not meditated over it. It came to him,
and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism. I must
say that to me it appeared about the most dangerous
thing in every way he had come upon so far.

“They had come together unavoidably, like two ships
becalmed near each other, and lay rubbing sides at last.
I suppose Kurtz wanted an audience, because on a cer-
tain occasion, when encamped in the forest, they had
talked all night, or more probably Kurtz had talked.
‘We talked of everything,’ he said, quite transported
at the recollection. ‘I forgot there was such a thing
as sleep. The night did not seem to last an hour. Every-
thing! Everything! . . . Of love too.’ ‘Ah, he
talked to you of love!’ I said, much amused. ‘ It isn’t
what you think,’ he cried, almost passionately. ‘It wa»
in general. He made me see things—things.’

“ He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time,
and the headman of my wood-cutters, lounging near by,
turned upon him his heavy and glittering eyes. I looked
around, and I don’t know why, but I assure you that
never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle,
the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hope-
less and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so
pitiless to human weakness. ‘ And, ever since, you have
been with him, of course?’ I said.

[ 144 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

“On the contrary. It appears their intercourse had
been very much broken by various causes. He had, as
he informed me proudly, managed to nurse Kurtz
through two illnesses (he alluded to it as you would to
some risky feat), but as a rule Kurtz wandered alone,
far in the depths of the forest. ‘ Very often coming to
this station, I had to wait days and days before he would
turn up,’ he said. ‘Ah, it was worth waiting for!—
sometimes.’ ‘ What was he doing? exploring or what?’
TI asked. ‘Oh yes, of course;’ he had discovered lots of
villages, a lake too—he did not. know exactly in what
direction; it was dangerous to inquire too much—but
mostly is expeditions had been for ivory. ‘ But he had
no goods to trade with by that time,’ I objected. ‘ There’s
a good lot of cartridges left even yet,’ he answered, look-
ing away. ‘To speak plainly, he raided the country,’
Isaid. He nodded. ‘ Not alone, surely!’ He muttered
something about the villages round that lake. ‘ Kurtz
got the tribe to follow him, did he?’ I suggested. He
fidgeted a little. ‘They adored him,’ he said. The tone
of these words was so extraordinary that I looked at
him searchingly.' It was curious to see his mingled eager-
ness and reluctance to speak of Kurtz. The man filled
his life, occupied his thoughts, swayed his emotions.
‘ What can you expect?’ he burst out; ‘ he came to them
with thunder and lightning, you know—and they had
never seen anything like it—and very terrible. He could
be very terrible. You can’t judge Mr. Kurtz as you
would an ordinary man. No, no, no! Now—just to
give you an idea—I don’t mind telling you, he wanted

[ 145 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

to shoot me too one day—but I don’t judge him.’
“Shoot you!” I cried. ‘What for?’ ‘ Well, I had a
small lot of ivory the chief of that village near my house
gave me. You see I used to shoot game for them. Well,
he wanted it, and wouldn’t hear reason. He declared
he would shoot me unless I gave him the ivory and then
cleared out of the country, because he could do so, and
had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth to
prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased. And it
was true too. I gave him the ivory. What did I care!
But I didn’t clear out. No, no. I couldn’t leave him.
I had to be careful, of course, till we got friendly again
for a time. He had his second illness then. Afterwards
I had to keep out of the way; but I didi’t mind. He
was living for the most part in those villages on the
lake. When he came down to the river, sometimes he
would take to me, and sometimes it was better for me
to be careful. This man suffered too much. He hated
all this, and somehow he couldn’t get away. When I had
a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was
time; I offered to go back with him. And he would
say yes, and then he would remain; go off on another
ivory hunt; disappear for weeks ; forget himself amongst
these. people—forget himself—you know.’ ‘ Why! he’s
mad,’ I said. He protested indignantly. Mr. Kurtz
couldn’t be mad. If I had heard him talk, only two
days ago, I wouldn’t dare hint at such a thing.

I had taken up my binoculars while we talked and
was looking at the shore, sweeping the limit of the
forest at each side and at the back of the house. The

[ 146 }
HEART OF DARKNESS

consciousness of there being people in that bush, so silent,

so quiet—as silent and quiet as the ruined house on the,
hill—made me uneasy. There was no sign on the face

of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much |
told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations, com-

pleted by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending ;
in deep sighs. The woods were unmoved, like a mask—
heavy, like the closed door of a prison—they looked with
their air of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation,
of unapproachable silence. The Russian was explaining
to me that it was only lately that Mr. Kurtz had come
down to the river, bringing along with him all the fight-
ing men of that lake tribe. He had been absent for.
several months—getting himself adored, I suppose—and
had come down unexpectedly, with the intention to all
appearance of making a raid either across the river or
down stream. Evidently the appetite for more ivory
had got the better of the—what shall I say?—less ma-
terial aspirations. However he had got much worse
suddenly. ‘I heard he was lying helpless, and so I came
up—took my chance,’ said the Russian. ‘Oh, he is
bad, very bad.’ I directed my glass to the house. There
were no signs of life, but there was the ruined roof,
the long mud wall peeping above the grass, with three
little square window-holes, no two of the same size; all
this brought within reach of my hand, as it were. And
then I made a brusque movement, and one of the remain-
ing posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field
of my glass. You remember I told you I had been
struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamenta-

P 147 |

'
HEART OF DARKNESS

tion, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place.
Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result
was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow.
Then I went carefully, from post to post with my glass,
and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not
ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and
puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and
also for the vultures if there had been any looking down
from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were
industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would
have been even more impressive, those heads on the
stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house.
Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way.
I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back
I had given was really nothing but a movement of sur-
prise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you
know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen—
and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eye-
lids,—a, head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole,
and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white
line of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously
at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.

“TI am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact the
manager said afterwards that Mr. Kurtz’s methods had
ruined the district. I have no opinion on that point,
but I want you clearly to understand that there was
nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there.
They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the
gratification of his various lusts, that there was some-
thing wanting in him—some small.matter which, when

[ 148 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

the pressing need arose, could not be found under his '
magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this de-
ficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came
to him at last—only at the very last. But the wilder-
ness had found him out early, and had taken on him
a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think
it had whispered to him things about himself which he
did not know, things of which he had no conception till
he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper
had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly
within him because he was hollow at the core. . . . I
put down the glass, and the head that had appeared
near enough to be spoken to seemed at once to have
leaped away from me into inaccessible distance.

“The admirer of Mr. Kurtz was a bit crestfallen. In
a hurried, indistinct voice he began to assure me he had
not dared to take these—say, symbols—down. He was
not afraid of the natives; they would not stir till Mr.
Kurtz gave the word. His ascendency was extraor-
dinary. The camps of these people surrounded the
place, and the chiefs came every day to see him. They
would crawl. . . . ‘I don’t want to know anything of
the ceremonies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz,’ I
shouted. Curious, this feeling that came over me that
such details would be more intolerable than those heads
drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz’s windows. After
all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one
bound to have been transported into some lightless
region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated
savagery was a positive relief, being something that had

[ 149 7
HEART OF DARKNESS
a right to exist—obviously—in the sunshine. The
young man looked at me with surprise. I suppose it
did not occur to him that Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine.
He forgot I hadn’t heard any of these splendid mono-
logues on, what was it? on love, justice, conduct of life
—or what not. If it had come to crawling before Mr.
Kurtz, he crawled as much as the veriest savage of them
all. I had no idea of the conditions, he said: these heads
were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by
laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition
I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, work-
ers—and these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked
very subdued to me on their sticks. ‘ You don’t know how
such a life tries a man like Kurtz,’ cried Kurtz’s last
disciple. ‘Well, and you?’ I said. ‘I! I! I ama
simple man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing
from anybody. How can you compare me to . . .?”
His feelings were too much for speech, and suddenly he
broke down. ‘I don’t understand,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve
been doing my best to keep him alive, and that’s enough.
'I had no hand in all this. I have no abilities. There
‘hasn’t been a drop of medicine or.a mouthful of invalid
food for months here. He was shamefully abandoned. °
A man like this, with such ideas. Shamefully!
Shamefully! I—I—-haven’t slept for the last ten
hights. . . .”

“ His voice lost itself in the calm of the evening. The
long shadows of the forest had slipped down hill while
we talked, had gone far beyond the ruined hovel, be-
yénd the symbolic row of stakes. All this was in the

[ 150 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

gloom, while we down there were yet in the sunshine;
and the stretch of the river abreast of the clearing
glittered in a still and dazzling splendor, with a murky
and over-shadowed bend above and below. Not a living
soul was seen on the shore. The bushes did not rustle.

‘Suddenly round the corner of the house a group of
men appeared, as though they had come up from the
ground. They waded waist-deep in the grass, in a
compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher in their
midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a
cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp
arrow flying straight to the very heart of the land; and,
as if by enchantment, streams of human beings—of
naked human beings—with spears in their hands, with
bows, with shields, with wild glances and savage move-
ments, were poured into the clearing by the dark-faced
and pensive forest. The bushes shook, the grass swayed
for a time, and then everything stood still in attentive
immobility.

“* Now, if he does not say the right thing to them we
are all done for,’ said the Russian at my elbow. The
knot of men with the stretcher had stopped too, half-way
to the steamer, as if petrified. I saw the man on the
stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm, above
the shoulders of the bearers. ‘‘ Let us hope that the
man who can talk so well of love in general will find
some particular reason to spare us this time,’ I said. I
resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as
if to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had
been a dishonoring necessity. I could not hear a sound,

[151 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

but through my glasses I saw the thin arm extended
commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that
apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that
nodded with grotesque jerks. Kurtz—Kurtz—that
means short in German—don’t it? Well, the name was
as true as everything else in his life—and death. He
looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen
off, and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling
as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his
ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as
though an animated image of death carved out of old
ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a
motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering
bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him
a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to
swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
A deep voice reached me faintly. He must have been
shouting. He fell back suddenly. The stretcher shook
as the bearers staggered forward again, and almost at’
the same time I noticed that the crowd of savages was
vanishing without any perceptible movement of retreat,
as if the forest that had ejected these beings so suddenly
had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn in a
long aspiration.

“Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his
arms—two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver-
carbine—the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter. The
manager bent over him murmuring as he walked beside
his head. They laid him down in one of the little cabins -
—just a rcom fcr a bed-place and a camp-stool or two,

[ 152 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

you know. We had brought his belated correspondence,
and a lot of torn envelopes and open letters littered his
hed. His hand roamed feebly amongst these papers. I
was struck by the fire of his eyes and the composed
languor of his expression. It was not so much the ex-
haustion of disease. He did not seem in pain. This
shadow looked satiated and calm, as though for the
moment it had had its fill of all the emotions.

“He rustled one of the letters, and looking straight.
in my face said, ‘I am glad.’ Somebody had been writ-
ing to him about me. These special recommendations
were turning up again. The volume of tone he emitted
without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his
lips, amazed me. A voice! a voice! It was grave, pro-
found, vibrating, while the man did net seem capable
of a whisper. However, he had enough strength in
him—factitious no doubt—to very nearly make an end
of us, as you shall hear directly.

“The manager appeared silently in the doorway; I
stepped out at once and he drew the curtain after me.
The Russian, eyed curiously by the pilgrims, was star-
ing at the shore. I followed the direction of his glance.

“ Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance,
flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the
forest, and near the river two bronze figures, leaning
on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-
dresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque
repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore
moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman.

“She walked with measured steps, draped in striped

[ 153 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a
slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She
carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape
of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass
wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny
cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck;
bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung
about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She
must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon
her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnifi-
cent; there was something ominous and stately in her
deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen
suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense
wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mys-
terious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it
had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and
passionate soul.

““ She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, daa faced
us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face
had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of
dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling,
half-shaped resolve. She stood’ looking at us without
a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brood-
ing over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed,
and then she made a step forward. There was a low
jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draper-
ies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The
young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims mur-
mured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life
had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her

[ 154 }
HEART OF DARKNESS

glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw
them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncon-
trollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time
the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around
on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy em-
brace. A formidable silence hung over the scene.

“She turned away slowly, walked on, following the
bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only
her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets.
before she disappeared.

“ «Tf she had offered to come aboard I really think I
would have tried to shoot her,’ said the man of patches,
nervously. ‘I had been risking my life every day for
the last fortnight to keep her out of the house. She
got in one day and kicked up a row about those miser-
able rags I picked up in the storeroom to mend my clothes
with. I wasn’t decent. At least it must have been that,
for she talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour, point-
ing at me now and then. I don’t understand the dia-
lect of this tribe. Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt
too il] that day to care, or there would have been mis-
chief. I don’t understand. . . . No—it’s too much
for me. Ah, well, it’s all over now.’

“ At this moment I heard Kurtz’s deep voice behind
' the curtain, * Save me !—save the ivory, you mean. Don’t
tell me. Save me! Why, I’ve had to save you. You
are interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so
sick as you would like to believe. Never mind. Ill
carry my ideas out yet—I will return. I'll show you
what can be done. You with your little peddling no-

[ 155 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

tions—you are interfering with me. I will return, .

Lec

““'The manager came out. He did me the honor to
take me under the arm and lead me aside. ‘ He is very
low, very low,’ he said. He considered it necessary to
sigh, but neglected to be consistently sorrowful. ‘ We
have done all we could for him—haven’t we? But there
is no disguising the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more
harm than good to the Company. He did not see the
time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cau-
tiously—that’s my principle. We must be cautious yet.
The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable ! Upen
the whole, the trade will suffer. I don’t deny there is
a remarkable quantity of ivory—mostly fossil. We must
save it, at all events—but look how precarious the posi-
tion is—and why? Because the method is unsound.’
“Do you,’ said I, looking at the shore, ‘ call it “ unsound
method ”?’ ‘Without doubt,’ he exclaimed, hotly.
“Don’t you?? . . ! ‘No method at all,’ I murmured
after a while. ‘ Exactly,’ he exulted. ‘I anticipated
this. Shows a complete want of judgment. It is my
duty to point it out in the proper quarter.’ ‘ Oh,’ said
I, ‘that fellow—what’s his name?—the brickmaker, will
make a readable report for you.” He appeared con-
founded for a moment. It seemed to me I had never

breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally .

to Kurtz for relief—positively for relief. ‘ Neverthe-
less I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,’ I said with
emphasis. He started, dropped on me a cold heavy
glance, said very quietly, ‘ He was,’ and turned his back

{ 156 ]

\
HEART OF DARKNESS

on me. My hour of favor was over; I found myself
lumped along with Kurtz as a partisan of methods for
which the time was not ripe: I was unsound! Ah! but it
was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.

“T had turned to the wilderness really, not to BL:

Kurtz, who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried.
And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were
buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I
felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the
smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victoricus
corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night. .
The Russian tapped me on the shoulder. I heard him:
mumbling and stammering something about ‘brother
seaman—couldn’t conceal—knowledge of matters that.
would affect Mr. Kurtz’s reputation.” I waited. For
him evidently Mr. Kurtz was not in his grave; I suspect
that for him Mr. Kurtz was one of the immortals.
‘Well!’ said I at last, ‘speak out. As it happens, I am
Mr. Kurtz’s friend—in a way.’

“ He stated with a good deal of formality that had
we not been ‘of the same profession,’ he would have-
kept the matter to himself without regard to conse-
quences. ‘He suspected there was an active ill-will to-
wards him on the part of these white men tha a
* You are right,’ I said, remembering a certain conversa-
ticn I had overheard. ‘The manager thinks you ought
to be hanged.” He showed a concern at this intelligence
which amused me at first. ‘I had better get out of the
way quietly,’ he said, earnestly. ‘I can do no more for
Kurtz now, and they would soon find some excuse.

[ 157 ]

 
HEART OF DARKNESS

What’s to stop them? There’s a military post three hun-
dred miles from here.’ ‘ Well, upon my word,’ said I,
‘perhaps you had better go if you have. any friends
amongst the savages near by.’ ‘ Plenty,’ he said. ‘ They
are simple people—and I want nothing, you know.’
He stood biting his lip, then: ‘ I don’t want any harm to
happen to these whites here, but of course I was think-
ing of Mr. Kurtz’s reputation—but you are ‘a brother
seaman and: 7 ‘All right,’ said I, after a time.
‘Mr. Kurtz’s reputation is safe with me.’ I did not
know how truly I spoke.

“He informed me, lowering his voice, that it was.
Kurtz who had ordered the attack to be made on the
steamer. ‘ He hated sometimes the idea of being taken
away—and then again. . . . But I don’t understand
these matters. Iamasimple man. He thought it would
scare you away—that you would give it up, thinking
him dead. I could not stop him. Oh, I had an awful
time of it this last month.’ ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘ He is
all right now.’ ‘ Yé-e-es,’ he muttered, not very con-
vinced apparently. ‘ Thanks,’ said I; ‘I shall keep my
eyes open.’ ‘ But quiet—eh?’ he urged, anxiously. ‘ It
would be awful for his reputation if anybody here——’
I promised a complete discretion with great gravity. ‘I
have a canoe and three black fellows waiting not very
far. Iam off. Could you give me a few Martini-Henry
cartridges?’ I could, and did, with proper secrecy. He
helped himself, with a wink at me, to a handful of my
tobacco. ‘ Between sailors—you know—good English
tobacco.’ At the door of the pilot-house he turned round

[ 158 ]

 
HEART OF DARKNESS

—‘I say, haven’t you a pair of shoes you could spare? *
He raised one leg. ‘Look.’ The soles were tied with
knotted strings sandal-wise under his bare fect. I rooted
out an old pair, at which he looked with admiration be-
fore tucking it under his left arm. One of his pockets
(bright red) was bulging with cartridges, from the
other (dark blue) peeped ‘ 'Towson’s Inquiry,’ &c., &c.
He seemed to think himself ‘excellently well equipped
for a renewed encounter with the wilderness. ‘ Ah! I'll
never, never meet such a man again. You ought to
have heard him recite poetry—his own too it was, he told
me. Poetry!’ He rolled his eyes at the recollection
of these delights. * Oh, he enlarged my mind!’ ‘ Good-
by,’ said I. He shook hands and vanished in the night.
Sometimes I ask myself whether I had ever really seen
him—whether it was possible to meet such a phenome-
non! .

“When I woke up shortly after midnight his warning
came to my mind with its hint of danger that seemed,
in the starred darkness, real enough to make me get
up for the purpose of having a look round. On the
hill a big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked
corner of the station-house. One of the agents with
a picket of a few of our blacks, armed for the purpose,
was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep within the
forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and
rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes
of intense blackness, showed the exact position of the
camp where Mr. Kurtz’s adorers were keeping their un-
easy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled

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HEART OF DARKNESS

the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. 4
steady droning sound of many men chanting each to
himself some weird incantation came out from the black,
flat wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes
out of a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect upon
my half-awake senses. I believe I dozed off leaning
over the rail, till an abrupt burst of yells, an over-
whelming outbreak of a pent-up and mysterious frenzy,
woke me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut short
all at once, and the low droning went on with an effect
of audible and soothing silence. I glanced casually inte
the little cabin. A light was burning within, but Mr.
Kurtz was not there.

“T think I would have raised an outcry if I had be-
lieved my eyes. But I didn’t believe them at first—the
thing seemed so impossible. The fact is I was completely
unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror,
unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger.
What miade this emotion so overpowering was—how shall
I define it?—the moral shock I received, as if something
altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious
to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly. This
lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and
then the usual’ sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the
possibility of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or some-
thing of the kind, which I saw impending, was positively
welcome and composing. It pacified me, in fact, so
much, that I did not raise an alarm.

““'There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster
and sleeping on a chair on deck within three feet of

[ 160 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

me. The yells had not awakened him; he snored very
slightly; I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore.
I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should
never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to
the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to deal
with this shadow by myself alone,—and to this day I
don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any-
one the peculiar blackness of that experience.

“ As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail—a broad
trail through the grass. I remember the exultation with
which I said to myself, ‘ He can’t walk—he is crawling
on all-fours—I’ve got him.’ The grass was wet with
dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I
had some vague notion of falling upon him and giving
him a drubbing. I don’t know. I had some imbecile
thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat ob.
truded herself upon my memory as a most improper
person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair
I saw a row of pilgrims squirting lead in the air oui
of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I woulé
never get back to the steamer, and imagined myself
living alone and unarmed in the woods to an advanced
age. Such silly things—you know. And I remember
I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of
my heart, and was pleased at its calm regularity.

“T kept to the track though—then stopped to listen.
The night was very clear: a dark blue space, sparkling
with dew and starlight, in which black things stcod
very still. I thought I could see a kind of motion ahead
of. me. I was strangely cocksure of everything that

[ 161 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

night. I actually left the track and ran in a wide semi-
circle (I verily believe chuckling to myself) so as to
get in front of that stir, of that motion I had seen—
if indeed I had seen anything. I was circumventing
Kurtz as though it had been a boyish game.

* T came upon him, and, if he had not heard me coming,
I would have fallen over him too, but he got up in
time. He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct, like a
vapor exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty
and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed
between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued
from the forest. I had cut him off cleverly; but when
actually confronting him I seemed to come to my senses,
I saw the danger in its right proportion. It was by
no means over yet. Suppose he began to shout? Though
he could hardly stand, there was still plenty of vigor
in his voice. ‘ Go away—hide yourself,’ he said, in that
profound tone. It was very awful. I glanced back.
We were within thirty yards from the nearest fire. A
black figure stood up, strode on long. black legs, waving
long black arms, across the glow. It had horns—ante-
lope horns, I think—on its head. Some sorcerer, some
witch-man, no doubt: it looked fiend-like enough. ‘ Do
you know what you are doing?’ I whispered. ‘ Per-
fectly,” he answered, raising his voice for that single
word: it sounded to me far off and yet loud, like a hail
through a speaking-trumpet. If he makes a row we
are lost, I thought to myself. This clearly was not a
case for fisticuffs, even apart from the very natural
aversion I hac to beat that Shadow—this wandering and

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tormented thing. ‘ You will be lost,’ I said— utterly
lost.” One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration,
you know. I did say the right thing, though indeed
he could not have been more irretrievably lost than he
was at this very moment, when the foundations of our
intimacy were being laid—to endure—to ‘endure—even
to the end—even beyond.

“*T had immense plans,’ he muttered irresolutely.
‘Yes,’ said I; ‘ but if you try to shout I’ll smash your
head with * there was not a stick or a stone near. ‘I
will throttle you for good,’ I corrected myself. ‘I was
on the threshold of great things,’ he pleaded, in a voice
of longing, with a wistfulness of tone that made my
blood run cold. ‘ And now for this stupid scoundre ;
‘Your success in Europe is assured in any case,’ I af-
firmed, steadily. I did not want to have the throttling
of him, you understand—and indeed it would have been
very little use for any practical purpose. I tried to
break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilder-
ness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by
the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the
memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone,
I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the
forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb
of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone
had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of
permitted aspirations. And, don’t you see, the terror

of the position was not in being knocked on the head
—though I hada very lively sense of that danger too
—but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom

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I could not appeal in the name of anything high’ or low.
I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him—himself—
his own exalted and incredible degradation. ‘There was
nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He
had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the
man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was
alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood
on the ground or floated in the air. I’ve been telling
you what we said—repeating the phrases we pronounced,
—hbut what’s the good? They were common everyday
words,—the familiar, vague sounds exchanged on every
waking day of life. But what of that? They had be-
hind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of
words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in night-
mares. Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a
soul, Iam the man. And I wasn’t arguing with a luna-
tic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was per-
fectly clear—concentrated, it is true, upon himself with
horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only
chance—barring, of course, the killing him there and
then, which wasn’t so good, on account of unavoidable
noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilder-
ness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell
you, it had gone mad. I had—for my sins, I suppose—
to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No
eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief
in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled
with himself, too. I saw it,—I heard it. I saw the in-
conceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no
faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. I

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HEART OF DARKNESS

kept my head pretty well; but when I had him at last
stretched on the couch, I wiped my forehead, while my
legs shook under me as though I had carried half a
ton on my back down that hill. And yet I had only
supported him, his bony arm clasped round my neck
——and he was not much heavier than a child.
' “ When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose
presence behind the curtain of trees I had been acutely
conscious all the time, flowed out of the woods again,
filled the clearing, covered the slope with a mass of naked,
breathing, quivering, brenze bodies. I steamed up a
bit, then swung down-stream, and two thousand eyes
followed the evolutions of the splashing, thumping,
fierce river-demon beating the water with its terrible tail
and breathing black smoke into the air. In front .of
the first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with
bright red earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro
restlessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the
river, stamped their feet, nodded their hornéd heads,
swayed their scarlet bodies ; they shook towards the fierce
river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin
with a pendent tail—something that looked like a dried
gourd; they shouted periodically together strings of
amazing words that resembled no sounds of human lJan-
guage; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, inter-
rupted suddenly, were like the response of some satanic
litany.

“We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was
more air there. Lying on the couch, he stared through
the open shutter. There was an eddy in the mass of

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human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and
tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream.
She put out her hands, shouted something, and all that
wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of
articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.

“*Do you understand this?’ I asked.

“He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing
eyes, with a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate.
He made no answer, but I saw a smile, a smile of inde-
finable meaning, appear on his colorless lips that a mo-
ment after twitthed convulsively. ‘Do I not?’ he said
slowly, gasping, as if the words had been torn out of
him by a supernatural power.

“T pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this
because I saw the pilgrims on deck getting out their
rifles with an air of anticipating a jolly lark. At the
sudden screech there was = movement of abject terror
through that wedged mass of bodies. ‘ Don’t! don’t!
you frighten them away,’ cried someone on deck dis-
consolately. I pulled the string time after time. They
broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they swerved,
they dodged the flying terror of the sound. The three
red chaps had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as
though they had been shot dead. Only the barbarous
and superb woman did not so much as flinch, and
stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the
somber and glittering river.

“And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck
started their little fun, and I could see nothing more
for smoke.

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HEART OF DARKNESS

“The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of
darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice
the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz’s life was
running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart
into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very
placid, he had no vital anxieties now, he took us both
in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance: the ‘ affair ”
had come off as well as could be wished. I saw the time
approaching when I would be left alone of the party of
‘unsound method.’ The pilgrims looked upon me with
disfavor. I was, so to speak, numbered with the dead.
It is strange how I accepted this unforeseen partner-
ship, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the
tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phan-
toms.

“ Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep
to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in
the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness
of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The
wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy
images now—images of wealth and fame revolving
absequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble
and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my
career, my ideas—these were the subjects for the occa-
sional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of
the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow
sham, whose fate it was to, be buried presently in the
mold of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and
the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated
fought for the possession of that soul satiated with

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. primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham dis-
tinction, of all the appearances of success and power.

“ Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired
to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return
from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to ac-
complish great things. ‘You show them you have in
you something that is really profitable, and then there
will be no limits to the recognition of your ability,’ he
would say. ‘Of course you must take care of the mo-
tives—right motives—always.’? The long reaches that
were like one and the same reach, monotonous bends that
were exactly alike, slipped past the steamer with their
multitude of secular trees looking patiently after this
grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of
change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings.
I looked ahead—piloting. * Close the shutter,’ said
Kurtz suddenly one day; ‘I can’t bear to look at this.’
I did so. There was a silence. ‘Oh, but I will wring
your heart yet!’ he cried at the invisible wilderness.

“We broke down—as I had expected—and had to lie
up for repairs at the head of an island. This delay
was the first thing that shook Kurtz’s confidence. One

merning he gave me a packet of papers and a photo- — :

yraph,—the lot tied together with a shoe-string. ‘ Keep
this for me,’ he said. ‘This noxious fool’ (meaning
the manager) ‘ is capable of prying into my boxes when
I am not looking.’ In the afternoon I saw him. He
was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew
quietly, but I heard him mutter, ‘ Live rightly, die,
die . . .? I listened. There was nothing more. Was

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he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a frag-
ment of a phrase from some newspaper article? He had
been writing for the papers and meant to do so again,
‘for the furthering of my ideas. It’s a duty.’

‘“‘ His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him
as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom
of a precipice where the sun never shines. But I had
not much time to give him, because I was helping the
engine-driver to take to pieces the. leaky cylinders, to
straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in other such
matters. I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings,
nuts, bolts, ‘spanners, hammers, ratchet-drills—things I
abominate, because I don’t get on with them. I tended
the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I toiled
wearily in a wretched scrap-heap—unless I had the
shakes too_bad to stand.

“ One evening coming in with a candle I was startled
to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here
in the dark waiting for death.’ The light was within
a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘ Oh,
nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.

“ Anything approaching the change that came over
his features I have never seen before, and hope never
to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated.
It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that
ivory face the expression cf somber pride, of ruthless
power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless
despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of
desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme
moment of complete kitowledge? He cried in a whisper

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{
HEART OF DARKNESS

at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a

cry that was no more than a breath—

““¢The horror! The horror!’

“T blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pil-
grims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my
place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give
me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored.
He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his
sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. - A con-
tinuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp,
upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly
the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the
doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt—
“© Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’

“ All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and
went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered
brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There
was a lamp in there—light, don’t you know—and outside
it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near
the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment
upon the adventures of his soul on this earth. The
voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am
of course aware that next day the pilgrims buried some-
thing in a muddy hole. |

** And then they very nearly buried me.

“* However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz
there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the
nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to
Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing
life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic

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HEART OF DARKNESS

for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it
is some knowledge of yourself—-that comes too late—a
crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with
death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
It takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing
underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators,
without clamor, without glory, without the great desire
of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly
atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in
your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.
If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life isa
greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was
within a hair’s-breadth of the last opportunity for pro-
nouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably
I would have nothing to say. This is the reason why I
affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had some-
thing to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the
edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his
stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was
wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing
enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the dark-
ness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The
horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this
was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor,
it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its
whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth
—the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it
is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of
grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a
careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even

[17 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem
to have lived through. True, he had made that last
stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been
permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And per-
haps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wis-
dom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed
into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step
over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! TI like to
think my summing-up would not have been a word of
careless contempt. Better his cry—much better. It was
an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable
defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfac-
tions. But it was a victory! That is why I have re-
mained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond,
when a long time after I heard once more, not his own
voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown
to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of
crystal.

“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period
of time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering
wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world
that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself
back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people
hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from
each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp:
their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and
silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They
were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an
irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could
not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing,

f 172}
HEART OF DARKNESS

which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals
going about their business in the assurance of perfect
safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flaunt-
ings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to
comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten
them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself
from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid impor-
tance. I dare say I was not very well at that time. I
tottered about the streets—there were various affairs to
settle—grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable per-
sons. I admit my behavior was inexcusable, but then my
temperature was seldom normal in these days. My dear
aunt’s endeavors to ‘ nurse up my strength ’ seemed alto-
gether beside the mark. It was not my strength that
wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted
soothing. I kept the bundle of papers given me by
Kurtz, not knowing exactly what to do with it. His
mother had died lately, watched over,.as I was told, by
his Intended. A clean-shaved man, with an official
manner and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, called on
me one day and made inquiries, at first circuitous, after-
wards suavely pressing, about what he was pleased to
denominate certain ‘documents.’ I was not surprised,
because I had had two rows with the manager on the
subject out there. I had refused to give up the smallest
scrap out of that package, and I took the same attitude
with the spectacled man. He became darkly menacing
at last, and with much heat argued that the Company
had the right to every bit of information about its ‘ ter-
ritories.. And, said he, ‘Mr. Kurtz’s knowledge of

[ 173 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS 5

unexplored regions must have been necessarily extensive
and peculiar—owing to his great abilities and to the
deplorable circumstances in which he had been placed:
therefore ’ I assured him Mr. Kurtz’s knowledge,
however extensive, did not bear upon the problems of
commerce or administration. He invoked then the name
of science. ‘ It would be an incalculable loss if,’ &c., &e.
I offered him the report on the ‘ Suppression of Savage
Customs,’ with the postscriptum torn off. He took it
up eagerly, but ended by sniffing at it with an air of
contempt. ‘ This is not what we had a right to expect,’ -
he remarked. ‘ Expect nothing else,’ I said. ‘ There
are only private letters.’ He withdrew upon some threat
of legal proceedings, and I saw him no more; but an-
other fellow, calling himself Kurtz’s cousin, appeared
two days later, and was anxious to hear all the details
about his dear relative’s last moments. Incidentally he
gave me to understand that Kurtz had been essentially
a great musician. ‘There was the making of an im-
mense success,’ said the man, who was an organist, I

 

believe, with lank gray hair flowing over a greasy coat-
collar. I had no reason to doubt his statement; and to
this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz’s pro-
fession, whether he ever had any—which was the greatest
of his talents. I had taken him for a painter who wrote
for the papers, or else for a journalist who could paint
—but even the cousin (who took snuff during the inter-
view) could not tell me what he had been-—exactly. He
was a universal genius—on that point I agreed with the
old chap, who thereupon blew his nose noisily into a

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HEART OF DARKNESS

large cotton handkerchief and withdrew in senile agita-
tion, bearing off some family letters and memoranda
without importance. Ultimately a journalist anxious to
know something of the fate of his ‘dear colleague’
turned up. This visitor informed me Kurtz’s proper
sphere ought to have been politics ‘ on the popular side.’
He had furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped
short, an eye-glass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming
expansive, confessed his opinion that Kurtz really
couldn’t write a bit—‘ but heavens! how that man could
talk! He electrified large meetings. He had faith—
don’t you see?—he had the faith. He could get himself
to believe anything—anything. He would have been
a splendid leader of an extreme party.’ ‘ What party?’
I asked. ‘Any party,’ answered the other. ‘He was
an—an—extremist.? Did I not think so? I assented.
Did I know, he asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity,
‘what it was that had induced him to go out there?’ °
‘Yes,’ said I, and forthwith handed him the famous
Report for publication, if he thought fit. He glanced
through it hurriedly, mumbling all the time, judged ‘ it
would do,’ and took himself off with this plunder.

“ Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters
and the girl’s portrait. She struck me as beautiful—
T mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the’
sunlight can be made to lie too, yet one felt that no
manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the
delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features. She
seemed ready to listen without mental reservation, with-'
out suspicion, without a thought for herself. I con-

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HEART OF DARKNESS

cluded I would go and give her back her portrait and
those letters myself. Curiosity? Yes; and also some
other feeling perhaps. All that had been Kurtz’s had
passed out of my hands: his soul, his body, his station,
his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained cnly
his memory and his Intended—and I wanted to give that
up too to the past, in a way,—to surrender personally
all that remained of him with me to that oblivion which
is the last word of our common fate. I don’t defend
myself. I had no clear perception of what it was I
really wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of uncon-
scious loyalty, or the fulfillment of one of these ironic
necessities that lurk in the facts of human existence.
I don’t know. I can’t tell. But I went.

“JT thought his memory was like the other memories
of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life,—a vague
impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it
in their swift and final passage; but before the high and
‘ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as
still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I
had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth
voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its
mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much
as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid
appearances, of frightful realities ; a shadow darker than
the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds
of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter _
the house with me—the stretcher, the phantom-bearers,’::.
the wild crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the
forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends,

[ 1%6 ]
HEART OF DARKNESS

the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beat-
ing of a heart—the heart of a conquering darkness. It
was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invad-
ing and vengeful rush which, it seemed to me, I would
have to keep back alone for the salvation of another
soul. And the memory of what I had heard him say
afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back,
in the glow of fires, within the patient woods, those
broken phrases came back to me, were heard again in
their ominous and terrifying simplicity. I remembered
his abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale
of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tem-
pestuous anguish of his soul. And later on I seemed to
see his collected languid manner, when he said one day,
‘This lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company
did not pay for it. I collected it myself at a very great
personal risk. I am afraid they will try to claim it as
theirs though. H’m. It is a difficult case. What do
you think I ought to do—resist? Eh? I want no more
than justice.” . . . He wanted no more than justice—-
no more than justice. I rang the bell before a mahogany
door on the first floor, and while I waited he seemed to
stare at me out of the glassy panel—stare with that wide
and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all
the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, ‘ The
horror! The horror!’

“The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty draw-
ing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling
that were like three luminous and bedraped columns.
The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in

[177]
HEART OF DARKNESS

indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold
and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood mas-
sively in a corner, with dark gleams on the flat sur-
faces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. A high
door opened—closed. I rose.

“She came forward, all in black, with a pale head,
floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning.
It was more than a year since his death, more than a
year since the news came; she seemed as though she
would remember and mourn for ever. She took both
my hands in hers and murmured, ‘I had heard you
were coming.’ I noticed she was not very young—I
mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity,
for belief, for suffering. The room seeme) to have
grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy
evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair
hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, scemed surrounded °
by an ashy halo from which the dark: eyes looked out at
me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and
trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she
‘were ‘proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, I
—I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.
But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of
awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she
was one of those creatures that are not the playthings
of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And,
by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me too
he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very
minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time
—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the

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HEART OF DARKNESS

very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw
them together—I heard them together. She had said,
with a deep catch of the breath, ‘ I have survived; ’ while
my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with
her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper
of his eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I
was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart
as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and
absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold.
She motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the
packet gently on the little table, and she put her hand
over it. . . . ‘You knew him well,’ she murmured,
after a moment of mourning silence.

“* Intimacy grows quick out there,’ I said. ‘I knew
him as well as it is possible for one man to know another.’

*** And you admired him,’ she said. ‘ It was impossible
to know him and not to admire him. Was it?’

“* He was a remarkable man,’ I said, unsteadily. Then
before the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to
watch for more words on my lips, I went on, ‘It was
impossible not to——’

““* Love him,’ she finished eagerly, silencing me into
an appalled dumbness. ‘ How true! how true! But
when you think that no one knew him so well as I! I
had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.’

““* You knew him best,’ I repeated. And perhaps she
did. But with every word spoken the room was growing
darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, re-
mained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief
and love.

[179 }
HEART OF DARKNESS

*¢ You were his friend,’ she went on. ‘ His friend,’
she repeated, a little louder. ‘ You must have been, if
he had given you this, and sent you to me. I feel I
can speak to you—and oh! I must speak. I want you
—you who heave ‘heard his last words—to know I have
been worthy of him. . . . Itis not pride. . . . Yes!
I am proud to know I understood him better than any-
one on earth—he told me so himself. And since his
mother died I have had no one—no one—to—to——~

“T listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even
sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather
suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of
his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager
examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing
her pain in the certitude of my sympathy ; she talked as
thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement
with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He
wasn’t rich enough or something. And indeed I don’t
know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He
had given me some reason to infer that it was his im-
patience of comparative poverty that drove him out
there.

“¢, . . Who was not his friend who had heard him
speak once?’ she was saying. ‘He drew men towards
him by what was best in them.’ She looked at me with
intensity. ‘It is the gift of the great,’ she went on,
and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the ac-
companiment of all the other sounds, full of mystery,
desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard—the ripple of
the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind,

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ea aw age
HEART OF DARKNESS

the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incom-
prehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a
voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal
darkness. ‘ But you have heard him! You know!’ she
cried.

“¢Yes, I know,’ I said with something like despair
in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that
was in her, before that great and saving illusion that
shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the
triumphant darkness from which 1 could not have de-
fended her—from which I could not even defend
myself.

“* What a loss to me—to us!’—she corrected herself
with beautiful generosity ; then added in a murmur, ‘ To
the world.’ By the last gleams of twilight I could see
the glitter of her eyes, full of tears—of tears that would
not fall.

“*T have been very happy—very fortunate—very
proud,’ she went on. ‘Too fortunate. Too happy for
a little while. And now I am unhappy for—for
life.’

“She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the
remaining light in a glimmer of gold. I rose too.

““¢ And of all this,’ she went on, mournfully, ‘ of all his
promise, and of all his greatness, of his generous mind,
of his noble heart, nothing remains—nothing but a
memory. You and

*** We shall always remember him,’ I said, hastily.
*<“No!? she cried. ‘ It is impossible that all this should
be lost—that such a life should be sacrificed to leave

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HEART OF DARKNESS

nothing—but sorrow. You know what vast plans he
had. I knew of them too—I could not perhaps under-
stand,—but others knew of them. Something must re-
main. His words, at least, have not died.’

“* Fis words will remain,’ I said.

** And his example,’ she whispered to herself. ‘ Men
looked up to him,—his goodness shone in every act. His
example——’

“* True,’ I said; ‘his example too. Yes, his example.
I forgot that.’

*¢ But Ido not. I cannot—I cannot believe—not yet.
I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that
nobody will see him again, never, never, never.’

“ She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure,
stretching them black and with clasped pale hands across
the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see
him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this
eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her
too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this ges-
ture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with power-
less charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter
of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said
suddenly very low, ‘ He died as he lived.’

““¢ His end,’ said I, with dull anger stirring in me,
‘was in every way worthy of his life.’

“ * And I was not with him,’ she murmured. My anger
subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.

“* Everything that could be done—— I mumbled.

“¢ Ah, but I believed in him more than anyone on
earth—more than his own mother, more than—himself.

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HEART OF DARKNESS

He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh,
every word, every sign, every glance.’

“T felt like a chill grip on my chest. * Don’t,’ I said,
in a muffled voice.

“* Forgive me. I—I—have mourned so long in silence
—in silence. . . . You were with him—to the last?
I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand
him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one te
hear. . a

“* To the very end,’ I said, shakily. ‘I heard his very
last words. . .’ I stopped in a fright.

“*Repeat them,’ she murmured in a heart-broken tone.
‘I want—I want—something—something—to—to live
with.’

“I was on the point of crying at her, ‘ Don’t you hear
them?’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent
whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell
menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The
horror! the horror!’

“*His last word—to live with,’ she insisted, ‘ Don’t
you understand I loved him—TI loved him—TI loved him!’

“TJ pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

“* The last word he pronounced was—your name.’

“T heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still,
stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by
the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable
pain. ‘I knew it—I was sure!’ . . . She knew. She
was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her
face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would
collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would

[ 183 J
HEART OF DARKNESS

fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The
heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have
fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice
which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only jus-
tice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would
have been too dark—too dark altogether. .°. .”
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in
the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a
time. “‘ We have lost the first of the ebb,” said the Di-
rector, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was

barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-.

way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed
somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness.

£E. 184 7
2

THE END OF THE TETHER
THE END OF THE TETHER

I

Foz a long time after the course of the steamer Sofala
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 fell violently
upon the calm sea—seemed to shatter themselves upon
an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazz-
ling vapor of light that blinded the eye and wearied the.
brain with its unsteady brightness.

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.

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

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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 al-
most to a minuté of her allowed time. At any moment,
as he sat on the bridge without looking up, or lay sleep-
less in his bed, simply by reckoning the days and the
hours he could tell where he was—the precise spot of the

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THE END OF THE TETHER

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 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 re-
siding 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 regis-
try 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:

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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 thor-
ough apprenticeship,” he used to remark smilingly), had
made him honorably known to a generation of ship-
owners 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 Admiraltv
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 4
‘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 descrip-
tion of the “ Malotu or Whalley Passage” with the
words: “ This advantageous route, first discovered in
1850 by Captain Whalley in the ship Condor,” &c.,

[ 190 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

and ends by recommending it warmly to sailing vessels.
leaving the China ports for the south in the months.
from December to April inclusive.

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 East-:
ern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his.
early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new
generation of seamen.

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 ex-
pected 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 Tra-
vancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose down-
fall had shaken. the East like an earthquake. And he
was sixty-seven years old.

II

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

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THE END OF THE TETHER

judgment in matters of finance was as expert as his sea:
manship had commended the prudence of his invest-
ments, 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 ex-
pressed it himself.

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 vacht-
ing to satisfy him. He wanted the illusion of affairs;
and his acquisition of the Fair Maid preserved the con-
tinuity of his life. He introduced her to his acquaint-
ances 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 sen-
timentalism of regret; and a little wistfully withal, be-
cause he was at home in life, taking a genuine pleasure

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THE END OF THE TETHER

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 Jonely leisure.

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 bedplace. 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 ‘splash-
ings, 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, acknowl-
edging 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 eudgel-like
stick on account of a stiffness in the hip—a slight touch
of rheumatism, he supposed. Otherwise he knew nothing:

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THE END OF THE TETHER

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 maple-
wood 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 plummet kept -
suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the
heavy gold frame. Then with the door of his state-
room 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 re-
membered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she used

to be. 2
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

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his meals he stcod 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 con-
fessed 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 listen-
ing 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 gomg 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 Hongkong 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 Whal-
ley 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
jump of chipped red granite in a shower. It was all

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THE END OF THE TETHER

wery well for that old sea-dog to cry. He had to read
won 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 to-
gether a mourning frock for the child out of one of
her black skirts.

He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up
life like a sluggish stream. It will break out and flow
aver 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
jhad 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
tto 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
fimish her education. It was ten years before he saw her
again.

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 de-
light. “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 associa-
tion of ideas. She had twined herself tightly round his
heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as
& 2 tower of strength; forgetting, while she was little,

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THE END OF THE TETHER

that in the nature of things she would probably clec&
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.

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 dis-
satisfied there was not to see that she clung now te some-
body else, but that the prop she had selected seemed om
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. Brat
of his apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day
of his departure, with t*:> hall-door open all ready, hold-
ing 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 under-
stood him without many words.

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 what-
ever 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 himp

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THE END OF THE TETHER

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.

Upon that, as if he had only waited for this catas-
trophe, 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.

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 oldman 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.

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THE END OF THE TETHER

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 Cap~
tain 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.

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

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Bp
THE END OF THE TETHER

in honor to do something for Dare-devil Harry Whailey.
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
arreducible minimum, in a world that was able to count
ats 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.

He found it more difficult from year to year. He suf-
fered 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
Mimited 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 ex-
planations, and their perfect understanding endured
without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would
hhave been shocked if she had taken it into her head to
thank him in so many words, but he found it perfectly
matural that she should tell him she needed two hundred
pounds.

He had come in with the Fair Maid in ballast to look
for a freight in the Sofala’s port of registry, and her
fetter met him there. Its tenor was that it was no use
wincing matters. Her only resource was in opening a
bearding-house, for which the prospects, she judged,

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‘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 mo-
ment 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.

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.

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.

“Good morning to you,” pronounced Captain Whal-

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ley 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?”

The mate shut his mouth, and then asked as if dazed,
“What empty case, sir?”

“ A big flat packing-case belonging to that painting in
my room. Let it be taken up on deck and tell the
zarpenter to look it over. I may want to use it before
long.”

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.”

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 knock-
ing 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. Cap-
tain Whalley was methodically winding up the chro-
nometers, dusting the portrait of his late wife, getting
a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making himself

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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. .

IIl

Just at that time the Japanese were casting far and
wide for ships of European build, and he had no diffi-
culty in finding a purchaser, a speculator who drove a
hard bargain, but paid cash down for the Fair Maid,
‘with a view to a profitable resale. Thus it came about
that Captain Whalley found himself on a certain after-
‘noon descending the steps of one of the most important
post-offices of the East with a slip of bluish paper in his
hand. This was the receipt of a registered letter en-
’ closing a draft for two hundred pounds, and addressed
to Melbourne. Captain Whalley pushed the paper into
his waistcoat-pocket, took his stick from under his arm,
and walked down the street.

It was a recently opened and untidy thoroughfare with
rudimentary side-walks and a soft layer of dust cushion-
ing the whole width of the road. One end touched the
slummy street of Chinese shops near the harbor, the other
drove straight on, without houses, for a couple of miles,
through patches of jungle-like vegetation, to the yard
gates of the new Consolidated Docks Company. The
crude frontages of the new Government buildings alter-
nated with the blank fencing of vacant plots, and the
view of the sky seemed to give an added spaciousness to
the broad vista. It was empty and shunned by natives

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after business hours, as though they had expected te
see one of the tigers from the neighborhood of the New
Waterworks on the hill coming at a loping canter down
the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Cap-
tain Whalley was not dwarfed by the solitude of the
grandly planned street. He had too fine a presence for
that. He was only a lonely figure walking purposefully,
with a great white beard like a pilgrim, and with a thick
stick that resembled a weapon. On one side the new
Courts of Justice had a low and unadorned. portico of
squat columns half concealed by a few old trees left in
the approach. On the other the pavilion wings of the
new Colonial Treasury came out to the line of the street.
But Captain Whalley, who had now no ship and no
home, remembered in passing that on that very site
when he first came out from England there had stood a
fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between
a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went
writhing into a tangled wilderness without any docks or
waterworks.

No ship—no home. And his poor Ivy away there had
no home either. A boarding-house is no sort of home
though it may get you a living. His feelings were
horribly rasped by the idea of the boardinz-house. In
his rank of life he had that truly aristocratic tempera-
ment characterized by a scorn of vulgar gentility and
by prejudiced views as to the derogatory nature of cer-
tain occupations. For his own part he had always pre-
ferred sailing merchant ships (which is a straight-
forward occupation) to buying and selling merchandise,

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of which the essence is to get the better of somebody in a
bargain—an undignified trial of wits at best. His father
had been Colonel Whalley (retired) of the H. E. I. Com-
pany’s service, with very slender means besides his pen-
sion, but with distinguished connections. He could re-
member as a boy how frequently waiters at the inns, coun-
try tradesmen and small people of that sort, used to “ My
lord” the old warrior on the strength of his appear-
ance.

Captain Whalley himself (he would have entered the
Navy if his father had not died before he was fourteen)
had something of a grand air which would have suited
an old and glorious admiral; but he became lost like a
straw in the eddy of a brook amongst the swarm of
brown and yellow humanity filling a thoroughfare, that
by contrast with the vast and empty avenue he had left
seemed as narrow as a lane and absolutely riotous with
life. The walls of the houses were blue; the shops of
the Chinamen yawned like cavernous lairs; heaps of
nondescript merchandise overflowed the gloom of the
long range of arcades, and the fiery serenity of sunset
took the middle of the street from end to end with a
glow like the reflection of a fire. It fell on the bright
colors and the dark faces of the bare-footed crowd, on
the pallid yellow backs of the half-naked jostling coolies,
on the accouterments of a tall Sikh trooper with @
parted beard and fierce mustaches on sentry before the
gate of the police compound. Looming very big above
the heads in a red haze of dust, the tightly packed car,
of the cable tramway navigated cautiously up the hu-

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man stream, with the incessant blare of its horn, in the
manner of a steamer groping in a fog.

Captain Whalley emerged like a diver on the other
side, and in the desert shade between the-walls cf closed
warehouses removed his hat to cool his brow. A certain
disrepute attached to the calling of a landlady of a
boarding-house. These women were said to be rapacious,
unscrupulous, untruthful; and though he contemned no
class of his fellow-creatures—God forbid !—these were
suspicions to which it was unseemly that a Whalley
should lay herself open. He had not expostulated with
her, however. He was confident she shared his feelings;
he was sorry for her; he trusted her judgment; he con-
sidered it a merciful dispensation that he could help her
once more,—but in his aristocratic heart of hearts he
would have found it more easy to reconcile himself to the
idea of her turning seamstress. Vaguely he remembered
reading years ago a touching piece called the “ Song of
the Shirt.” It was all very well making songs about
poor women. The granddaughter of Colonel Whalley,
the landlady of a boarding-house! Pooh! He replaced .
his hat, dived into two pockets, and stopping a moment
to apply a flaring match to the end of a cheap cheroot,
blew an embittered cloud of smoke at a world that could
hold such surprises.

Of one thing he was certain—that she was the own
child of a clever mother. Now he had got over the
wrench of parting with his ship, he perceived clearly
that such a step had been unavoidable. Perhaps he had
been growing aware of it all along with an unconfessed

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knowledge. But she, far away there, must have had
an intuitive perception of it, with the pluck to face that
truth and the courage to speak out—all the qualities
which had made her mother a woman of such excellent
counsel. :

It would have had to come to that in the end! It was
fcrtunate she had forced his hand. In another year or
two it would have been an utterly barren sale. To keep
the ship going he had been involving himself deeper
every year. He was defenseless before the insidious work
of adversity, to whose more open assaults he could pre-.
sent a firm front; like a cliff that stands unmoved the
open battering of the sea, with a lofty ignorance of the
treacherous backwash undermining its base. As it was,
every liability satisfied, her request answered, and owing
no man a penny, there remained to him from the pro-
ceeds a sum of five hundred pounds put away safely. In
addition he had upon his person some forty odd dollars
—enough to pay his hotel bill, providing he did not
linger too long in the modest bedroom where he had
taken refuge.

Scantily furnished, and with a waxed floor, it opened
into one of the side-verandas. The straggling building
of bricks, as airy as a bird-cage, resounded with the
incessant flapping of rattan screens worried by the wind
between the white-washed square pillars of the sea-front
The rooms were lofty, a ripple of sunshine flowed ove
the ceilings ; and the periodical invasions of tourists from
some passenger steamer in the harbor flitted through the
wind-swept dusk of the apartments with the tumult of

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their unfamiliar voices and impermanent presences, like
Yelays of migratory shades condemned to speed headlong
round the earth without leaving a trace. The babble-
of their irruptions ebbed out as suddenly as it had arisen ;
the draughty corridors and the long chairs of the ve-
randas knew their sight-seeing hurry or their prostrate
repose no more; and Captain Whalley, substantial and
dignified, left wellnigh alone in the vast hotel by each
light-hearted skurry, felt more and more like a stranded
tourist with no aim in view, like a forlorn traveler with-
out a home. In the solitude of his room he smoked
thoughtfully, gazing at the two sea-chests which held all
that he could call his own in this world. A thick roll of
charts in a sheath of sailcloth leaned in a corner; the
flat packing-case containing the portrait in oils and
the three carbon photographs had been pushed under
the bed. He was tired of discussing terms, of assisting
at surveys, of all the routine of the business. What to
the other parties was merely the sale of a ship was to
him a momentous event involving a radically new view of
existence. He knew that after this ship there would
be no other; and the hopes of his youth, the exercise of
his abilities, every feeling and achievement of his man-
hood, had been indissolubly connected with ships. He
had served ships; he had owned ships; and even the
years of his actual retirement from the sea had been made,
bearable by the idea that he had only to stretch out his
hand full of money to get a ship. He had been at
liberty to feel as though he were the owner of all the
ships in the world. The selling of this one was weary

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work; but when she passed from him at last, when he
signed the last receipt, it was as though all the ships
had gone out of the world together, leaving him on the
shore of inaccessible oceans with seven hundred pounds
in his hands.

Striding firmly, without haste, along the quay, Captain
Whalley averted his glances from the familiar roadstead.
Two generations of seamen born since his first day at
sea stood between him and all these ships at the anchor-
age. His own was sold, and he had been asking him-
self, What next?

From the feeling of loneliness, of inward emptiness,
—and of loss too, as if his very soul had been taken
out of him forcibly,—there had sprung at first a desire
to start right off and join his daughter. ‘ Here are the
last pence,’ he would say to her; “‘ take them, my dear.
And here’s your old father: you must take him too.”

His soul recoiled, as if afraid of what lay hidden at
the bottom of this impulse. Give up! Never! When
one is thoroughly weary all sorts of nonsense come into
one’s head. A pretty gift it would have been for a poor
woman—this seven hundred pounds with the incumbrance
of a hale old fellow more than likely to last for years
and years to come. Was he not as fit to die in harness
as any of the youngsters in charge of these anchored
ships out yonder? He was as solid now as ever he had
been. But as to who would give him work to do, that
was another matter. Were he, with his appearance and
antecedents, to go about looking for a junior’s berth,
people, he was afraid, would not take him seriously; or

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else if he succeeded in impressing them, he would maybe
obtain their pity, which would be like stripping your-
self naked to be kicked. He was not anxious to give
himself away for less than nothing. He had no use
for anybody’s pity. On the other hand, a command—
the only thing he could try for with due regard for
common decency—was not likely to be lying in wait for
him at the corner of the next street. Commands don’t
go a-begging nowadays. Ever since he had come ashore
to carry out the business of the sale he had kept his
ears open, but had heard no hint of one being vacant
in the port. And even if there had been one, his suc-
cessful past itself stood in his way. He had been his
own employer too long. The only credential he could
produce was the testimony of his whole life. What
better recommendation could anyone require? But
vaguely he felt that the unique document would ke
looked upon as an archaic curiosity of the Eastern
waters, a screed traced in obsolete words—in a half-for-
gotten language.

IV

Revolving these thoughts, he strolled on near the rail-
ings of the quay, broad-chested, without a stoop, as
though his big shoulders had never felt the burden of
the loads that must be carried between the cradle and
the grave. No single betraying fold or line of care
disfigured the reposeful modeling of his face. It was
full and untanned; and the upper part emerged, mas-
sively quiet, out of the downward flow of silvery hair,

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with the striking delicacy of its clear complexion and
the powerful width of the forehead. The first cast of
his glance fell on you candid and swift, like a boy’s;
but because of the ragged snowy thatch of the eyebrows
the affability of his attention acquired the character of
a keen and searching scrutiny. With age he had put
on flesh a little, had increased his girth like an old tree
presenting no symptoms of decay; and even the opulent,
lustrous ripple of white hairs upon his chest seemed an
attribute of unquenchable vitality and vigor.

Once rather proud of his great bodily strength, and
even of his personal appearance, conscious of his worth,
and firm in his rectitude, there had remained to him,
like the heritage of departed prosperity, the tranquil
bearing of a man who had proved himself fit in every
sort of way for the life of his choice. He strode on
squarely under the projecting brim of an ancient Panama
hat. It had a low crown, a crease through its whole
diameter, a narrow black ribbon. Imperishable and a
little discolored, this headgear made it easy to pick him
out from afar on thronged wharves and in the busy
streets. He had never adopted the comparatively modern
fashion of pipeclayed cork helmets. He disliked the
form; and he hoped he could manage to keep a cool
head to the end of his life without all these contrivances
for hygienic ventilation. His hair was cropped close,
his linen always of immaculate whiteness; a suit of thin
gray flannel, worn threadbare but scrupulously brushed,
floated about his burly limbs, adding to his bulk by the
looseness of its cut. The years had mellowed the good~

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humored, imperturbable audacity of his prime into a
temper carelessly serene; and the leisurely tapping of
his iron-shod stick accompanied his footfalls with a self-
confident sound on the flagstones. It was impossible to
connect such a fine presence and this unruffled aspect
with the belittling troubles of poverty; the man’s whole
existence appeared to pass before you, facile and large,
in the freedom of means as ample as the clothing of his
body.

The irrational dread of having to break into his five
. hundred pounds for personal expenses in the hotel dis-
turbed the steady poise of his mind. There was no
time to lose. The bill was running up. He nourished
the hope that this five hundred would perhaps be the
means, if everything else failed, of obtaining some work
which, keeping his body and soul together (not a matter
of great outlay), would enable him to be of use to his
daughter. To his mind it was her own money which he
employed, as it were, in backing her father and solely
for her benefit! Once at work, he would help her with
the greater part of his earnings; he was good for many
years yet, and this boarding-house business, he argued
to himself, whatever the prospects, could not be much of
a gold-mine from the first start. But what work? He
was ready to lay hold of anything in an honest way so
that it came quickly to his hand; because the five hun-
dred pounds must be preserved intact for eventual use.
That was the great point. With the entire five hundred
one felt a substance at one’s back; but it seemed to him
that should he let it dwindle to four-fifty or even four-

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eighty, all the efficiency would be gone out of the money,
as though there were some magic power in the round
figure. But what sort of work?

Confronted by that haunting question as by an uneasy
ghost, for whom he had no exorcising formula, Captain
Whalley stopped short on the apex of a small bridge
spanning steeply the bed of a canalized creek with
granite shores. Moored between the square blocks a sea-
going Malay prau floated half hidden under the arch
of masonry, with her spars lowered down, without a sound
of life on board, and covered from stem to stern with a
ridge of palm-leaf mats. He had left behind him the
overheated pavements bordered by the stone frontages
that, like the sheer face of cliffs, followed the sweep
of the quays; and an unconfined spaciousness of orderly
and sylvan aspect opened before him its wide plots of
rolled grass, like pieces of green carpet smoothly pegged
out, its long ranges of trees lined up in colossal porticos
of dark shafts roofed with a vault of branches.

Some of these avenues ended at the sea. It was a ter-
raced shore; and beyond, upon the level expanse, pro-
found and glistening like the gaze of a dark-blue cye,
an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself in-
definitely through the gap between a couple of verdant
twin islets. ‘The masts and spars of a few ships far
away, hull down in the outer roads, sprang straight from
the water in a fine maze of rosy lines penciled on the
clear shadow of the eastern board. Captain Whalley
gave them a long glance. The ship, once his own, was
anchored out there. It was staggering to think that it

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was open to him no longer to take a boat at the jetty
and get himself pulled off to her when the evening came.
To no ship. Perhaps never more. Before the sale was
concluded, and till the purchase-money had been paid,
he had spent daily some time on board the Fair Maid.
The money had been paid this very morning, and now,
all at once, there was positively no ship that he could
go on board of when he liked; no ship that would need
his presence in order to do her work—to live. It seemed
an incredible state of affairs, something too bizarre to
last. And the sea was full of craft of all sorts. There
was that prau lying so still swathed in her shroud of
sewn palm-leaves—she too had her indispensable man.
They lived through each other, this Malay he had never
seen, and this high-sterned thing of no size that seemed
to be resting after a long journey. And of all the ships
in sight, near and far, each was provided with a man,
the man without whom the finest ship is a dead thing,
a floating and purposeless log.

After his one glance at the roadstead he went on, since
there was nothing to turn back for, and the time must
be got through somehow. ‘The avenues of big trees ran
straight over the Esplanade, cutting each other at di-
verse angles, columnar below and luxuriant above. The
interlaced boughs high up there seemed to slumber; not
a leaf stirred overhead: and the reedy cast-iron lamp-
posts in the middle of the road, gilt like scepters,
diminished in a long perspective, with their globes of
white porcelain atop, resembling a barbarous decoration
of ostriches’ eggs displayed in a row. The flaming sky

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kindled a tiny crimson spark upon the glistening sur-
face of each glassy shell.

With his chin sunk a little, his hands behind his back,
and the end of his stick marking the gravel with a faint
wavering line at his heels, Captain Whalley reflected
that if a ship without a man was like a body without
a soul, a sailor without a ship was of not much more
account in this world than an aimless log adrift upon the
sea. The log might be sound enough by itself, tough
of fiber, and hard to destroy—but what of that! And
a sudden sense of irremediable idleness weighted his feet
like a great fatigue.

A succession of open carriages came bowling along the
newly opened sea-road. You could see across the wide
grass-plots the discs of vibration made by the spokes.
The bright domes of the parasols swayed lightly out-
wards like full-blown blossoms on the rim of a vase; and
the quiet sheet of dark-blue water, crossed by a bar of
purple, made a background for the spinning wheels and
the high action of the horses, whilst the turbaned heads
of the Indian servants elevated above the line of the sea
horizon glided rapidly on the paler blue of the sky. In
an open space near the little bridge each turn-out trotted
smartly in a wide curve away from the sunset; then pull-
ing up sharp, entered the main alley in a long slow-
moving file with the great red stillness of the sky at
the back. The trunks of mighty trees stood all touched
with red on the same side, the air seemed aflame under
the high foliage, the very ground under the hoofs of the
horses was red. The wheels turned solemnly; one after

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another the sunshades drooped, folding their colors like
gorgeous flowers shutting their petals at the end of the
day. In the whole half-mile of human beings no voice
-uttered a distinct word, only a faint thudding noise went
on mingled with slight jingling sounds, and the motion-
less heads and shoulders of men and women sitting in
couples emerged stolidly above the lowered hoods—as if
wooden. But one carriage and pair coming late did not
join the line.

It fled along in a noiseless roll; but on entering the
avenue one of the dark bays snorted, arching his neck
and shying against the steel-tipped pole; a flake of
foam fell from the bit upon the point of a satiny shoul-
der, and the dusky face of the coachman leaned for-
ward at once over the hands taking a fresh grip of the
reins. It was a long dark-green landau, having a digni-
fied and buoyant motion between the sharply curved |
C-springs, and a sort of strictly official majesty in its
supreme elegance. It seemed more roomy than is usual,
its horses seemed slightly bigger, the appointments a
shade more perfect, the servants perched somewhat
higher on the box. The dresses of three women—two
young and pretty, and one, handsome, large, of mature |
age—seemed to fill completely the shallow body of the
carriage. The fourth face was that of a man, heavy
lidded, distinguished and sallow, with a somber, thick,
iron-gray imperial and mustaches, which somehow had
the air of solid appendages. His Excellency.

The rapid motion of that one equipage made all the
others appear utterly inferior, blighted, and reduced te

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crawl painfully at a snail’s pace. The landau distanced
the whole file in a sort of sustained rush; the iteatures
of the occupants whirling out of sight left behind an
impression of fixed stares and impassive vacancy; and
after it had vanished in full flight as it were, notwith-
standing the long line of vehicles hugging the curb at
a walk, the whole lofty vista of the avenue seemed to lie
open and emptied of life in the enlarged impression of
an august solitude.

Captain Whalley had lifted his head to look, and his
mind, disturbed in its meditation, turned with wonder
(as men’s minds will do) to matters of no importance.
It struck him that it was to this port, where he had
just sold his last ship, that he had come with the very
first he had ever owned, and with his head full of a plan
for opening a new trade with a distant part of the
_ Archipelago. The then governor had given him no end
of encouragement. No Excellency he-—this Mr. Den-
ham—this governor with his jacket off; a man who
tended night and day, so to speak, the growing pros-
perity of the settlement with the self-forgetful devotion
of a nurse for a child she loves; a lone bachelor who
lived as in a camp with the few servants and his three
dogs in what was called then the Government Bungalow:
a low-roofed structure on the half-cleared slope of a
hill, with a new flagstaff in front and a police orderly
on the veranda. He remembered toiling up that hill
under a heavy sun for his audience; the unfurnished
aspect of the cool shaded room; the long table covered
at one end with piles of papers, and with two guns, a

£217 1
THE END OF THE TETHER

brass telescope, a small bottle of oil with a feather stuck
in the neck at the other—and the flattering attention
given to him by the man in power. It was an under-
taking full of risk he had come to expound, but a twenty
minutes’ talk in the Government Bungalow on the hill
had made it go smoothly from the start. And as he
was retiring Mr. Denham, already seated before the
papers, called out after him, “ Next month the Dido
starts for a cruise that way, and I shall request her
captain officially to give you a look in and see how
you get on.” The Dido was one of the smart frigates on
the China station—and five-and-thirty years make a big
slice of time. Five-and-thirty years ago an enterprise
like his had for the colony enough importance to be
looked after by a Queen’s ship. <A big slice of time.
Individuals were of some account then. Men like him-
_self; men, too, like poor Evans, for instance, with his
red face, his coal-black whiskers, and his restless eyes,
who had set up the first patent slip for repairing smal!
ships, on the edge of the forest, in a lonely bay three
miles up the coast. Mr. Denham had encouraged that
enterprise too, and yet somehow poor Evans had ended
by dying at home deucedly hard up. His son, they said,
was squeezing oil out of cocoa-nuts for a living on some
God-forsaken islet of the Indian Ocean; but it was from
that patent slip in a lonely wooded bay that had sprung
the workshops of the Consolidated Docks Company, with
its three graving basins carved out of solid rock, its
wharves, its jetties, its electric-light plant, its steam-
power houses—with its gigantic sheer-legs, fit to lift the

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heaviest weight ever carried afloat, and whose head could
be seen like the top of a queer white monument peeping
over bushy points of land and sandy promontories, as
you approached the New Herbor from the west.

There had been a time when men counted: there were
not so many carriages in the colony then, though Mr.
Denham, he fancied, had a buggy. And Captain Whal-
ley seemed to be swept out of the great avenue by the
swirl of a mental backwash. He remembered muddy
shores, a harbor without quays, the one solitary wooden
pier (but that was a public work) jutting out crookedly,
the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught
fire mysteriously and smoldered for days, so that
amazed ships came into a roadstead full of sulphurous
fog, and the sun hung blood-red at midday. He re-
membered the things, the faces, and something more
besides—like the faint flavor of a cup quaffed to the
bottom, like a subtle sparkle of the air that was not
to be found in the atmosphere of to-day.

In this evocation, swift and full of detail like a flash
of magnesium light into the niches of a dark memorial
hall, Captain Whalley contemplated things once impor-
tant, the efforts of small men, the growth of a great
place, but now robbed of all consequence by the great-
ness of accomplished facts, by hopes greater still; and
they gave him for a moment such an almost physical
grip upon time, such a comprehension of our unchange-
able feelings, that he stopped short, struck the ground
with his stick, and ejaculated mentally, “‘ What the devil
am I doing here!” He seeméd lost in a sort of surprise ;

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but he heard his name called out in wheezy tones once,
twice—and turned on his heels slowly.

He beheld then, waddling towards him autocratically,
a man of an old-fashioned and gouty aspect, with hair
as white as his own, but with shaved, florid cheeks, wear-
ing a necktie—almost a neckcloth—whose stiff ends pro-
jected far beyond his chin; with round legs, round arms,
a round body, a round face—generally producing the
effect of his short figure having been distended by means
of an air-pump as much as the seams of his clothing
would stand. This was the Master-Attendant of the
port. A master-attendant is a superior-sort of harbor-
master; a person, out in the East, of some consequence
in his sphere; a Government official, a magistrate for
the waters of the port, and possessed of vast but ill-
defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes.
This particular Master-Attendant was reported to con-
sider it miserably inadequate, on the ground that it
did not include the power of life and death. This was
a jocular exaggeration. Captain Eliott was fairly satis-
fied with his position, and nursed no inconsiderable sense
of such power as he had. His conceited and tyrannical
disposition did not allow him to let it dwindle in his
hands for want of use. The uproarious, choleric frank-
ness of his comments on people’s character and conduct
caused him to be feared at bottom; though in conversa-
tion many pretended not to mind him in the least, others
would only smile sourly at the mention of his name, and
there were even some who dared to pronounce him “a
meddiesome old ruffian.” But for almost all of them

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one of Captain Eliott’s outbreaks was nearly as distaste-
ful to face as a chance of annihilation.

Vv

As soon as he had come up quite close he said, mouth-
ing in a growl—

“* What’s this I hear, Whalley? Is it true you’re sell-
ing 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 com-
rades 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

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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 irens,
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, pre-
sented 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.

“Pl 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 own time. We need a lord
here now. They have got a lord in Bombay.”

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He dined once or twice every year at the Governmcnt
House—a many-windowed, arcaded palace upon a hill
jaid 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 her-
self 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 edi-
fication, 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.

“ T 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

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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 in-
struct 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. ‘ve your little
record 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 Whal-
ley said almost involuntarily, “if you had sent tot
me.”

[ 224 J
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Captain Eliott was immensely amused; he shook with
laughter as he walked. But suddenly he stopped laugh-
ing. 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 com-
pletely. ‘“ 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 incon-
ceivable 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 te
spring upon him a demand for a small ioan 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 be-
tween him and the workhouse. And he had a family.
Three girls, as Whalley knew. He gave “ Harry, old

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soy,” 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-minded-
ness.

“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 Whal-
ley 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 pro-
nounced slowly, staring to the end of the avenue.

The Master-Attendant was glad to hear this. Uncom-
monly glad. He remembered her well. A pretty girl
she was.

Captain Whalley, stepping out carelessly, assented as
if in a dream.

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THE END OF THE TETHER

“ 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 re-
turned and took possession of the straight wide road.
A syce in white stood at the head of a Burmah pony har-
nessed 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 re-
frained; 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. Cap-
tain 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
af the Ringdove. He wondered if he too had changed to

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THE END OF THE TETHER

tthe 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. Noi a bad fellow the pleasant, jolly
Ned Elictt, 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 eould not bring himself to take into his confidence
at this juncture; and the other went on with his intimate
eutpourings, and as remote from his hearer as though
che 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 ap-
pointment—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.

[ 228 ].
THE END OF THE TETHER

* Nothing’s the matter. Sound old steamer. Her
owner has been in my office this afternoon tearing his
hair.”

“Ts 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?”

“JT 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 remem-
bered, 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 mu-
tinous sort of chap. Well, he remained out here, a per-
fect nuisance, everlastingly shipped and unshipped, un-
able to keep a berth very long; pretty nigh went
through every engine-room afloat belonging to the
colony. Then suddenly, “What do you think hap-
pened, 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 lot-

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THE END OF THE TETHER

tery. 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 pro-
duce—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, ie es
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

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THE END OF THE TETHER

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 him-
self 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 Elliott
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 ex-
‘plained. ‘ 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 regu-
lar 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

[ 231 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

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 fcllow, of course, told me it was all nonsense; there
has been a plot hatching for ycars 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 com-
‘petition nowadays for people to keep their stuff lying
about for a ship that does not turn up when she’s ex-
pected. 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 get-
ting 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.”

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THE END OF THE TETHER

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 (“im 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 ig-
norance 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

[ 233 1
THE END OF THE TETHER

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 strok-
ing, 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 im-
pudent 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,” rum-
bled 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,

[ 234 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

“Tll 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 vears 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 sea-
shore, 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 peristyie
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 belong-
ing to the young captain of the Condor. Good feilow—

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THE END OF THE TETHER

Harry Whalley—riever 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 fel-
low’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 lke 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 senti-
mental mood had it not struck him suddenly that Cap-
tain Whalley, unstirring and without a word, scemed
to be awaiting somethmg—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 . . .”

‘he pony plunged—the syce skipped out of the way.
Captain Whalley raised his arm.

66 Good-by.”

VI

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

[ 236 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

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 Cap-
tain 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 re-
flected gleams left the world below, and the water of the
canal seemed to turn into pitch. Captain Whalley
crossed. it. 4

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
hé could get himself pulled off in the evening. Far
away, beyond the houses, on the slope of an indigo

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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, fin-
like 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 be-
gan 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 ap-
peared like the head of a pin stabbed deep into the
smooth, pale, shimmering fabric of the sky, the edge

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of a keen chill seemed to cleave through the warm air
of the earth. At the moment of stepping into the sam-
pan to go and try for the command of the Sofala Cap-
tain 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 ong 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 dig-
nity 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, with-
out knowing it, a service for which it would have been

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impossible to ask. He hoped Ned would not think there
had been something underhand in his action. He sup-
posed 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 steamer, 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 dis-
cretion 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 un-
quenchaple 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 te her integrally

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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 any-
thing 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 dines:
tion of that step—and there was the whole Icag 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.

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“ 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 south-
ward. 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 mur-
mured 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 col-
loquy. Then he stepped out on the bridge and began
to walk from end to end, holding up the long cherry-
wood 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 mouth-
piece, he presented such a heavy overhanging profile

A [ 242 ]
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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—

“T 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 im-
posing stature and walked across to the binnacle, hold-
ing 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 dis-
comfited 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? ”

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“ 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 per-
spiration 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 mate 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 con-
founded fool.”

Vil

Sterne went down smirking and apparently not at
all disconeerted, but the engineer Massy remained on
the bridge, moving about with uneasy self-assertion.
Everybody on board was his inferior—everyone .with-
out exception. He paid their wages and found them in
their food. They ate more of his bread and pocketed
more of his money than they were worth; and they had
no care in the world, while he alone had to meet all the
“Wifficulties of shipowning. When he contemplated his
position in all its menacing entirety, it seemed to him
that he had been for years the prey of a band of para-

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sites: and for years he had scowled at everybody con-
nected with the Sofala except, perhaps, at the Chinese
firemen who served to get her along. Their use was
manifest: they were an indispensable part of the ma-
chinery of which he was the master.

When he passed along his decks he shouldered those
he came across brutally; but the Malay deck hands had
learned to dodge out of his way. He had to bring him-
self to tolerate them because of the necessary manual
labor of the ship which must be done. He had to
struggle and plan and scheme to keep the Sofala afloat
—and what did he get for it? Not even enough respect.
They could not have given him enough of that if all
their thoughts and all their actions had been directed
to that end: The vanity of possession, the vainglory
of power, had passed away by this time, and there re-
mained only the material embarrassments, the fear of
losing that position which had turned out not worth
having, and an anxiety of thought which no abject sub-
servience of men could repay.

He walked up and down. The bridge was his own
after all. He had paid for it; and with the stem of
the pipe in his hand he would stop short at times as
if to listen with a profound and concentrated attention
to the deadened beat of the engines (his own engines)
and the slight grinding of the steering chains upon the
continuous low wash of water alongside. But for these
sounds, the ship might have been lying as still as if
moored to a bank, and as silent as if abandoned by every
living soul; only the coast, the low coast of mud and

| [ 245 ]
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mangroves with the three palms in a bunch at the back,
grew slowly more distinct in its long straight line, with-
out a single feature to arrest attention. The native
passengers of the Sofala lay about on mats under the
awnings; the smoke of her funnel seemed the only sign
of her life and connected with her gliding motion in a
mysterious manner.

Captain Whalley on his feet, with a pair of binoculars
in his hand and the little Malay Serang at his elbow,
like an old giant attended by a wizened pigmy, was tak-
ing her over the shallow water of the bar.

This submarine ridge of mud, scoured by the stream
out of the ‘soft bottom of the river and heaped up far
out on the hard bottom of the sea, was difficult to get
over. The alluvial coast having no distinguishing
marks, the bearings of the crossing-place had to be
taken from the shape of the mountains inland. The
guidance of a form flattened and uneven at the top like
a grinder tooth, and of another smooth, saddle-backed
summit, had to be searched for within the great un-
clouded glare that seemed to shift and float like a dry
fiery mist, filling the air, ascending from the water,
shrouding the distances, scorching to the eye. In this
veil of light the near edge of the shore alone stood
out almost coal-black with an opaque and motionless
solidity. Thirty miles away the serrated range of the
interior stretched across the horizon, its outlines and
shades of blue, faint and tremulous like a background
painted on airy gossamer on the quivering fabric of an
impalpable curtain let down to the plain of alluvial soil;

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and the openings of the estuary appeared, shining
white, like bits of silver let into the square pieces snipped
clean and sharp out of the body of the land bordered
with mangroves.

On the forepart of the bridge the giant and the pigmy

muttered to each other frequently in quiet tones. Be-
hind them Massy stood sideways with an expression of
- disdain and suspense on his face. His globular eyes
were perfectly motionless, and he seemed to have for-
gotten the long pipe he held in his hand.

On the fore-deck below the bridge, steeply roofed with,
the white slopes of the awnings, a young lascar seaman
had clambered outside the rail. He adjusted quickly
a broad band of sail canvas under his armpits, and
‘hrowing his chest against it, leaned out far over the
water. The sleeve of his thin cotton shirt, cut off close
te the shoulder, bared his brown arm of full rounded
form and with a satiny skin like a woman’s. He swung
it rigidly with the rotary and menacing action of a
slinger: the 14-Ib. weight hurtled circling in the air,
then suddenly flew ahead as far as the curve of the bow.
The wet thin line swished like scratched silk running
through the dark fingers of the man, and the plunge of
the lead close to the ship’s side made a vanishing silvery
scar upon the golden glitter; then after an interval the
voice of the young Malay uplifted and long-drawn de-
clared the depth of the water in his own language.

“ Tiga stengah,” he cried after each splash and pause,

‘gathering the line busily for another cast. “ Tiga
stengah,” which means three fathom and a half. For

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a mile or so from seaward there was a uniform depth
of water right up to the bar. “ Half-three. Half-
three. Half-three,”—and his modulated cry, returned
leisurely and monotonous, like the repeated call: of a
bird, seemed to float away in sunshine and disappear in
the spacious silence of the empty sea and of a lifeless
shore lying open, north and south, east and west, with-
out the stir of a single cloud-shadow or the whisper of
any other voice.

The owner-engineer of the Sofala remained very still
behind the two seamen of different race, creed, and
color; the European with the time-defying vigor of
his old frame, the little Malay, old, too, but slight and
shrunken like a withered brown leaf blown by a chance
wind under the mighty shadow of the other. Very
busy looking forward at the land, they had not a glance
te spare; and Massy, glaring at them from behind,
seemed to resent their attention to their duty like a per-
sonal slight upon himself.

This was unreasonable; but he had lived in his own
world of unreasonable resentments for many years. At
last, passing his moist palm over the rare lanky wisps
of coarse hair on the top of his yellow head, he began
to talk slowly.

“A leadsman, you want! I suppose that’s your cor-
rect mail-boat style. Haven’t you enough judgment .
to tell where you are by looking at the land? Why,
before I had been a.twelvemonth in the trade I was up
to that trick—and I am only an engineer. I can point
to you from here where the bar is, and I could tell you

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besides that you are as likely as not to stick her in the
mud in about five minutes from now; only you would
call it interfering, I suppose. And there’s that written
agreement of ours, that says I mustn’t interfere.”

His voice stopped. Captain Whalley, without relax-
ing the set severity of his features, moved his lips to ask
in a quick mumble—

“ How near, Serang?” :

“Very near now, Tuan,” the Malay muttered rapidly..

“ Dead slow,” said the Captain aloud in a firm tone.

The Serang snatched at the handle of the telegraph.
A gong clanged down below. Massy with a scornful
snigger walked off and put his head down the engine-:
vom skylight.

“You may expect some rare fooling with the engines,
Jack,” he bellowed. The space into which he stared was
deep and full of gloom; and the gray gleams of steel
down there seemed cool after the intense glare of the
sea around the ship. The air, however, came up clammy ,
and hot on his face. A short hoot on which it would
have been impossible to put any sort of interpretation
came from the bottom cavernously. This was the way
in which the second engineer answered his chief.

He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive man-
ner, and apparently wrapped up in such a taciturn con-
cern for his engines that he seemed to have lost the use:
of speech. When addressed directly his only answer
would be a grunt or a hoot, according to the distance.
For all the years he had been in the Sofala he had never:
been known to exchange as much as a frank Good-morn

F249 1
THE END OF THE TETHER

ing with.any of his shipmates. He did not seem aware
that men came and went in the world; he did not seem
to see them at all. Indeed he never recognized his ship
mates on shore. At table (the four white men of the
Sofala messed together) he sat looking into his plate
dispassionately, but at the end of the meal would jump
up and bolt down below as if a sudden thought had im-
pelled him to rush and see whether somebody had not
stolen the engines while he dined. In port at the end of
the trip he went ashore regularly, but no one knew
where he spent his evenings or in what manner. The
local coasting fleet had preserved a wild and incoherent
tale of his infatuation for the wife of a sergeant in an
Irish infantry regiment. The regiment, however, had
done its turn of garrison duty there ages before, and
was gone somewhere to the other side of the earth, out
of men’s knowledge. ‘Twice or perhaps three times in
the eourse of the year he would take too much to drink.
On these occasions he returned on board at an earlier
hour than usual; ran across the deck balancing himself
with his spread arms like a tight-rope walker; and
locking the door of his cabin, he would converse and
argue with himself the livelong night in an amazing
variety of tones; storm, sneer, and whine with an inex-
haustible persistence. Massy in his berth next door,
raising himself on his elbow, would discover that his
second had remembered the name of every white man
that had passed through the Sofala for years and years
back. He remembered the names of men that had died,
that had gone home, that had gone to America: he

J 250 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

remembered in his cups the names of men whose con-
nection with the ship had been so short that Massy had
almost forgotten its circumstances and could barely re-
call their faces. The inebriated voice on the other side
of the bulkhead commented upon them all with an ex-
traordinary and ingenious venom of scandalous inven-
tions. It seems they had all offended him in some way,
and in return he had found them all out. He muttercd
darkly; he laughed sardonically; he crushed them one
after another; but of his chief, Massy, he babbled with
an envious and naive admiration. Clever scoundrel!
Den’t meet the likes of him every day. Just look at
him. Ha! Great! Ship of his own. Wouldn’t catch
him going wrong. No fear—the beast! And Massy,
after listening with a gratified smile to these artless
tributes to his greatness, would begin to shout, thump-
ing at the bulkhead with both fists—

“Shut up, you lunatic! Won’t you let me go to
sleep, you fool!”

But a half smile of pride lingered on his lips; outside
the solitary lascar told off for night duty in harbor,
perhaps a youth fresh from a forest village, would stand
motionless in the shadows of the deck listening to the
endless drunken gabble. His heart would be thumping
with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and
obstinate men who pursue inflexibly their incompre-
hensible purposes,—beings with weird intonations in the
voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by in-
scrutable motives.

f 251 ]
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Vint

For a while after his second’s answering hoot Massy
hung over the engine-room gloomily. Captain Whal-
ley, who, by the power of five hundred pounds, had kept
his command for three years, might have been suspected
of never having seen that coast before. He seemed un-
able to put down his glasses, as though they had been
glued under his contracted eyebrows. This settled
frown gave to his face an air of invincible and just
severity; but his raised elbow trembled slightly, and
‘the perspiration poured from under his hat as if a
second sun had suddenly blazed up at the zenith by the
side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose
blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a
mote of dust.

From time to time, still holding up his glasses, he
raised his other hand to wipe his streaming face. The
drops rolled down his cheeks, fell like rain upon the
white hairs of his beard, and brusquely, as if guided
by an uncontrollable and anxious impulse, his arm
reached out to the stand of the engine-room telegraph.
. The gong clanged down below. The balanced vibra-’
tion of the dead-slow speed ceased together with every
sound and tremor in the ship, as if the great stillness
that reigned upon the coast had stolen in through her
sides of iron and taken possession of her innermost re-
cesses. The illusion of perfect immobility seemed to
fall upon her from the luminous blue dome without a

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stain arching over a flat sea without a stir. The faint
breeze she had made for herself expired, as if all at
once the air had become too thick to budge; even the
slight hiss of the water on her stem died out. The nar-
row, long hull, carrying its way without a ripple,
seemed to approach the shoal water of the bar by
stealth. The plunge of the lead with the mournful,
mechanical cry of the lascar came at longer and longer
intervals; and the men on her bridge seemed to hold
their breath. The Malay at the helm looked fixedly
at the compass card, the Captain and the Serang stared
at the coast.

Massy had left the skylight, and, walking flat-footed,
had returned softly to the very spot on the bridge he
had occupied before. A slow, lingering grin exposed
his set of big white teeth: they gleamed evenly in the
shade of the awning like the keyboard of a piano in a
dusky room.

At last, pretending to talk to himself in excessive as-
tonishment, he said not very loud—

“ Stop the engines now. What next, I wonder? ”

He waited, stooping from the shoulders, his head
bowed, his glance oblique. Then raising his voice a
shade—

“If I dared make an absurd remark I would say that
you haven’t the stomach to . . .”

But a yelling spirit of excitement, like some frantic
soul wandering unsuspected in the vast stillness of the
coast, had seized upon the body of the lascar at the lead.
The languid monotony of his sing-song ¢hanged to a

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THE END OF THE TETHER

swift, sharp clamor. The weight flew after a single
whir, the line whistled, splash followed splash in haste
The water had shoaled, and the man, instead of the
drowsy tale of fathoms, was calling out the soundings
in feet.

“Fifteen feet. Fifteen, fifteen! Fourteen, four-
teen . . .”

Captain Whalley lowered the arm holding the glasses.
It descended slowly as if by its own weight; no other
part of his towering body stirred; and the swift cries
with their eager warning note passed him by as though
he had been deaf.

Massy, very still, and turning an attentive ear, had
fastened his eyes upon the silvery, close-cropped back
of the steady old head. The ship herself seemed to be
arrested but for the gradual decrease of depth under
her keel.

“ Thirteen feet . . . Thirteen! Twelve!” cried the
leadsman anxiously below the bridge. And, suddenly
the barefooted Serang stepped away noiselessly to steal
a glance over the side.

Narrow of: shoulder, in a suit of faded blue cotton, an
old gray felt hat rammed down on his head, with a hollow
in the nape of his dark neck, and with his slender limbs,
he appeared from the back no bigger than a boy of
fourteen. There was a childlike impulsiveness in the
curiosity with which he watched the spread of the
voluminous, yellowish convolutions rolling up from be-
low to the surface of the blue water like massive clouds
driving slowly upwards on the unfathomable sky. He

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THE END OF THE TETHER

was not startled at the sight in the least. It was not
doubt, but the certitude that the keel of the Sofala must
be stirring the mud now, which made him peep over the
side.

His peering eyes, set aslant in a face of the Chinese
type, a little old face, immovable, as if carved in old
brown oak, had informed him long before that the ship
was not headed at the bar properly. Paid off from
the Fair Maid, together with the rest of the crew, after
the completion of the sale, he had hung, in his faded
blue suit and floppy gray hat, about the doors of the
Harbor Office, till one day, seeing Captain Whalley
coming along to get a crew for the Sofala, he had put
himself quietly in the way, with his bare feet in the dust
and an upward mute glance. The eyes of his old com-
mander had fallen on him favorably—-it must have
been an auspicious day—and in less than half an hour
the white men in the “ Ofiss ” had written his name on
a document as Serang of the fire-ship Sofala. Since
that time he had repeatedly looked at that estuary, upon
that coast, from this bridge and from this side of the
bar. The record of the visual world fell through his
eyes upon his unspeculating mind as on a sensitized
plate through the lens of a camera. His knowledge was
absolute and precise; nevertheless, had he been asked
his opinion, and especially if questioned in the down-
right, alarming manner of white men, he would have
displayed the hesitation of ignorance. He was certain
of his facts—but such a certitude counted for little
against the doubt what answer would be pleasing.

[ 255 ]
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Fifty years ago, in a jungle village, and before he was
a day old, his father (who died without ever seeing
a white face) had had his nativity cast by a man of
’ skill and wisdom in astrology, because in the arrange-
ment of the stars may be read the last word of human
destiny. His destiny had been to thrive by the favor
of various white men on the sea. He had swept the
decks of ships, had tended their helms, had minded their
stores, had risen at last to be a Serang; and his placid
mind had remained as incapable of penetrating the sim-
plest motives of those he served as they themselves were
incapable of detecting through the crust of the earth
the secret nature of its heart, which may be fire or may
be stone. But he had no doubt whatever that the Sofala
was out of the proper track for crossing the bar at
Batu Beru.

It was a slight error. The ship could not have been
more than twice her own length too far to the north-
ward; and a white man at a loss for a cause (since it
was impossible to suspect Captain Whalley of blunder-
ing ignorance, of. want of skill, or of neglect) would
thave been inclined to doubt the testimony of his senses.
It was some such feeling that kept Massy motionless,
with his teeth laid bare by an anxious grin. Not so the
Serang. He was not troubled by any intellectual mis-
trust of his senses. If his captain chose to stir the mud
it was well. He had known in his life white men indulge
in outbreaks equally strange. He was only genuinely
interested to see what would come of it. At last, appar-
ently satisfied, he stepped back from the rail.

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He had made no sound: Captain Whalley, however,
seemed to have observed the movements of his Serang.
Holding his head rigidly, he asked with a mere stir of
his lips—

“Going ahead still, Serang? ”

“Still going a little, Tuan,” answered the Malay.
Then added casually, “‘ She is over.”

The lead confirmed his words; the depth of water in-
creased at every cast, and the soul of excitement de-
parted suddenly from the lascar swung in the canvas
belt over the Sofala’s side. Captain Whalley or-
dered the lead in, set the engines ahead without haste,
and averting his eyes from the coast directed the
Serang to keep a course for the middle of the en-
trance.

Massy brought the palm of his hand with a loud smack
against his thigh.

“You grazed on the bar. Just look astern and see
if you didn’t. Look at the track she left. You can see
it plainly. Upon my soul, I thought‘you would! What
made you do that? What on earth made you do that?
T believe you are trying to scare me.”

He talked slowly, as it were circumspectly, keeping his
prominent black eyes on his captain. There was also a
slight plaintive note in his rising choler, for, primarily,
it was the clear sense of a wrong suffered undeservedly
that made him hate the man who, for a beggarly five
hundred pounds, claimed a sixth part of the profits
under the three years’ agreement. Whenever his resent-
meat got the better of the awe the person of Captaim

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Whalley inspired he would positively whimper with
fury.

“You don’t know what to invent to plague my life
out of me. I would not have thought that a man of
your sort would condescend . . .”

He paused, half hopefully, half timidly, whenever
Captain Whalley made the slightest movement in the
deck-chair, as though expecting to be conciliated by a
‘ soft speech or else rushed upon and hunted off the
bridge. ‘

“T am puzzled,” he went on again, with the watchful
unsmiling baring of his big teeth. ‘I don’t know what
to think. I do believe you are trying to frighten me.
You very nearly planted her on the bar for at least
twelve hours, besides getting the engines choked with
mud. Ships can’t afford to lose twelve hours on a trip
nowadays—as you ought to know very well, and de
know very well to be sure, only . . -”

His slow volubility, the sideways cranings of his neck,
the black glances out of the very corners of his eyes,
left Captain Whalley unmoved. He looked at the deck
with a severe frown. Massy waited for some little time,
then began to threaten plaintively.

“You think you’ve got me bound hand and foot in
that agreement. You think you can torment me in any
way you please. Ah! But remember it has another
six weeks to run yet. There’s time for me to dismiss
you before the three years are out. You will do yet
something that will give me the chance to dismiss you,
and make you wait a twelvemonth for your money before

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you can take yourself off and pull out your five hundred,
and leave me without a penny to get the new boilers for
her. You gloat over that idea—don’t you?. I do be-
lieve you sit here gloating. It’s as if I had sold my
soul for five hundred pounds to be everlastingly damned
in the end... .” 7

He paused, without apparent exasperation, then con-
tinued evenly—

“. . . With the boilers worn out and the survey hang-
ing over my head, Captain Whalley. Captain
Whalley, I say, what do you do with your money? You
must have stacks of money somewhere—a man like you
must. It stands to reason. I am not a fool, you know,
Captain Whalley—partner.”

Again he paused, as though he had done for good.
He passed his tongue over his lips, gave a backward
glance at the Serang conning the ship with quiet whis-
pers and slight signs of the hand. The wash of the
propeller sent a swift ripple, crested with dark froth,
upon a long flat spit of black slime. The Sofala had
entered the river; the trail she had stirred up over the
bar was a mile astern of her now, out of sight, had dis-
appeared utterly; and the smooth, empty sea along the
coast was left behind in the glittering desolation of sun-
shine. On each side of her, low down, the growth of
somber twisted mangroves covered the semi-liquid banks ;
and Massy continued in his old tone, with an abrupt
start, as if his speech had been ground out of him, like
the tune of a music-box, by turning a handle.

“ Though if anybody ever got the best of me, it is you.

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X don’t mind saying this. I’ve said it—there! What
more can you want? Isn’t that enough for your pride,
Captain Whalley. You got over me from the first. It’s
all of a piece, when I look back at it. You allowed me
to insert that clause about intemperance without saying
anything, only looking very sick when I made a point
of it going in black on white. How could I tell what
was wrong about you? ‘There’s generally something
wrong somewhere. And, lo and behold! whea you
come on board it turns out that you’ve been in the
habit of drinking nothing but water for years and
years.”

His dogmatic reproachful whine stopped. He brooded
profoundly, after the manner of crafty and unintelli-
gent men. It seemed inconceivable that Captain
Whalley should not laugh at the expression of disgust
that overspread the heavy, yellow countenance. But
Captain Whalley never raised his eyes—aitting in his
arnm-chair, outraged, dignified, and motionless.

“Much good it was to me,” Massy remonstrated
monotonously, “to insert a clause of dismissal for in-
temperance against a man who drinks nothing but water.
And you looked so upset, too, when I read my draft in
the lawyer’s office that morning, Cuptain Whalley,—
you legked so crestfallen, that I made sure I had gone
home on your weak spot. A shipowner can’t be too
eareful as to the sort of skipper he gets. You must
have been laughing at me in your sleeve all the blessed
time. . . . Eh? What are you going to say?”

Captain Whalley had only shuffled his feet slightly.

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A duli animosity became apparent in Massy’s sideways
stare. ;
“But recollect that there are other grounds of dis-
missal. There’s habitual carelessness, amounting te in-
competence—there’s gross and persistent neglect of
duty. I am not quite as big a fool as you try to make
me out to be. You have been careless of late—leaving
everything to that Serang. Why! [ve seen you let-
ting that old fool of a Malay take bearings for you,
as if you were too big to attend to your work yourself
And what do you call that silly touch-and-go manner
in which you took the ship over the bar just now? You
expect me to put up with that?”
Leaning on his elbow against the ladder abaft the
bridge, Sterne, the mate, tried to hear, blmking the
while from the distance at the second engineer, who had
come up for a moment, and stood in the engine-room
eompanion. Wiping his hands on a bunch of cotton
waste, he looked about with indifference to the right
and left at the river banks slipping astern of the
Sofala steadily.
Massy turned full at the chair. The character of hs
“Take care. I may yet dismiss you and freeze to your
money for a year. Imay .. .”
But before the silent, rigid immobility of the man
whose money had come in the nick of time to save him
from utter ruin, his voice died out in his throat.
“Not that I want you to go,” he resumed after a si-
lence, and im an absurdly insinuating tone. “I want

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nothing better than to be friends and renew the agree-
ment, if you will‘consent to find another couple of hun-
dred to help with the new boilers, Captain Whalley.
T’ve told' you before. She must have new boilers; you
know it as well as Ido. Have you thought this over? ”

He waited. The slender stem of the pipe with its
bulky lump of a bowl at the end hung down from his
thick lips. It had gone out. Suddenly he took it from
between his teeth and wrung his hands slightly.

* Don’t you believe me?” He thrust the pipe bowl
into the pocket of his shiny black jacket.

“Tt’s like dealing with the devil,” he said. ‘ Why
don’t you speak? At first you were so high and mighty
with me I hardly dared to creep about my own deck.
Now I can’t get a word from you. You don’t seem to
see me at all. What does it mean? Upon my soul, you
terrify me with this deaf and dumb trick. What’s go-
ing on in that head of yours? What are you plotting
against me there so hard that you can’t say a word?
You will never make me believe that you—you—don’t
know where to lay your hands on a couple of hundred.
You have made me curse the day I was born. . . .”

“Mr. Massy,” said Captain Whalley suddenly, with-
out stirring.

The engineer started violently.

“Tf that is so I can only beg you to forgive me.”

“* Starboard,” muttered the Serang to the helmsman;
and the Sofala began to swing round the bend into the
second reach.

* Ough!” Massy shuddered. “You make my blood
[ 262 1
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run cold. What made you come here? What made you
come aboard that evening all of a sudden, with your
high talk and your money—tempting me? I always
wondered what was your motive? You fastened yourself
on me to have easy times and grow fat on my life blood,
T tell you. Was that it? I believe you are the greatest
miser-in the world, or else why . . .”

“No. Iam only poor,” interrupted Captain Whalley,
stonily.

“ Steady,” murmured the Serang. Massy turned away
with his chin on his shoulder.

“JT don’t believe it,” he said in his dogmatic tone.
Captain Whalley made no movement. “ There you sit
like a gorged vulture—exactly like a vulture.”

He embraced the middle of the reach and both the
banks in one blank unseeing circular glance, and left the
‘bridge slowly.

Ix

On turning to descend Massy perceived the head of
Sterne the mate loitering, with his sly confident smile,
his red mustaches and blinking eyes, at the foot of the
ladder.

Sterne had been a junior in one of the larger shipping
concerns before joining the Sofala. He had thrown up
his berth, he said, “‘on general principles.” The pro-
motion in the employ was very slow, he complained, and
he thought it was time for him to try and get on a bit

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in the world. It seemed as though nobody. would ever
die or leave the firm; they all stuck fast in their berths
till they got mildewed; he was tired of waiting; and he
feared that when a,vacancy did occur the best servants
were by no means sure of being treated fairly. Besides,
the captain he had to serve under—Captain Provost—
was an unaccountable sort of man and had taken a
dislike to him for some reason or other. For doing
rather more than his bare duty as likely as not.
When he had done anything wrong he could take a
talking to, like a man; but he expected to be treated
like a man too, and not to be addressed invariably as
though he were a dog. He had asked Captain Provost
plump and plain to tell him where he was at fault, and
Captain Provost, in a most scornful way, had told him
that he was a perfect officer, and that if he disliked the
‘ way he was being spoken to there was the gangway—
he could take himself off ashore at once. But everybody
knew what sort of man Captain Provost was. It was no
use appealing to the office. Captain Provost had too
much influence in the employ. All the same, they had
to give him a good character. He made bold to say
there was nothing in the world against him, and, as he
had happened to hear that the mate of the Sofala had
been taken to the hospital that morning with a sun-
stroke, he thought there would be no harm in seeing
whether he would not do. . . .
He had come to Captain Whalley freshly shaved, red-
faced, thin-flanked, throwing out his lean chest; and
had recited his little tale with an open and manly as-

[ 264 ]
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‘surance. Now and then his eyelids quivered slightly,
his hand would steal up to the end of the flaming
mustache; his eyebrows were straight, furry, of a chest-
nut color, and the directness of his gaze seemed to
tremble on the verge of impudence. Captain Whalley
had engaged him temporarily ; then, the other man hav-
ing been ordered home by the doctors, he had remained
for the next trip, and then the next. He had now at-
tained permanency, and the performance of his duties
was marked by an air of serious, single-minded apphi-
ation. Directly he was spoken to, he began to smile
attentively, with a great deference expressed in his
whole attitude; but there was in the rapid winking
which went on all the time something quizzical, as
though he had possessed the secret of some universal
joke cheating all creation and impenetrable to other
mortals.

Grave and smiling he watched Massy come down step
by step; when the chief engineer had reached the deck
he swung about, and they found themselves face to face.
Matched as to height and utterly dissimilar, they con-
fronted each other as if there had been something be-
tween them—something else than the bright strip of
sunlight that, falling through the wide lacing of two
awnings, cut crosswise the narrow planking of the deck
and separated their feet as it were a stream; something
profound and subtle and incalculable, like an unex-
pressed understanding, a secret mistrust, or some sort
of fear.

At last Sterne, blinking his deep-set eyes and sticking

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forward his scraped, clean-cut chin, as crimson as the
rest of his face, murmured—

“You’ve seen? He grazed! You've seen?”

Massy, contemptuous, and without raising his yellow,
fleshy countenance, replied in the same pitch—

“Maybe. But if it had been you we would have been
stuck fast in the mud.”

‘‘ Pardon me, Mr. Massy. I beg to deny it. Of course
a shipowner may say what he jolly well pleases on his
own deck. That’s all right; but I beg to . . .”

“Get out of my way!”

The other had a slight start, the impulse of suppressed
indignation perhaps, but held his ground. Massy’s
downward glance wandered right and left, as though the
deck all raund Sterne had been bestrewn with eggs that
must not be broken, and he had looked irritably for
places where he could set his feet in flight. In the end
he too did not move, though there was plenty of room
to pass on.

“*T heard you say up there,” went on the mate—“ and
a very just remark it was too—that there’s always
something wrong. . . .”

“Eavesdropping is what’s wrong with you, Mr.
Sterne.”

“ Now, if you would only listen to me for a moment,
Mr. Massy, sir, I could . . .”

“You are a sneak,” interrupted Massy in a great
hurry, and even managed to get so far as to repeat, “ a
common sneak,” before the mate had broken in argu-
mentatively—

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“ Now, sir, what is it you want? You want...

“YT want—I want,” stammered Massy, infuriated and
astonished— I want. How do you know that I want
anything? How dare you? . . . What do you
mean? . . . What are you after—you .. .”

“Promotion.” Sterne silenced him with candid brav-
ado. The engineer’s round soft cheeks quivered still,
but he said quietly enough—

“You are only worrying my head off,” and Sterne
met him with a confident little smile.

“A chap in business I know (well up in the world
he is now) used to tell me that this was the proper way.
‘ Always push on to the front,’ he would say. ‘ Keep
yourself well before your boss. Interfere whenever you
get a chance. Show him what you know. Worry him
into seeing you.” That was his advice. Now I know
no other boss than you here. You are the owner, and
no one else counts for that much in my eyes. See, Mr.
Massy? I want to get on. I make no secret of it that
I am one of the sort that means to get on. These are
the men to make use of, sir. You haven’t arrived at
the top of the tree, sir, without finding that out—I
dare say.”

“Worry your boss in order to get on,” repeated
Massy, as if awestruck by the irreverent originality of
the idea. ‘‘I shouldn’t wonder if this was just what the
Blue Anchor people kicked you out of their employ for.

”

the same way here if you aren’t careful—I can promise
you.”

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THE END OF THE TETHER

At this Sterne hung his head, thoughtful, perplexed,
winking hard at the deck. All his attempts to enter into
confidential relations with his owner had led of late
to nothing better than these dark threats of dismissal ;
and a threat of dismissal would check him at once into
a hesitating silence as though he were not sure that
the proper time for defying it had come. On this occa-
sion he seemed to have lost his tongue for a moment, and
Massy, getting in motion, heavily passed him by with
an abortive attempt at shouldering. Sterne defeated it
by stepping aside. He turned then swiftly, opening
his mouth very wide as if to shout something after the
engineer, but seemed to think better of it.

Always—as he was ready to confess—on the lookout
for an opening to get on, it had become an instinct with
him to watch the conduct of his immediate superiors for
something “that one could lay hold of.” It was his
belief that no skipper in the world would keep his com-
mand for a day if only the owners could be “ made to
know.” This romantic and naive theory had led him
ito trouble more than once, but he remained incorrigi-
ble; and his character was so instinctively disloyal that
whenever he joined a ship the intention of oustmg his
commander out of the berth and taking his place was
always present at the back of his head, as a matter of
course. It filled the leisure of his waking hours with
the reveries of careful plans and compromising diseov-
eries—the dreams of his sleep with images of lucky
turns and favorable accidents. Skippers had been
known to sicken and die at sea, than which nothing

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could be better to give a smart mate a chance of showing
what he’s made of. They also would tumble overboard
sometimes: he had heard of one or two such cases.
Others again . . . But, as it were constitutionally, he
was faithful to the belief that the conduct of no single
one of them would stand the test of careful watching
by a man who “ knew what’s what” and who kept his
eyes “skinned pretty well” all the time.

After he had gained a permanent footing on board
the Sofala he allowed his perennial hope to rise high.
To begin with, it was a great advantage to have an old
man for captain: the sort of man besides who in the
nature of things was likely to give up the job before
long from one cause or another. Sterne was greatly
chagrined, however, to notice that he did not = any-
way near being past his work yet. Still, these old men
go to pieces all at once sometimes. Then there was the
owner-engineer close at hand to be impressed by his zeal
and steadiness. Sterne never for a moment doubted the
obvious nature of his own merits (he was really an ex-
cellent officer) ; only, nowadays, professional merit alone
does not take a man along fast enough. A chap must
have some push in him, and must keep his wits at work
too to help him forward. He made up his mind to
"inherit the charge of this steamer if it was to be done
at all; not indeed estimating the command of the
Sofala as a very great catch, but for the reason that,
out East especially, to make a start is everything, and
one command leads to another.

He began by promising himself to behave with great
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circumspection; Massy’s somber and fantastic humors
intimidated him as being outside one’s usual sea experi-
ence; but he was quite intelligent enough to realize al-
most from the first that he was there in the presence of
an exceptional situation. His peculiar prying imagina-
tion penetrated it quickly; the feeling that there was
in it an element which eluded his grasp exasperated his
impatience to get on. And so one trip came to an end,
then another, and he had begun his third before he’ saw
an opening by which he could step in with any sort of
effect. It had all been very queer and very obscure;
something had been going on near him, as if separated
by a chasm from the common life and the working
routine of the ship, which was exactly like the life and
the routine of any other coasting steamer of that class.

Then one day he made his discovery.

It came to him after all these weeks of watchful ob-
servation and puzzled surmises, suddenly, like the long-
sought solution of a riddle that suggests itself to the
mind in a flash. Not with the same authority, however.
Great heavens! Could it be that? And after remain-
ing thunderstruck for a few seconds he tried to shake
it off with self-contumely, as though it had been the
product of an unhealthy bias towards the Incredible,
the Inexplicable, the Unheard-of—the Mad!

This—the illuminating moment—had occurred the trip
before, on the return passage. They had just left a .
place of call on the mainland called Pangu; they were
steaming straight out of a bay. To the east a massive
headland closed the view, with the tilted edges of the

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rocky strata showing through its ragged clothing of
rank bushes and thorny creepers. The wind had begun
to sing in the rigging; the sea along the coast, green
and as if swollen a little above the line of the horizon,
seemed to pour itself over, time after time, with a slow
and thundering fall, into the shadow of the leeward
cape; and across the wide opening the nearest of a
group of small islands stood enveloped in the hazy
yellow light of a breezy sunrise; still farther out the
hummocky tops of other islets peeped out motionless
-above the water of the channels between, scoured
tumultuously by the breeze.

The usual track of the Sofala both going and return-
ing on every trip led her for a few miles along this reef-
infested region. She followed a broad lane of water,
dropping astern, one after another, these crumbs of the
earth’s crust resembling a squadron of dismasted hulks
run in disorder upon a foul ground of rocks and shoals.
Some of these fragments of land appeared, indeed, no
bigger than a stranded ship; others, quite flat, lay
awash like anchored rafts, like ponderous, black rafts
of stone; several, heavily timbered and round at the
base, emerged in squat domes of deep green foliage that
shuddered darkly all over to the flying touch of cloud
shadows/ driven by the sudden gusts of the squally sea-
son. The thunderstorms of the coast broke frequently
over that cluster; it turned then shadowy in its whole
extent; it turned more dark, and as if more still in the
play of fire; as if more impenetrably silent in the peals
of thunder; its blurred shapes vanished—dissolving ut-

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terly at times in the thick rain—to reappear clear-cut
and black in the stormy light against the gray sheet of
the cloud—scattered on the slaty round table of
the sea. Unscathed by storms, resisting the work of
years, unfretted by the strife of the world, there it lay
unchanged as on that day, four hundred years ago,
when first beheld by Western eyes from the deck of
a high-pooped caravel.

It was one of these secluded spots that may be found
on the busy sea, as on land you come sometimes upon the
clustered houses of a hamlet untouched by men’s rest-
lessness, untouched by their need, by their thought, and
as if forgotten by time itself. The lives of uncounted
generations had passed it by, and the multitudes of sea-
fowl, urging their way from all the points of the horizon
to sleep on the outer rocks of the group, unrolled the
converging evolutions of their flight in long somber
streamers upon the glow of the sky. The palpitating
cloud of their wings soared and stooped over the pinna-
cles of the rocks, over the rocks slender like spires, squat
like martello towers ; over the pyramidal heaps like fallen
ruins, over the lines of bald bowlders showing like a wall
of stones battered to pieces and scorched by lightning—
with the sleepy, clear glimmer of water in every breach.
The noise of their continuous and violent screaming
filled the air.

This great noise would meet the Sofala coming up from
Batu Beru; it would meet her on quiet evenings, a piti-
less and savage clamor enfeebled by distance, the
clamor of seabirds settling to rest, and struggling for

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a footing at the end of the day. No one noticed it
especially on board; it was the voice of their ship’s un-
erring landfall, ending the steady stretch of a hundred
miles. She had made good her course, she had run her
distance till the punctual islets began to emerge one by
one, the points of rocks, the hummocks of earth .

and the cloud of birds hovered—the restless cloud emit-
ting a strident and cruel uproar, the sound of the fa-
miliar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath,
of the outspread sea, and of the high sky without a
flaw.

But when the Sofala happened to close with the land
after sunset she would find everything very still there
under the mantle of the night. All would be still, dumb,
almost invisible—but for the blotting out of the low
constellations occulted in turns behind the vague masses
of the islets whose true outlines eluded the eye amongst
the dark spaces of the heaven: and the ship’s three lights,
resembling three stars—the red and the green with the
white above—her three lights, like three companion
stars wandering on the earth, held their unswerving
course for the passage at the southern end of the group.
Sometimes there were human eyes open to watch them
come nearer, traveling smoothly in the somber void; the
eyes of a naked fisherman in his canoe floating over a
reef. He thought drowsily: “Ha! The fire-ship that
once in every moon goes in and comes out of Pangu
Bay.” More he did not know of her. And just as he
had detected the faint rhythm of the propeller beating
the calm water a mile and a half away, the time would

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come for the Sofala to alter her course, the lights would
swing off him their triple beam—and disappear.

A few miserable, half-naked families, a sort of outcast:
tribe of long-haired, lean, and wild-eyed people, strove
for their living in this lonely wilderness of islets, lying
like an abandoned outwork of the land at the gates of
the bay. Within the knots and loops of the rocks the
water rested more transparent than crystal under their
crooked and leaky canoes, scooped out of the trunk of

.a tree: the forms of the bottom undulated slightly to
the dip of a paddle; and the men seemed to hang in the
air, they seemed to hang inclosed within the fibers of a
dark, sodden log, fishing patiently in a strange, un-
steady, pellucid, green air above the shoals.

Their bodies stalked brown and emaciated as if dried
up in the sunshine; their lives ran out silently; the
homes where they were born, went to rest, and died—
flimsy sheds of rushes and coarse grass eked out with
a few ragged mats—were hidden out of sight from the
open sea. No glow of their household fires ever kindled
for a seaman a red spark upon the blind night of the
group: and the calms of the coast, the flaming long
calms of the equator, the unbreathing, concentrated
calms like the deep introspection of a passionate nature,
brooded awfully for days and weeks together over the
unchangeable inheritance of their children; till at last
the stones, hot like live embers, scorched the naked sole,
till the water clung warm, and sickly, and as if thick-
ened, about the legs of lean men with girded loins, wad-
ing thigh-deep in the pale blaze of the shallows. And

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it would happen now and then that the Sofala, through
some delay in one of the ports of call, would heave in
sight making for Pangu Bay as late as noonday.

Only a blurring cloud at first, the thin mist of her
smoke would arise mysteriously from an empty point on
the clear line of sea and sky. The taciturn fishermen
within the reefs would extend their lean arms towards
the offing; and the brown figures stooping on the tiny
beaches, the brown figures of men, women, and children
grubbing in the sand in search of turtles’ eggs, would
rise up, crooked elbow aloft and hand over the eyes, ta
watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve
off—and go by. Their ears caught the panting of that
ship; their eyes followed her till she passed between the
two capes of the mainland going at full speed as though
she hoped to make her way unchecked into the very
bosom of the earth.

On such days the luminous sea would give no sign of
the dangers lurking on both sides of her path. Every-
thing remained still, crushed by the overwhelming power
of the light; and the whole group, opaque in the sun-
shine,—the rocks resembling pinnacles, the rocks resem-
bling spires, the rocks resembling ruins; the forms of
islets’ resembling beehives, resembling mole-hills, the
islets recalling the shapes of haystacks, the contours of
ivy-clad towers,—would stand reflected together upside
down in the unwrinkled water, like carved toys of ebony
disposed on the silvered plate-glass of a mirror.

The first touch of blowing weather would envelop the
whole at once in the spume of the windward breakers,

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as if in a sudden cloudlike burst of steam; and the clear
water seemed fairly to boil in all the passages. The
provoked sea outlined exactly in a design of angry foam
the wide base of the group; the submerged level of
broken waste and refuse left over from the building of
the coast near by, projecting its dangerous spurs, all
awash, far into the channel, and bristling with wicked
long spits often a mile long: with deadly spits made of
froth and stones.

And even nothing more than a brisk breeze—as on
that morning, the voyage before, when the Sofala left
Pangu Bay early, and Mr. Sterne’s discovery was te
blossom out like a flower of incredible and evil aspect
from the tiny seed of instinctive suspicion,—even such
a breeze had enough strength to tear the placid mask
from the face of the sea. To Sterne, gazing with indif-
ference, it had been like a revelation to behold for the
first time the dangers marked by the hissing livid
patches on the water as distinctly as on the engraved
paper of a chart. It came into his mind that this was
the sort of day most favorable for a stranger attempt-
ing the passage: a clear day, just windy enough for
the sea to break on every ledge, buoying, as it were,
the channel plainly to the sight; whereas during a calm
you had nothing to depend on but the compass and the
practiced judgment of your eye. And yet the suc-
cessive captains of the Sofala had had to take her
through at night more than once. Nowadays you could
not afford to throw away six or seven hours of a
steamer’s time. That you couldn’t. But then use is

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everything, and with proper care . . . The channel
was broad and safe enough; the main point was to hit
upon the entrance correctly in the dark—for if a man
got himself involved in that stretch of broken water
over yonder he would never get out with a whole ship—
if he ever got out at all.

This was Sterne’s last train of thought independent
of the great discovery. He had just seen to the secur-
ing of the anchor, and had remained forward idling
’ away a moment or two. The captain was in charge on
the bridge. With a slight yawn he had turned away
from his survey of the sea and had leaned his shoulders
against the fish davit.

These, properly speaking, were the very last moments
of ease he was to know on board the Sofala. All the
instants that came after were to be pregnant with pur-
pose and intolerable with perplexity. No more idle,
random thoughts; the discovery would put them on the
rack, till sometimes he wished to goodness he had been
fool enough not to make it at all. And yet, if, his
chance to get on rested on the discovery of “ something
wrong,” he could not have hoped for a greater stroke
of luck.

x

The knowledge was too disturbing, really. There was
“something wrong” with a vengeance, and the moral
certitude of it was at first simply frightful to contem-
plate. Sterne had been looking aft in a mood so idle,
that for once he was thinking no harm of anyone. His

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saptain on the bridge presented himself naturally to
his sight. How insignificant, how casual was the
thought that had started the train of discovery—like an
accidental spark that suffices to ignite the charge of a
tremendous mine!

Caught under by the breeze, the awnings of the fore-
deck bellied upwards and collapsed slowly, and above
their heavy flapping the gray stuff of Captain Whalley’s
roomy coat fluttered incessantly around his arms and .
trunk. He faced the wind in full light, with his great
silvery beard blown forcibly against his chest; the eye-
brows overhung heavily the shadows whence his glance
appeared to be staring ahead piercingly. Sterne could
just detect the twin gleam of the whites shifting under
the shaggy arches of the brow. At short range these
eyes, for all the man’s affable manner, seemed to look
you through and through. Sterne never could defend
himself from that feeling when he had occasion to speak
with his captain. He did not like it. What a big
heavy man he appeared up there, with that little
shrimp of a Serang in close attendance—as was usual
in this extraordinary steamer! Confounded absurd cus-
tom that. He resented it. Surely the old fellow could
have looked after his ship without that loafing native
at his elbow. Sterne wriggléd his shoulders with dis-
gust. What was it? Indolence or what?

That old skipper must have been growing lazy for
years. They all grew lazy out East here (Sterne was
very conscious of his own unimpaired activity); they
got slack all over. But he towered very erect on the

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bridge; and quite low by his side, as you see a small
child looking over the edge of a table, the battered soft
hat and the brown face of the Serang peeped over the
white canvas screen of the rail.

No doubt the Malay was standing back, nearer to the
wheel; but the great disparity of size in close associa-
tion amused Sterne like the observation of a bizarre fact
in nature. There were as queer fish out of the sea as
any in it.

He saw Captain Whalley turn his head quickly to
speak to his Serang; the wind whipped the whole white
mass of the beard sideways. He would be directing the
chap to look at the compass for him, or what not. Of
course. Too much trouble to step over and see for him-
self. Sterne’s scorn for that bodily indolence which
overtakes white men in the East increased on reflection.
Some of them would be utterly lost if they hadn’t all
these natives at their beck and call; they grew perfectly
shameless about it too. He was not of that sort, thank
God! It wasn’t in him to make himself dependent for
his work on any shriveled-up little Malay like that. As
if one could ever trust a silly native for anything in
the world! But that fine old man thought differently,
it seems. There they were together, never far apart;
a pair of them, recalling to the mind an old whale at-.
tended by a little pilot-fish.

The fancifulness of the comparison made him smile.
A whale with an inseparable pilot-fish! That’s what
the old man looked like; for it could not be said he
looked like a shark, though Mr. Massy had called him

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that very name. But Mr. Massy did not mind what he
said in his savage fits. Sterne smiled to himself—and
gradually the ideas evoked by the sound, by the im-
agined shape of the word pilot-fish; the ideas of aid, of
guidance needed and received, came uppermost in his
mind: the ward pilot awakened the idea of trust, of
dependenice, the idea of welcome, clear-eyed help brought
to the seaman groping for the land in the dark: groping
blindly in fogs: feeling his way’ in the thick weather
of the gales that, filling the air with a salt mist blown
up from the sea, contract the range of sight on all
sides to a shrunken horizon that seems within reach of
the hand.

A pilot sees better than a stranger, because his local
knowledge, like a sharper vision, comp!-tes the shapes
of things hurriedly glimpsed; penetrates the veils of
mist spread over the land by the storms of the sea; de-
fines with certitude the outlines of a coast lying under
the pall fog, the forms of landmarks half buried in a
‘starless night as in a shallow grave. He recognizes be-
cause he already knows. It is not to his far-reaching
eye but to his more extensive knowledge that the pilot
looks for certitude; for this certitude of the ship’s posi-
tion on which may depend a man’s good fame and the
peace of his conscience, the justification of the trust
deposited in his hands, with his own life too, which is’
seldom wholly his to throw away, and the humble lives
of others rooted in distant affections, perhaps, and made
as weighty as the lives of kings by the burden of the
awaiting mystery. The pilot’s knowledge brings relief

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and certitude to the commander of a ship; the Scrang,
however, in his fanciful suggestion of a pilot-fish at-
tending a whale, could not in any way be credited with
a superior knowledge. Why should he have it? These
two men had come on that run together—the white and
the brown—on the same day: and of course a white man
would learn more in a week than the best native would
in a month. He was made to stick to the skipper as
though he were of some use—as the pilot-fish, they say,
is to the whale. But how—it was very marked—how?
A pilot-fish—a pilot—a . . . But if not superior
knowledge then . .

Sterne’s discovery was made. It was repugnant to his
imagination, shocking to his ideas of honesty, shocking
to his conception of mankind.. This enormity affected
one’s outlook on what was possible in this world: it was
as if for instance the sun had turned blue, throwing a
new and sinister light on men and nature. Really in
the first moment he had felt sickish, as though he had
got a blow below the belt: for a second the very color
of the sea seemed changed—appeared queer to his wan-
dering eyé; and he had'a passing, unsteady sensation in .
all his limbs as though the earth had started turning
the other way.

A very natural incredulity succeeding this sense of
upheaval brought a measure of relief. He had gasped;
it was over. But afterwards during all that day sudden
paroxysms of wonder would come over him in the midst
of his occupations. He would stop and shake his head.
The revolt of his incredulity had passed away almost as

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quick as the first emotion of discovery, and for the next
twenty-four hours he had no sleep. That would never
do. At meal-times (he took the foot of the table set
up for the white men on the bridge) he could not help
losing himself in a fascinated contemplation of Captain
Whalley opposite. He watched the deliberate upward
movements of the arm; the old man put his food to his
lips as though he never expected to find any taste in
his daily bread, as though he did not know anything
about it. He fed himself like a somnambulist. “ It’s an
awful sight,” thought Sterne; and he watched the long
period of mournful, silent immobility, with a big brown
hand lying loosely closed by the side of the plate, till
he noticed the two engineers to the right and left look-
ing at him in astonishment. He would close his mouth
in a hurry then, and lowering his eyes, wink rapidly at
his plate. It was awful to see the old chap sitting
there; it was even awful to think that with three words
he could blow him up sky-high. All he had to do was
to raise his voice and pronounce a single short sentence,
and yet that simple act seemed as impossible to attempt
as moving the sun out of its place in the sky. The old
chap could eat in his terrific mechanical way ; but Sterne,
from mental excitement, could not—not that evening,
at any rate.

He had had ample time since to get accustomed to the
strain of the meal-hours. He would never have believed
it. But then use is everything; only the very potency
of his success prevented anything resembling elation.
He felt like a man who, in his legitimate search for a

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loaded gun to help him on his way through the world,
chances to come upon a torpedo—upon a live torpedo.
with a shattering charge in its head and a pressure of
many atmospheres in its tail. It is the sort of weapon
to make its possessor careworn and nervous. He had
no mind to be blown up himself; and he could not get
rid of the notion that the explosion was bound to damage
him too in some way.

This vague apprehension had restrained him at first.
He was able now to eat and sleep with that fearful
weapon by his side, with the conviction of its power
always in his mind. It had not been arrived at by any
reflective process; but once the idea had entered his:
head, the conviction had followed overwhelmingly in a
multitude of observed little facts to which before he had
given only a languid attention. The abrupt and falter-
ing intonations of the deep voice; the taciturnity put.
on like an armor; the deliberate, as if guarded, move-
ments; the long immobilities, as if the man he watched!
had been afraid to disturb the very air: every familiar
gesture, every word uttered in his hearing, every sigh.
overheard, had acquired a special significance, a con-
firmatory import.

Every day that passed over. the Sofala appeared to
Sterne simply crammed full with proofs—with incon-
trovertible proofs. At night, when off duty, he would
steal out of his cabin in pyjamas (for more proofs) and
stand a full hour, perhaps, on his bare feet below the
bridge, as absolutely motionless as the awning stanchion
in its deck socket near by. On the stretches of easy

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navigation it is not usual for a coasting captain to re-
main on deck all the time of his watch. The Serang
keeps it for him as a matter of custom; in open water,
‘on a straight course, he is usually trusted to look after
the ship by himself. But this old man seemed incapable
of remaining quietly down below. No doubt he could
not sleep. And no wonder. This was also a proof.
Suddenly in the silence of the ship panting upon the
still, dark sea, Sterne would hear a low voice above him
exclaiming nervously—

“ Serang!”

“ Tuan!”

“You are watching the compass well? ”

‘6 Yes, I am watching, Tuan.”

“The ship is making her course? ” :

“ She is, Tuan: Very straight.”

“Tt is well; and remember, Serang, that the order
is that you are to mind the helmsmen and keep a look-
out with care, the same as if I were not on deck.”
-Then, when the Serang had made his answer, the low
tones on the bridge would cease, and everything round
‘Sterne seemed to become more still and more profoundly .
silent. Slightly chilled and with his back aching a little
from long immobility, he would steal away to his room
on the port side of the deck. He had long since parted
with the last vestige of incredulity; of the original
emotions, set into a tumult by the discovery, some trace
of the first awe alone remained. Not the awe of the
man himself—he could blow him up sky-high with six
words—rather it was an awestruck indignation at the

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reckless perversity of avarice (what else could it be?),.
at the mad and somber resolution that for the sake of a
few dollars more seemed to set at naught the common
rule of conscience and pretended to struggle against
the very decree of Providence.

You could not find another man like this one in the:
whole round world—thank God. There was something.
devilishly dauntless in the character of such a deception.
which made you pause.

Other considerations cccurring to his prudence had.
kept him tongue-tied from day to day. It seemed to
him now that it would yet have been easier to speak out
\in the first hour of discovery. He almost regretted not
having made a row at once. But then the very mon-
strosity of the disclosure . . . Why! he could hardly
face it himself, let alone pointing it out to somebody
else. Moreover, with a desperado of that sort one never
knew. The object was not to get him out (that was
as well as done already), but to step into his place.
Bizarre as the thought seemed he might have shown
fight. A fellow up to working such a fraud would have:
enough cheek for anything; a fellow that, as it were,
stood up against God Almighty Himself. He was a
horrid marvel—that’s what he was: he was perfectly
capable of brazening out the affair scandalously till he
got him (Sterne) kicked out of the ship and everlast-.
ingly damaged his prospects in this part of the East.
Yet if you want to get on something must be risked. At
times Sterne thought he had been unduly timid of taking
action in the past; and what was worse, it had come to.

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this, that in the present he did not seem to know what
action to take.

Massy’s savage moroseness was too disconcerting. It
was an incalculable factor of the situation. You could
not tell what there was behind that insulting ferocity.
How could one trust such a temper? it did not put
Sterne in bodily fear for himself, but it frightened him
exceedingly as to his prospects.

Though of course inclined to credit himself with ex-
ceptional powers of observation, he had by now lived
too long with his discovery. He had gone on looking
at nothing else, till at last one day it occurred to him
that the thing was so obvious that no one could miss
seeing it. There were four white men in all on board
the Sofala. Jack, the second engineer, was too dull to
notice anything that took place out of his engine-room.
Remained Massy—the owner—the interested person—
nearly going mad with worry. Sterne had heard and
seen more than enough on board to know what ailed him;
but his exasperation seemed to make him deaf to cau-
tious overtures. If he had only known it, there was the
very thing he wanted. But how could you bargain with
a man of that sort? It was like going into a tiger’s den
‘with a piece of raw meat in your hand. He was as
likely as not to rend you for your pains. In fact, he
was always threatening to do that very thing; and the
urgency of the case, combined with the impossibility of
handling it with safety, made Sterne in his watches below
toss and mutter open-eyed in his bunk, for hours, as
though he had been burning with fever.

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Occurrences like the crossing of the bar just now were
extremely alarming to his prospects. He did not want
to be left behind by some swift catastrophe. Massy be-
ing on the bridge, the old man had to brace himself up
and make a show, he supposed. But it was getting very
bad with him, very bad indeed, now. Even Massy had
been emboldened to find fault this time; Sterne, listen-
ing at the foot of the ladder, had -heard the other’s
whimpering and artless denunciations. Luckily the
beast was very stupid and could not see the why of all
this. However, small blame to him; it took a clever man
to hit upon the cause. Nevertheless, it was high time to
do something. The old man’s game could not be kept
up for many days more.

“T may yet lose my life at this fooling—let alone my
chance,” Sterne mumbled angrily to himself, after the
stooping back of the chief engineer had disappeared
round the corner of the skylight. Yes, no doubt—he
thought; but to blurt out his knowledge would not ad-
vance his prospects. On the contrary, it would blast
them utterly as likely as not. He dreaded another
failure. He had a vague consciousness of not being
much liked by his fellows in this part of the world; inex-
plicably enough, for he had done nothing to them.
Envy, he supposed. People were always down on a
clever chap who made no bones about his determination
to get on. To do your duty and count on the gratitude
of that brute Massy would be sheer folly. He was a bad
lot. Unmanly! A vicious man! Bad! Bad! A brute!
4 brute without a spark of anything human about him;

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without so much as simple curiosity even, or else surely
he would have responded in some way to all these hints
he had been given. . . . Such insensibility was almost
mysterious. Massy’s state of exasperation seemed to
Sterne to have made him stupid beyond the ordinary
silliness of shipowners.

Sterne, meditating on the embarrassments of that stu-
pidity, forgot himself completely. His stony, unwink-
ing stare was fixed on the planks of the deck.

The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the
ship was more perceptible in the silent river, shaded and
still like a forest path. The Sofala, gliding with an
even motion, had passed beyond the coast-belt of mud
and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm slop-
ing banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the
brink. Where the earth had been crumbled by the
floods it showed a steep brown cut, denuding a mass of —
roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in
the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with
creepers, carried on the struggle for life, mingled their
foliage in one solid wall of leaves, with here and there
the shape of an enormous dark pillar soaring, or a
ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannon-
ball, disclosing the impenetrable gloom within, the
secular inviolable shade of the virgin forest. The
thump of the engines reverberated regularly like the
strokes of a metronome beating the measure of the vast
‘silence, the shadow of the western wall had fallen across
the river, and the smoke pouring backwards from the
funnel eddied down behind ‘the ship, oe a thin

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dusky veil over the somber water, which, checked by
the flood-tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole
straight length of the reaches.
Sterne s body, as if rooted on the spot, trembled slightly
from top to toe with the internal vibration of the ship;
from under his feet came sometimes a sudden clang of
iron, the noisy burst of a shout below; to the right the
leaves of the tree-tops caught the rays of the low sun,
and seemed to shine with a golden green light of their
cwn shimmering around the highest boughs which stood
out black against a smooth blue sky that seemed to
droop over the bed of the river like the roof of a tent.
The passengers for Batu Beru, kneeling on the planks,
were engaged in rolling their bedding of mats busily;
they tied up bundles, they snapped the locks of wooden
chests. A pockmarked peddler of small wares threw his
head back to drain into his throat the last drops out of
an earthenware bottle before putting it away in a roll
of blankets. Knots of traveling traders standing about
the deck conversed in low tones; the followers of a small
Rajah from down the coast, broad-faced, simple young
fellows in white drawers and round white cotton caps
with their colored sarongs twisted across their bronze
shoulders, squatted on their hams on the hatch, chewing
betel with bright red mouths as if they had been tasting
blood. Their spears, lying piled up together within the
circle of their bare toes, resembled a casual bundle of
dry bamboos; a thin, livid Chinaman, with a bulky
package wrapped up in leaves already thrust under his
aaa, gazed ahead eagerly; a wandering Kling rubbed

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his teeth with a bit of wood, pouring over the side a
bright stream of water out of his lips; the fat Rajah
dozed in a shabby deck-chair,—and at the turn of every
bend the two walls of leaves reappeared running
parallel along the banks, with their impenetrable solidity
fading at the top to a vaporous mistiness of countless
slender twigs growing free, of young delicate branches
shooting from the topmost limbs of hoary trunks, of
feathery heads of climbers like delicate silver sprays
standing up without a quiver. There was not a sign
of a clearing anywhere; not a trace of human habita-
tion, except when in one place, on the bare end of a low
point under an isolated group of slender tree-ferns, the
jagged, tangled remnants of an old hut on piles ap-
peared with that peculiar aspect of ruined bamboo walls
that look as if smashed with a club. Farther on, half
hidden under the drooping bushes, a canoe containing
@ man and a woman, together with a dozen green cocoa-
nuts in a heap, rocked helplessly after the Sofala had
passed, like a navigating contrivance of venturesome
insects, of traveling ants; while two glassy folds of
water streaming away from each bow of the steamer
across the whole width of the river ran with her up
stream smoothly, fretting their outer ends into a brown
whispering tumble of froth against the miry foot of
each bank.

“T must,” thought Sterne, “bring that brute Massy
to his bearings. It’s getting too absurd in the end.
Here’s the old man up there buried in his chair—he
may just as well be in his grave for all the use he’ll ever

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be in the world—and the Serang’s in charge. Because
that’s what he is. In charge. In the place that’s mine
by rights. I must bring that savage brute to his bear-
ings. I'll do it at once, too. . .”

When the mate made an abrupt start, a little brown.
half-naked boy, with large black eyes, and the string
of a written charm round his neck, became panic-struck.
at once. He dropped the banana he had been munch-
ing, and ran to the knee of a grave dark Arab in flow-
ing robes, sitting like a Biblical figure, incongruously,
on a yellow tin trunk corded with a rope of twisted
rattan. The father, unmoved, put out his hand to pat
the little shaven poll protectingly.

XI

Sterne crossed the deck upon the track of the chief
engineer. Jack, the second, retreating backwards down
the engine-room ladder, and still wiping his hands,
treated him to an incomprehensible grin of white teeth
out of his grimy hard face; Massy was nowhere to be
seen. He must have gone straight into his berth.
Sterne scratched at the door softly, then, putting his.
lips to the rose of the ventilator, said—

“JT must speak to you, Mr. Massy. Just give me a
minute or two.”

“Tam busy. Go away from my door.”

“ But pray, Mr. Massy . . .”

“You go away. D’you hear? Take yourself off alto-

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gether—to the other end of the ship—quite away . . .”
The voice inside dropped low. ‘To the devil.”

Sterne paused: then very quietly—

“It’s rather pressing. When do you think you will
be at liberty, sir?”

The answer to this was an exasperated “ Never”; and
at once Sterne, with a very firm expression of face,
turned the handle. .

Mr. Massy’s stateroom—a narrow, one-berth cabin—
smelt strongly of soap, and presented to view a swept,
dusted, unadorned neatness, not so much bare as barren,
not so much severe as starved and lacking in humanity,
like the ward of a public hospital, or rather (owing to
the small size) like the clean retreat of a desperately
poor but exemplary person. Not a single photograph
frame ornamented the bulkheads; not a single article of
clothing, not as much as a spare cap, hung from the
brass hooks. All the inside was painted in one plain
tint of pale blue; two big sea-chests in sailcloth covers
and with iron padlocks fitted exactly in the space usder
the bunk. One glance was enough to embrace all the
strip of scrubbed planks within the four unconcealed
corners. The absence of the usual settee was striking;
the teak-wood top of the washing-stand seemed hermeti-
cally closed, and so was the lid of the writing-desk,
which protruded from the partition at the foot of the
bed-place, containing a mattress as thin as a pancake
under a threadbare blanket with a faded red stripe, anc
a folded mosquito-net against the nights spent in harbor.
There was not a scrip of paper anywhere in sight, no

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boots on the floor, no litter of any sort, not a speck of
dust anywhere; no traces of pipe-ash even, which, in
a heavy smoker, was morally revolting, like a manifesta-
tion of extreme hypocrisy; and the bottom of the old
wooden arm-chair (the only seat there), polished with
much use, shone as if its shabbiness had been waxed.
The screen of leaves on the bank, passing as if unrolled
endlessly i in the round opening of the port, sent a waver-
ing network of light and shade into the place.

Sterne, holding the door open with one hand, had thrust
in his head and shoulders. At this amazing intrusion
Massy, who was doing absolutely nothing, jumped up
speechless.

“ Don’t call names,” murmured Sterne hurriedly. “TI
won't be called names. I think of nothing but your
good, Mr. Massy.”

A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They
both seemed to have lost their tongues. Then the mate
went on with discreet glibness.

“You simply couldn’t conceive what’s going on on
board your ship. It wouldn’t enter your head for a
moment. You are too good—too—too upright, Mr.
Massy, to suspect anybody of sucha . . . It’s enough
to make your hair stand on end.”

He watched for the effect: Massy seemed dazed, un-
comprehending. He only passed the palm of his hand
on the coal-black wisps plastered across the top of his
head. In a tone suddenly changed to confidential au-
dacity Sterne hastened on.

“Remember that there’s only six weeks left to

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run...” The other was looking at him stonily .. .

** so anyhow you shall require a captain for the ship
before long.” :

Then only, as if that suggestion had scarified his flesh
in the manner of red-hot iron, Massy gave a start and
seemed ready to shriek. He contained himself by a
great effort.

“ Require a captain,” he repeated with scathing slow-
ness. “ Whorequires a captain? You dare tell me
that I need any of you humbugging sailors to run my
ship. You and your likes have been fattening on\me
for years. It would have burt me less to throw
my money overboard. Pam—pe—red us—e—less
f-f-f-frauds. The'old ship knows as much as the best
of you.” He snapped his teeth audibly and growled
through them, “ The silly law requires a captain.”

Sterne had taken heart of grace meantime.

“ And the silly insurance people too, as well,” he saic)
lightly. ‘“ But never mind that. What I want to ask
is: Why shouldn’t I do, sir? I don’t say but you could
take a steamer about the world as well as any. of us
sailors. I don’t pretend to tell you that it is a very
great trick . . .” He emitted a short, hollow guffaw,
familiarly . . . “I didn’t make the law—but there it
is; and I am an active young fellow! I quite hold with
your ideas; I know your ways by this time, Mr. Massy.
I wouldn’t try to give myself airs like that—that—er—
lazy specimen of an old man up there.”

He put a marked emphasis on the last sentence, to
lead Massy away from the track in case . . . but he

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did not doubt of now holding his success. The chief
engineer seemed nonplused, like a slow man invited to
catch hold of a whirligig of some sort.

“ What you want, sir, is a chap with no nonsense about
him, who would be content to be your sailing-master.
Quite right, too. Well, I am fit for the work as much
as that Serang. Because that’s what it amounts to.
Do you know, sir, that a dam’ Malay like a monkey is
in charge of your ship—and no one else. Just listen
to his feet pit-patting above us on the bridge—real
officer in charge. He’s taking her up the river while
the g.eat man is wallowing in the chair—perhaps asleep ;
and if he is, that would not make it much worse either—
take my word for it.”

He tried to thrust himself farther in. Massy, with
lowered forehead, one hand grasping the back of the
arm-chair, did not budge.

“You think, sir, that the man has got you tight in
his agreement . . .” Massy raised a heavy snarling
face at this . . . “ Well, sir, one can’t help hearing
of it on board. It’s no secret. And it has been the
talk on shore for years; fellows have been making bets
about it. No, sir! It’s you who have got him at your
mercy. You will say that you can’t dismiss him for
indolence. Difficult to prove in court, and soon. Why,’
yes. But if you say the word, sir, I can tell you some-
thing about his indolence that will give you the clear
right to fire him out on the spot and put me in charge
for the rest of this very trip—yes, sir, before we leave
Batu Beru—and make him pay a dollar a day for his

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keep till we get back, if you like. Now, what do yeu
think of that? Come, sir. Say the word. It’s really
well worth your while, and I am quite ready to take
your bare word. A definite statement from you would
be as good as a bond.”

His eyes began to shine. He insisted. A simple state-
ment,—and'he thought to himself that he would man-
age somehow to stick in his berth as long as it suited
him. He would make himself indispensable; the ship
had a bad name in her port; it would be easy to seare
the fellows off. Massy would have to keep him.

“A definite statement from me would be enough,”

Massy repeated slowly.

' Yes, sir. It would.” Sterne stuck out his chin
cheerily and blinked at close quarters with that uncon-
scious impudence which had the power to enrage Massy
beyond anything.

The engineer spoke very distinctly.

* Listen well to me, then, Mr. Sterne: I woulda’t—
d’ye hear?—I wouldn’t promise you the value of two
pence for anything you can tell me.”

He struck Sterne’s arm away with a smart blow, and
catching hold of the handle pulled the door to. The
terrific slam darkened the cabin instantaneously to his
eyes as if after the flash of an explosion. At once he
dropped into the chair. ‘Oh, no! You don’t!” he
whispered faintly.

The ship had in that place to shave the bank so close
that the gigantic wall of leaves came gliding like a
shutter against the port; the darkness of the primeval

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forest seemed to flow into that bare cabin with the odor
of rotting leaves, of sodden soil—the strong muddy smel!
of the living earth steaming uncovered after the pass-
ing of a deluge. The bushes swished loudly alongside;
above there was a series of crackling sounds, with a
sharp rain of small broken branches falling on the
bridge; a creeper with a great rustle snapped on the
head of a boat davit, and a long, luxuriant green twig
actually whipped in and out of the open port, leaving
behind a few torn leaves that remained suddenly at rest
on Mr. Massy’s blanket. Then, the ship sheering out
in the stream, the ight began to return, but did not
augment beyond a subdued clearness: for the sun was
very low already, and the river, wending its sinuous
course through a multitude of secular trees as if at the
bottom of a precipitous gorge, had been already in-
vaded by a deepening gloom—the swift precursor of
the night.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” murmured the engineer again.
His lips trembled almost imperceptibly ;. his hands too,
a little: and to calm himself he opened the writing-desk,
spread out a sheet of thin grayish paper covered with
a mass of printed figures and began to scan them at-
tentively for the twentieth time this trip at least.

With his elbows propped, his head between his hands,
he seemed to lose himself in the study of an abstruse
problem in mathematics. It was the list of the winning
numbers from the last drawing of the great lottery
which had been the one inspiring fact of so many years
of his existence. The conception of a life deprived of

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that periodical sheet of paper had slipped away from
him entirely, as another man, according to his nature,
would not have been able to conceive a world without
fresh air, without activity, or without affection. A
great pile of flimsy sheets had been growing for years
in his desk, while the Sofala, driven by the faithful
Jack, wore out her boilers in tramping up and down the
Straits, from cape to cape, from river to river, from
bay to bay; accumulating by that hard labor of an
overworked, starved ship the blackened mass of these
documents. Massy kept them under lock and key like
a treasure. There was in them, as in the experience
of life, the fascination of hope, the excitement of a half-
penetrated mystery, the longing of a half-satisfied
desire.

For days together, on a trip, he would shut himself
up in his berth with them: the thump of the toiling
engines pulsated in his ear; and he would weary his
brain poring over the rows of disconnected figures, be-
wildering by their senseless sequence, resembling the
hazards of destiny itself. He nourished a conviction
that there must be some logic lurking somewhere in the
results of chance. He thought he had seen its very
form. His head swam; his limbs ached; he puffed at
his pipe mechanically; a contemplative stupor would
soothe the fretfulness of his temper, like the passive
bodily quietude procured by a drug, while the intellect
remainstensely on the stretch. Nine, nine, nought, four,
two. He made a note. The next winning number of
the great prize was forty-seven thousand and five. These

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aumbers of course would have to be avoided in the future
when writing to Manilla for the tickets. He mumbled,
pencil in hand . . . “and fivee Hm... hm.” He
wetted his finger: the papers rustled. Ha! But what’s
this? Three years ago, in the September drawing, it
‘was number nine, nought, four, two that took the first
prize. Most remarkable. There was a hint there of
a definite rule! He was afraid of missing some recondite
principle in the overwhelming wealth of his material.
What could it be? and for half an hour he would remain
dead still, bent low over the desk, without twitching a
muscle. At his back the whole berth would be thick
with a heavy body of smoke, as if a bomb had burst
in'there, unnoticed, unheard.

At last he would lock up the desk with the decision of
unshaken confidence, jump up and go out. He would
walk swiftly back and forth on that part of the foredeck
which was kept clear of the lumber and of the bodies of
the native passengers. They were a great nuisance, but
they were also a source of profit that could not be dis-
dained. He necded every penny of profit the Sofala
could make. Little enough it was, in all conscience!
The incertitude of chance gave him no concern, since
he had somehow arrived at the conviction that, in the
course of years, every number was bound to have his
winning turn. It was simply a matter of time and of
taking as many tickets as he could afford for every
drawing. He generally took rather more; all the earn-
ings of the ship went that way, and also the wages he
allowed himself as chief engincer. It was the wages he

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paid to others that he begrudged with a reasoned and
at the same time a passionate regret. He scowled at
the lascars with their deck brooms, at the quarter-
masters rubbing the brass rails with greasy rags; ‘he
was eager to shake his fist and roar abuse in bad Malay
at the poor carpenter—a timid, sickly, opium-fuddled
Chinaman, in loose blue drawers for all costume, who
invariably dropped his tools and fled below, with stream-
ing tail and shaking all over, before the fury of that
“ devil.” But it was when he raised up his eyes to the
bridge where one of these sailor frauds was always
planted by law in charge of his ship that he felt almost
dizzy with rage. He abominated them all; it was an
old feud, from the time he first went to sea, an un-
licked cub with a great opinion of himself, in the
engine-room. The slights that had been put upon him.
The persecutions he had suffered at the hands of skip-
pers—of absolute nobodies in a steamship after all.
And now that he had risen to be a shipowner they were
still a plague to him: he had absolutely to pay away
precious money to the conceited useless loafers:—As if
a fully qualified engiteer—who was the owner as well—
were not fit to be trusted with the whole charge of a
ship. Well! he made it pretty warm for them; but it
was a poor consolation. He had come in time to hate
the ship too for the repairs she required, for the coal-
bills he had to pay, for the poor beggarly freights she
eartied. He would clench his hand as he walked and hit
the rail a sudden blow, viciously, as though she could
be made to feel pain. And yet he could not do without

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her; he needed her; he must hang on to her tooth and
nail to keep his head above water till the expected flood
of fortune came sweeping‘up and landed him safely on
the high shore of his ambition.

It was now to do nothing, nothing whatever, and have
plenty of money to do it on. He had tasted of power,
the highest form of it his limited experience was aware
of—the power of shipowning. What a deception!
Vanity of vanities! He wondered at his folly. He had
thrown away the substance for the shadow. Of the
gratification of wealth he did not know enough to excite
his imagination with any visions of luxury. How could
he—the child of a drunken boiler-maker—gomg
straight from the workshop into the engine-room of a
north-country collier! But the notion of the absolute
idleness of wealth he could very well conceive. He
reveled in it, to forget his present troubles; he imagined
himself walking about the streets of Hull (he knew their
gutters well as a boy) with his pockets full of sov-
ereigns. He would buy himself a house; his married
sisters, their husbands, his old workshop chums, would
render him infinite homage. There would be nothing
to think of. His word would be law. He had been out
of work for a long time before he won his prize,:and he
temembered how Carlo Mariani (commonly known as.
Paunchy Charley), the Maltese hotel-keeper at the
slummy end of Denham Street, had cringed joyfully
before him in the evening, when the news had come.
Poor Charley, though he made his living by ministering
to various abject vices, gave credit for their food to

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many a piece of white wreckage. He was naively over-
joyed at the idea of his old bills being paid, and, he
reckoned confidently on a spell of festivities in the
cavernous grog-shop downstairs. Massy remembered
the curious, respectful looks of the “ trashy ” white men
in the place. His heart had swelled within him. Massy
had left Charley’s infamous den directly he had realized
the possibilities open to him, with his nose in the air.
Afterwards the memory of these adulations was a great
sadness.

This was the true power of money,—and no trouble
with it, nor any thinking required either. He thought
with difficulty and felt vividly; to his blunt brain the
problems offered by any ordered scheme of life seemed
in their cruel toughness to have been put in his way
by the obvious malevolence of men. As a shipowner
everyone had conspired to make him a nobody. How
could he have been such a fool as to purchase that ac-
cursed ship? He had been abominably swindled; there
was no end to this swindling; and as the difficulties of his
improvident ambition gathered thicker round him, he
really came to hate everybody he had ever come in con-
tact with. A temper naturally irritable and an amazing
sensitiveness to the claims of his own personality had
_ended by making of life for him a sort of inferno—a
place where his lost soul had been given up to the tor-
ment of savage brooding. }

But he had never hated anyone so much as that old
man who had turned up one evening to save him from
an utter disaster,—from the conspiracy of the wretched

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sailors. He seemed to have fallen on board from the
sky. His footsteps echoed on the empty steamer, and
the strange deep-toned voice on deck repeating inter~
rogatively the words, “ Mr. Massy, Mr. Massy there? ”
had been startling like a wonder. And coming up from,
the depths of the cold engine-room, where he had been
pottering dismally with a candle amongst the enormous
shadows, thrown on all sides by the ‘skeleton limbs of ma-
-chinery, Massy had been struck dumb by astonishment
in the presence of that imposing old man with a beard
like a silver plate, towering in the dusk rendered lurid
by the expiring flames of sunset.

“Want to see me on business? What business? I am
doing no business. Can’t you see that this ship is laid
up?” Massy had turned at bay before the pursuing
irony of his disaster. Afterwards he could not believe
his ears. What was that old fellow getting at? Things
don’t happen that way. It was a dream. He would
presently wake up and find the man vanished like a
shape of mist. The gravity, the dignity, the firm and
courteous tone of that athletic old stranger impressed
Massy. He was almost afraid. But it was no dream.
Five hundred pounds are no dream. At once he became
suspicious. What did it mean? Of course it was an
offer to catch hold of for dear life. But what could
there be behind?

Before they had parted, after appointing a meeting
in a solicitor’s office early on the morrow, Massy was
asking himself, What is his motive? He spent the night
in hammering out the clauses of the agreement—a

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unique instrument of its sort whose tenor got bruited
abroad somehow and became the talk and wonder of the
port.

Massy’s object had been to secure for himself as many
ways as possible of getting rid of his partner without
being called upon at once to pay back his share. Cap-
tain Whalley’s efforts were directed to making the money
secure. Was it not Ivy’s money—a part of her fortune |
whose only other asset was the time-defying body of her
old father? Sure of his forbearance in the strength of
his love for her, he accepted, with stately serenity,
Massy’s stupidly cunning paragraphs against his in-
competence, his dishonesty, his drunkenness, for the sake
of other stringent stipulations. At the end of three
years he was at liberty to withdraw from the partner-
ship, taking his money with him. Provision was made
for forming a fund to pay him off. But if he left the
Sofala before the term, from whatever cause (barring
death), Massy was to have a whole year for paying.
“ Tilness? ” the lawyer had suggested: a young man

_fresh from Europe and not overburdened with business,
who was rather amused. Massy began to whine unctu-
ously, “* How could he be expected? . . .”

“Let that go,” Captain Whalley had said with s
superb confidence in his body. “ Acts of God,” he
added. In the midst of life we are in death, but he
trusted his Maker with a still greater fearlessness—his
Maker who knew his thoughts, his human affections, and
his motives. His Creator knew what use he was making
of his health—how much he wanted it . . . “I trust

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my first illness will be my last. Ive never been ill that
I can remember,” he had remarked. “ Let it go.”

But at this early. stage he had already awakened
Massy’s hostility by refusing to make it six hundred
instead of five. ‘“ I cannot do that,” was all he had said,
simply, but with so much decision that Massy desisted
at once from pressing the point, but had thought to
himself, “ Can’t! Old curmudgeon. Won’t! He must
have lots of money, but he would like to get hold of a
soft berth and the sixth part of my profits for nothing
if he only could.”

And during these years Massy’s dislike grew under the
yestraint of something resembling fear. The simplicity
of that man appeared dangerous. Of late he had
changed, however, had appeared less formidable and
with a lessened vigor of life, as though he had received
a secret wound. But still he remained incomprehensible
in his simplicity, fearlessness, and rectitude. And when
Massy learned that he meant to leave him at the end of
the time, to leave him confronted with the problem of
boilers, his dislike blazed up secretly into hate.

It had made him so clear-eyed that for a long time now
Mr. Sterne could have told him nothing he did not
know. He had much ado in trying to terrorize that
mean sneak into silence; he wanted to deal alone with
the situation ; and—ineredible as it might have ap-
peared to Mr. Sterne—he had not yet given up the de-
sire and the hope of inducing that hated old man to
stay. Why! there was nothing else to do, unless he were
to abandon his chances of fortune. But now, suddenly,

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since the crossing of the bar at Batu Beru things
seemed to be coming rapidly to a point. It disquieted
him so much that the study of the winning numbers
failed to soothe his agitation: and the twilight in the
cabin deepened, very somber.

He put the list away, muttering once more, “ Oh, no,
my boy, you don’t. Not if I know it.” He did not
mean the blinking, eavesdropping humbug to force his
action. He took his head again into his hands; his im-
mobility confined in the darkness of this shut-up little
place seemed to make him a thing apart infinitely re-
moved from the stir and the sounds of the deck.

He heard them: the passengers were beginning to
jabber excitedly; somebody dragged a heavy box
past his door. He heard Captain Whalley’s voice
above—

“ Stations, Mr. Sterne.” And the answer from some-
where,on deck forward—

6c Ay, ay; sir.”

* We shall moor head up stream this time; the ebb
has made.”

“Head up stream, sir.”

* You will see to it, Mr. Sterne.”

The answer was covered by the autocratic clang of the
engine-room gong. The propeller went on beating
slowly: one, two, three; one, two, three—with pauses as
if hesitating on the turn. The gong clanged time after
time, and the water churned this way and that by the
blades was making a great noisy commotion alongside.
Mr. Massy did not move. A shore-light on the other

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bank, a quarter of a mile across the river, drifted, no
bigger than a tiny star, passing slowly athwart the cir-
cle of the port. Voices from Mr. Van Wyk’s jetty an-
swered the hails from the ship; ropes were thrown and
missed and thrown again; the swaying flame of a torch
carried in a large sampan coming to fetch away in state
the Rajah from down the coast cast a sudden ruddy
glare into his cabin, over his very person. Mr. Massy
did not move. After a few last ponderous turns the
engines stopped, and the prolonged clanging of the
gong signified that the captain had done with them. A
great number of boats and canoes of all sizes boarded
the off-side of the Sofala. Then after a time the tumult
of splashing, of cries, of shuffling feet, of packages
dropped with a thump, the noise of the native passen-
gers going away, subsided slowly. On the shore, a
voice, cultivated, slightly authoritative, spoke very

close-alongside— ;

* Brought any mail for me this time? ”

“Yes, Mr. Van Wyk.” This was from Sterne, an-
swering over the rail in a tone of respectful cordiality.
“ Shall I bring it up to you? ”

But the voice asked again—

“ Where’s the captain? ”

“Still on the bridge, I believe. He hasn’t left his
chair. ShallI . . .”

The voice interrupted negligently.

“TI will come on board.”

“Mr. Van Wyk,” Sterne suddenly broke out with an
eager effort, “ will you do me the favor . . .”

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The mate walked away quickly towards the gangway,
A silence fell. Mr. Massy in the dark did not move.

He did not move even when he heard slow shuffling
footsteps pass his cabin lazily. He contented himself
to bellow out through the closed door—

“ You—Jack ! ”

The footsteps came back without haste; the door
handle rattled, and the second engineer appeared in the
epening, shadowy in the sheen of the skylight at his
hack, with his face apparently as black as the rest of —
his figure.

“We have been very long coming up this time,” Mr.
Massy growled, without changing his attitude.

“What do you expect with half the boiler tubes
plugged up for leaks.”” The second defended himself
loquaciously.

* None of your lip,” said Massy.

“None of your rotten boilers—I say,” retorted his
faithful subordinate without animation, huskily. “Go
down there and carry a head of steam on them yourself—
if you dare. I don’t.”

“ You aren’t worth your salt then,” Massy said. The
other made a faint noise which resembled a laugh but
- might have been a snarl.

“ Better go slow than stop the ship altogether,” he
admonished his admired superior. Mr. Massy moved
at last. He turned in his chair, and grinding his
teeth—.

Dam’ you and the ship! I wish she were at the
bottom of the sea. Then you would have to starve.”

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The trusty second engineer closed the door gently.

Massy listened. Instead of passing on to the bath-
room where he should have gone to clean himself, the
second entered his cabin, which was next door. Mr.
Massy jumped up and waited. Suddenly he heard the
lock snap in there. He rushed out and gave a violent
kick to the door.

“T believe you are locking yourself up to get drunk,”
he shouted.

A muffled answer came after a while.

“ My own time.”

“If you take to boozing on the trip I'll fire you out,”
Massy cried.

An obstinate silence followed that threat. Massy
moved away perplexed. On the bank two figures ap-
peared, approaching the gangway. THe heard a voice
tinged with contempt—

“TI would rather doubt your word. But I shall cer-
tainly speak to him of this.”

The other voice, Sterne’s, said with a sort of regretful
formalit y—

“Thanks. That’s all I want. I must do my duty.”

Mr. Massy was surprised. A short, dapper figure
leaped lightly on the deck and nearly bounded into him
where he stood beyond the circle of light from the gang-
way lamp. When it had passed towards the bridge,
after exchanging a hurried “Good evening,” Massy
said surlily to Sterne who followed with slow steps—

“ What is it you’re making up to Mr. Van Wyk for,
now? ”

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“Far from it, Mr. Massy. I am not good enough for
Mr. Van Wyk. Neither are you, sir, in his opinion, I
am afraid. Captain Whalley is, it seems. He’s gone
to ask him to dine up at the house this evening.”

Then he murmured to himself darkly—

“TI hope he will like it.”

XII

Mr. Van Wyk, the white man of Batu Beru, an ex-
naval officer who, for reasons best known to himself, had
thrown away the promise of a brilliant career to become
the pioneer of tobacco-planting on that remote part of
the coast, had learned to like Captain Whalley. The
appearance of the new skipper had attracted his atten-
tion. Nothing more unlike all the diverse types he had
seen succeeding each other on the bridge of the Sofala
could be imagined.

At that time Batu Beru was not what it has become
since: the center of a prosperous tobacco-growing dis-
trict, a tropically suburban-looking little settlement of
bungalows in one long street shaded with two rows of
trees, embowered by the flowering and trim luxuriance
of the gardens, with a three-mile-long carriage-road for
the afternoon drives and a first-class Resident with a
fat, cheery wife to lead the society of married estate-
managers and unmarried young fellows in the service
of the big companies.

All this prosperity was not yet; and Mr. Van Wyk
prospered alone on the left bank on his deep clearing

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carved out of the forest, which came down above and
below to the water’s edge. His lonely bungalow faced
across the river the houses of the Sultan: a restless and
melancholy old ruler who had done ‘with love and war,
for whom life no longer held any savor (except of evil
forebodings) and time never had any value. He was
afraid of death, and hoped he would die before the white
men were ready to take his country from him. He
crossed the river frequently (with never less than ten
boats crammed full of people), in the wistful hope of
extracting some information on the subject from his
own white man. There was a certain chair on the
veranda he always took: the dignitaries of the court
squatted on the rugs and skins between the furniture:
the inferior people remained below on the grass plot
tween the house and the river in rows three or four
dccp all along the front. Not seldom the visit began at
daybreak. Mr. Van Wyk tolerated these inroads. He
would nod out of his bedroom window, tooth-brush or
razor in hand, or pass through the throng of courtiers in
his bathing robe. He appeared and disappeared hum-
ming a tune, polished his nails with attention, rubbed
his shaved face with eau-de-Cologne, drank his carly
tea, went out to see his coolies at work: returned, looked
through some papers on his desk, read a page or two
in a book or sat before his cottage piano leaning back
on the stool, his arms extended, fingers on the keys, his
body swaying slightly from side to side. When abso-
lutely forced to speak he gave evasive vaguely soothing
answers out of pure compassion: the same feeling per-

[ $11 ]
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haps made him so lavishly hospitable with the aérated
drinks that more than once he left himself without soda-
water for a whole week. That old man had granted him
as much land as he cared to have cleared: it was neither
more nor less than a fortune.

Whether it. was fortune or seclusion from his kind that
Mr. Van Wyk sought, he could not have pitched upon
a better place. Even the mail-boats of the subsidized
company calling on the veriest clusters of palm-thatched
hovels along the coast steamed past the mouth of Batu
Beru river far away in the offing. The contract was
old: perhaps in a few years’ time, when it had expired,
.Batu Beru would be included in the service; meantime
all Mr. Van Wyk’s mail was addressed to Malacca,
whence his agent sent it across once a month by the
Sofala. It followed that whenever Massy had run short
of money (through taking too many lottery tickets),
or got into a difficulty about a skipper, Mr. Van Wyk
was deprived of his letters and newspapers. In so far
ike had a personal interest in the fortunes of the Sofala.
Though he considered himself a hermit (and for no
passing whim evidently, since he had stood eight years
of it already), he liked to know what went on in the
world.

Handy on the veranda upon a walnut éfagére (it had
come last year by the Sofala—everything came by the
Sofala) there lay, piled up under bronze weights, a pile
of the Times’ weekly edition, the large sheets of the
Rotterdam Courant, the Graphic in its world-wide
green wrappers, an illustrated Dutch publication with-

[ 312 7
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out a cover, the numbers of a German magazine with
covers of the “ Bismarck malade” color. There were
also parcels of new music—though the piano (it had
come years ago by the Sofala) in the damp atmosphere
of the forests was generally out of tune. It was vexing
to be cut off from everything for sixty days at a stretch
sometimes, without any means of knowing what was the
matter. And when the Sofala reappeared Mr. Van Wyk
would descend the steps of the veranda and stroll over
the grass plot in front of his house, down to the water-
side, with a frown on his white brow.

“ You’ve been laid up after an accident, I presume.”

He addressed the bridge, but before anybody could
answer Massy was sure to have already scrambled ashore
over the rail and pushed in, squeezing the palms of his
hands together, bowing his sleek head as if gummed all
over the top with black threads and tapes. And he
would be so enraged at the necessity of having to offer
such an explanation that his moaning would be posi-
tively pitiful, while all the time he tried to compose
his big lips into a smile.

“No, Mr. Van Wyk. You would not believe it. I
couldn’t get one of those wretches to take the ship out.
Not a single one of the lazy beasts could be induced,
and the law, you know, Mr. Van Wyk . . .”

He moaned at great length apologetically; the words
conspiracy, plot, envy, came out prominently, whined
with greater energy. Mr. Van Wyk, examining with
a faint grimace his polished finger-nails, would say,
“H’m. Very unfortunate,” and turn his back on him.

[ 315 j
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‘Fastidious, clever, slightly skeptical, accustomed to the
dest society (he had held a much-envied shore appoint-
mment at the Ministry of Marine for a year preceding
this retreat from his profession and from Europe), he
‘possessed a latent warmth of feeling and a capacity for
sympathy which were concealed by a sort of haughty,
arbitrary indifference of manner arising from his early
training; and by a something an enemy might have
called foppish, in his aspect—like a distorted echo of
past elegancies. He managed to keep an almost mili-
‘tary discipline amongst the coolies of the estate he had
dragged into the light of day out of the tangle and
‘shadows of the jungle; and the white shirt he put
on every evening with its stiff glossy front and high
collar looked as if he had meant to preserve the decent
ceremony of evening-dress, but had wound a thick crim-
son sash above his hips as a concession to the wilderness,
once his adversary, now his vanquished companicn.
Moreover, it was a hygienic precaution. Worn wide
-open in front, a short jacket of some airy silken stuff
floated from his shoulders. His fluffy, fair hair, thin
at the top, curled slightly at the sides; a carefully ar-
ranged mustache, an ungarnished forehead, the gleam
of low patent shoes peeping under the wide bottom of
trowsers cut straight from the same stuff as the gossa-
mer coat, completed a figure’ recalling, with its sash, a
pirate chief of romance, and at the same time the ele-
gance of a slightly bald dandy indulging, in seclusion,
a taste for unorthodox costume.

It was his evening get-up. The proper time for the

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Sofala to arrive at Batu Beru was an hour before sun-
set, and he looked picturesque, and somehow quite cor-
rect too, walking at the water’s edge on the background
of grass slope crowned with a low long bungalow with
an immensely steep roof of palm thatch, and clad to the
eaves in flowering creepers. While the Sofala was being
made fast he strolled in the shade of the few trees left
near the landing-place, waiting till he could go on
board. Her white men were not of his kind. The old
Sultan (though his wistful invasions were a nuisance)
was really much more acceptable to his fastidious taste.
But still they were white; the periodical visits of the
ship made a break in the well-filled sameness of the
days without disturbing his privacy. Moreover, they
were necessary from a business point of view; and
through a strain of preciseness in his nature he was
irritated when she failed to appear at the appointed
time.

The cause of the irregularity was too absurd, and
Massy, in his opinion, was a contemptible idiot. . The
first time the Sofala reappeared under the new agree-
ment swinging out of the bend below, after he had
almost given up all hope of ever seeing her again, he
felt so angry that he did not go down at once to the
landing-place. His servants had come running to him
with the news, and he had dragged a chair close against
the front rail of the veranda, spread his elbows out,
rested his chin on his hands, and went on glaring at
her fixedly while she was being made fast opposite his
house. He could make out easily all the white faces on

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board. Who on earth was that kind of patriarch they
had got there on the bridge now?

At last he sprang up and walked down the gravel path.
It was a fact that the very gravel for his paths had
been imported by the Sofala. Exasperated out of his
quiet superciliousness, without looking at anyone right
or left, he accosted Massy straightway in so determined
‘a manner that the engineer, taken aback, began to
stammer unintelligibly. Nothing could be heard but
‘the words: “Mr. Van Wyk . . . Indeed, Mr. Van
Wyk . .. For the future, Mr. Van Wyk ”—and by the
‘suffusion of blood Massy’s vast bilious face acquired an
unnatural orange tint, out of which the disconcerted
coal-black eyes shone in an extraordinary manner.

“Nonsense. I am tired of this. I wonder you have
the impudence to come alongside my jetty as if I had
at made for your convenience alone.”

Massy tried to protest earnestly. Mr. Van Wyk was
very angry. He had a good mind to ask that German
firm—those people in Malacca—what was their name?—
boats with green funnels. They would be only too glad
of the opening to put one of their small steamers on
the run. Yes; Schnitzler, Jacob Schnitzler, would in a
moment. Yes. He had decided to write without delay.

In his agitation Massy caught up his falling pipe.

“You don’t mean it, sir!” he shrieked.

“You shouldn’t mismanage your business in this
ridiculous manner.”

Mr, Van Wyk turned on his heel. The other three
whites on the bridge had not stirred during the scene.

[ 316 1
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Massy walked hastily from side to side, puffed out his
cheeks, suffocated.

“ Stuck up Dutchman!”

And he moaned out feverishly a long tale of griefs.
The efforts he had made for all these years to please
that man. This was the return you, got for it, eh?
Pretty. Write to Schnitzler—let in the green-funnel.
boats—get an old Hamburg Jew to ruin him. No,
really he could laugh. . . . He laughed sobbingly. . . .
Ha! ha! ha! And make him carry the letter in his own.
ship presumably.

He stumbled across a grating and swore. He would:
not hesitate to fling the Dutchman’s correspondence
overboard—the whole confounded bundle. He had
never, never made any charge for that accommodation.
But Captain Whalley, his new partner, would not let
him probably; besides, it would be only putting off the
evil day. For his own part he would make a hole in the
water rather than look on tamely at the green funnels.
overrunning his trade.

He raved aloud. 'The China boys hung back with the
dishes at the foot of the ladder. He yelled from the
bridge down at the deck, “ Aren’t we going to have any
chow this evening at all?” then turned violently to
Captain Whalley, who waited, grave and patient, at
the head of the table, smoothing his beard in silence
now and then with a forbearing gesture.

“You don’t seem to care what happens to me. Don’t
you see that this affects your interests as much as mine?
It’s no joking matter.”

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He took the foot of the table growling between his
teeth.

“Unless you have a few thousands put away some-
where. I haven’t.”

Mr. Van Wyk dined in his thoroughly lit-up bunga- .
low, putting a point of splendor im the night of his
clearing above the dark bank of the river. Afterwards
he sat down to his piano, and in a pause he became aware
of slow footsteps passing on the path along the front.
A plank or two creaked under a heavy tread; he swung
half round on the music-stool, listening with his finger-
tips at rest on the keyboard. His little terrier barked
violently, backing in from the veranda. A deep voice
apologized gravely for “ this intrusion.” He walked out
quickly.

At the head of the steps the eve figure, who
was the new captain of the Sofala apparently (he had
seen a round dozen of them, but not one of that sort),
towered without advancing. The little dog barked un-
ceasingly, till a flick of Mr. Van Wyk’s handkerchief
made him spring aside into silence. Captain Whalley,
opening the matter, was met by a poe polite
but determined opposition.

They carried on their discussion standing where they
had come face to face. Mr. Van Wyk observed his
visitor with attention. Then at last, as if forced out of
his reserve—

“<T am surprised that you should intercede for such a
confounded fool.”

This outbreak was almost complimentary, as if ite

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acaning had been, “ That such a man as you should!
intercede!” Captain Whalley let it pass by without.
flinching. One would have thought he had heard noth-
ing. He simply went on to state that he was personally
interested in putting things straight between them.
Personally . . .

But Mr. Van Wyk, really carried away by his disgust
with Massy, became very incisive—

“Indeed—if I am to be frank with you—his whole
character does not seem to me particularly estimable or
trustworthy .. .”

Captain Whalley, always straight, seemed to grow an
inch taller and broader, as if the girth of his chest had
suddenly expanded under his beard.

“* My dear sir, you don’t think I came here to discuss:
a man with whom I am—I am—h’m—closely asso-
ciated.”

A sort of solemn silence lasted for a moment. He was.
not used to asking favors, but the importance he at-

tached to this affair had made him willing to try. . . .

Mr. Van Wyk, favorably impressed, and suddenly mol-
lified by a desire to laugh, interrupted—

“That’s all right if you make it a personal matter ;
but you can do no less than sit down and smoke a cigar
with me.”

A slight pause, then Captain Whalley stepped forward
heavily. As to the regularity of the service, for the
future he made himself responsible for it; and his name
was Whalley—perhaps to a sailor (he was speaking to
a sailor, was he not?) not altogether unfamiliar. There:

[ 319 ]
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was a lighthouse now, on an island. Maybe Mr. Van
Wyk himself .. .

“Oh yes. Oh indeed.” Mr. Van Wyk caught on at
once. He indicated a chair. How very interesting. |
For his own part he had seen some service in the last
Acheen War, but had never been so far East. Whalley
Island? Of course. Now that was very interesting.
What changes his guest must have seen since.

“T can look further back even—on a whole half-
century.”

Captain Whalley expanded a bit. The flavor of a
good cigar (it was a weakness) had gone straight to his
heart, also the civility of that young man. There was
something in that accidental contact of which he had
been starved in his years of struggle.

The front wall retreating made a square recess fur-
nished like a room. A lamp with a milky glass shade,
suspended below the slope of the high roof at the end
of a slender brass chain, threw a bright round of light
upon a little table bearing an open book and an ivory
paper-knife. And, in the translucent shadows beyond,
other tables could be seen, a number of easy-chairs of
various shapes, with a great profusion of skin rugs
strewn on the teakwood planking all over the veranda.
The flowering creepers scented the air. Their foliage
clipped out between the uprights made as if several
frames of thick unstirring leaves reflecting the lamp-
light in a green glow. Through the opening at his
elbow Captain Whalley could see the gangway lantern
of the Sofala burning dim by the shore, the shadowy

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masses of the town beyond the open lustrous darkness
of the river, and, as if hung along the straightedge
of the projecting eaves, a narrow black strip of the
night sky full of stars—resplendent. The famous cigar
in hand he had a moment of complacency.

“A trifle. Somebody must lead the way. I just
showed that the thing could be done; but you men
brought up to the use of steam cannot conceive the
vast importance of my bit of venturesomeness to’
the Eastern trade of the time. Why, that new route-
reduced the average time of a southern passage by
eleven days for more than half the year. Eleven days!
It’s on record. But the remarkable thing—speaking
to a sailor—I should say was . . .”

He talked well, without egotism, professionally. The
powerful voice, produced without effort, filled the
bungalow even into the empty rooms with a deep and
limpid resonance, seemed to make a stillness outside;
and Mr. Van Wyk was surprised by the serene quality
of its tone, like the perfection of manly gentleness.
Nursing one small foot, in a silk sock and a patent
leather shoe, on his knee, he was immensely entertained.
It was as if nobody could talk like this now, and the
overshadowed eyes, the flowing white beard, the big
frame, the serenity, the whole temper of the man, were
an amazing survival from the prehistoric times of the
world coming up to him out of the sea.
Captain Whalley had been also the pioneer of the early
trade in the Gulf of Pe-tchi-li. He even found occasion
to mention that he had buried his “dear wife” there.

[ 321 ] .
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eix-and-twenty years‘ago. Mr. Van Wyk, impassive,
could not help speculating in his mind swiftly as te
the sort of woman that would mate with such a man.’
Did they make an adventurous and well-matched pair?
Wo. Very possibly she had been small, frail, no doubt
wery feminine—or most likely commonplace with do-
mestic instincts, utterly insignificant. But Captain
Whalley was no garrulous bore, and shaking his head
as if to dissipate the momentary gloom that had settled
on his handsome old face, he alluded conversationally to
Mr. Yan Wyk’s solitude.

Mr. Van Wyk affirmed that sometimes he had more
company than he wanted. He mentioned smilingly
some of the peculiarities of his intercourse with “ My
Saltan.” He made his visits in force. Those people
damaged his grass-plot in front (it was not easy to
obtain some approach to a lawn in the tropics), and the
other day had broken down some rare bushes he had
planted over there. And Captain Whalley remembered
immediately that, in forty-seven, the then Sultan, “ this
man’s grandfather,” had been notorious as a great pro-
tector of the piratical fleets of praus from farther East.
‘They had a safe refuge in the river at Batu Beru. He
financed more especially a Balinini chief called Haji
Daman. Captain Whalley, nodding significantly his
bushy white eyebrows, had very good reason to know
something ef that. The world had progressed since
that time.

Mr. Van Wyk demurred with unexpected acrimony.
BProgressed in what? he wanted to know.

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Why, in knowledge of truth, in decency, in justice, im
erder—in honesty too, since men harmed each other
mostly from ignorance. It was, Captain Whalley con-
cluded quaintly, more pleasant to live in.

Mr. Van Wyk whimsically would not admit that Mr.
Massy, for instance, was more pleasant naturally tham
the Balinini pirates.

The river had not gained much by the change. They
were in their way every bit as honest. Massy was less
ferocious than Haji Daman no doubt, but . - .

“And what about you, my good sir?” Captam
Whalley laughed a deep soft laugh. “ You are an im-
provement, surely.”

He continued in a vein of pleasantry. A good cigar
was better than a knock on the head—the sort of wel-
come he would have found on this river forty or fifty
years ago. Then leaning forward slightly, he became
earnestly serious. It seems as if, outside their own sea-
gypsy tribes, these rovers had hated all mankind with
an incomprehensible, bloodthirsty hatred. Meantime
their depredations had been stopped, and what was the
consequence? The new generation was orderly, peace-
able, settled in prosperous villages. He could speak
from personal knowledge. And even the few survivors
of that time—old men now—had changed so much, that
it would have been..unkind to remember against them
that they had ever slit a throat in their lives. He had
one especially in his mind’s eye: a dignified, venerable:
headman of a certain large coast village about sixt-
mniles sou’west of Tampasuk. It did one’s heart good

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to see him—to hear that man speak. He might have
been a ferocious savage once. What men wanted was
to be checked by superior intelligence, by superior
knowledge, by superior force too—yes, by force held in
trust from'God and sanctified by its use in accordance
with His declared will. Captain Whalley believed a dis-
position for good existed in every man, even if the
world were not a very happy place as a whole. In the
wisdom of men he had not so much confidence. The dis-
position had to be helped up pretty sharply sometimes,
“he admitted. They might be silly, wrongheaded, un-
happy; but naturally evil—no. There was at bottom
a complete harmlessness at least . . .

~ “Ts there? ? Mr. Van Wyk snapped acrimoniously,

Captain Whalley laughed at the interjection, in the
good humor of large, tolerating certitude. He could :
look back at half a century, he pointed out. The smoke
oozed placidly through the white hairs hiding his kindly
lips.

“ At all events,” he resumed after a pause,~“I am
glad that they’ve had no time to do you much harm as
yet.”

This allusion to his comparative youthfulness did not
offend Mr. Van Wyk, who got up and wriggled his
shoulders with an enigmatic half-smile. They walked
out together amicably into the starry night towards
the river-side. Their footsteps resounded unequally on
the dark path. At the shore end of the gangway the
Jantern, hung low to the handrail, threw a vivid light
on the white legs and the big black feet of Mr. Massy

[ 824 ]
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waiting about anxiously. From the waist upwards he
remained shadowy, with a row of buttons gleaming up’
to the vague outline of his chin.

“ You may thank Captain Whalley for this,” Mr. Van
Wyk said curtly to him before turning away.

The lamps on the veranda flung three long squares
of light between the uprights far over the grass. A bat
flitted before his face like a circling flake of velvety
blackness. Along the jasmine hedge the night air
seemed heavy with the fall of perfumed dew; flower-
beds bordered the path; the clipped bushes uprose in
dark rounded clumps here and there before the house;
the dense foliage of creepers filtered the sheen of the
lamplight within in a soft glow all along the front;
and everything near and far stood still in a great im-
mobility, in a great sweetness.

Mr. Van Wyk (a few years before he had had occasion
to imagine himself treated more badly than anybody
alive had ever been by a woman) felt for Captain
Whalley’s optimistic views the disdain of a man who
had once been credulous himself. His disgust with the
world (the woman for a time had filled it for him com-
pletely) had taken the form of activity in retirement,
because, though capable of great depth of feeling, he
was energetic and essentially practical. But there was
in that uncommon old sailor, drifting on the outskirts
of his busy solitude, something that fascinated his
skepticism. His very simplicity (amusing enough) was
like a delicate refinement of an upright character. The
striking dignity of manner could be nothing else, in a

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wan reduced to such a humble position, but the ex-
Pression of something essentially noble in the character.
With all his trust in mankind he was no fool; the seren-
aty of his temper at the end of so many years, since it
could not ebvieusly have been appeased by success, wore
an air of profound wisdom. Mr. Van’ Wyk was amused
at it sometimes. Even the very physical traits of the
ald captain of the Sofala, his powerful frame, his re-
poseful mien, his intelligent, handsome face, the big
limbs, the benign courtesy, the touch of rugged severity
in the shaggy eyebrows, made up a seductive person-
ality. Mr. Van Wyk disliked littleness of every kind,
but there was nothing small about that man, and in
the exemplary regularity of many trips an intimacy had
grown up between them, a warm feeling at bottom under
a. kindly stateliness of forms agreeable to his fastidious-
mess.

They kept their respective opinions on all worldly
matters. His other convictions Captain Whalley never
antrauded. The difference of their ages was like another
bond between them. Once, when twitted with the un-
charitableness of his youth, Mr. Van Wyk, ruaning his
eye over the vast proportions ef his interlocutor, re-
torted in friendly banter-—

“Oh. You'll come to my way of thinking yet. You'll
have plenty of time. Don’t call yourself old: you jook
good for a round hundred.”

Bat he could not help his stinging incisiveness, and
though moderating it by an almost affectionate smile,
he added—

T 826 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

. “And by then you will probably consent to die from
sheer disgust.”
Captain Whalley, smiling too, shook his head. “Ged
forbid!”

He thought that perhaps on the whole he deserved

. something better than to die in such sentiments. ‘The
time of course would have to come, and he trusted te
his Maker to provide a manner of gomg out of which
he need not be ashamed. For the rest he hoped he:
would live to a hundred if need be: other men had beem
known ; it would be no miracle. He expected no miracies..

The pronounced, argumentative tone caused Mr. Vam

_ Wyk to raise his head and look at him steadily. Cap-
tain Whalley was gazing fixedly with a rapt expression,
as though he had seen his Creator’s. favorable decree
written in mysterious characters on the wall. He kept
perfectly motionless for a few seconds, then got his vast
bulk on to his feet so impetuously that Mr. Van Wyk
was startled.

He struck first a heavy blow on his inflated chest z and,
throwing out horizontally a big arm that remamed
steady, extended in the air like the limb of a tree am
a windless day—

* Not a pain or an ache there. Can you see this shake
in the least? ”

His voice was low, in an awing, confident contrast with
the headlong emphasis of his movements. He sat down
abruptly.

“ This isn’t to boast of it, you know. I am nothmg,”
he said in his effortless strong voice, that seemed te

[ 327 3
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come out as naturally as a river flows. He picked up the
stump of the cigar he had laid aside, and added peace-
fully, with a slight nod, “ As it happens, my life is
necessary ; it isn’t my own, it isn’t—God knows.”

‘He did not say much for the rest of the evening, but
several times Mr. Van Wyk detected a faint smile of
assurance flitting under the heavy mustache.

Later’ on Captain Whalley would now and then consent
to dine “at the house.” He could even be induced to
drink a glass of wine. “ Don’t think I am afraid of it,
my good sir,” he explained. “There was a very good
reason why I should give it up.”

On another occasion, leaning back at ease, he remarked,
* You have treated me most—most humanely, my dear
Mr. Van Wyk, from the very first.”

“You'll admit there was some merit,” Mr. Van Wyk
hinted slyly. “ An associate of that excellent Massy.
- - « Well, well, my dear captain, I won’t say a word
against him.”

“Tt would be no use your saying anything against
him,” Captain Whalley affirmed a little moodily. “ As
Tve told you before, my life—my work, is necessary, not
for myself alone. I can’t choose” . . . He paused,
turned: the glass before him right round. . . . “I have
an only child—a daughter.”

' The ample downward sweep of his arm over the table
seemed to suggest a small girl at a vast distance. “I
hope to see her once more before I die. Meantime it’s
enough to know that she has me sound and 8olid, thank
God. You can’t understand how one feels. Bone of my

[ 328 3
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bone, flesh of my flesh; the very image of my poor wife.
Well, she . . .” ,

Again he paused, then pronounced stoically the words,
“She has a hard struggle.”

And his head fell on his breast, his eyebrows remained
knitted, as by an effort of meditation. But generally his
mind seemed steeped in the serenity of boundless trust
in a higher power. Mr. Van Wyk wondered sometimes
how much of it was due to the splendid vitality of the
man, to the bodily vigor which seems to impart some-
thing of its force to the soul. But he had learned to
like him very much.

XII

This was the reason why Mr. Sterne’s confidential com-
munication, delivered hurriedly on the shore alongside
the dark silent ship, had disturbed his equanimity. It
was the most incomprehensible and unexpected thing
that could happen; and the perturbation of his spirit
was so great that, forgetting all about his letters, he ran
rapidly up the bridge ladder.

The portable table was being put together for dinner
to the left of the wheel by two pig-tailed “ boys,” who
as usual snarled at each other over the job, while another,
a doleful, burly, very yellow Chinaman, resembling Mr.
Massy, waited apathetically with the cloth over his arm
and a pile of thick dinner-plates against his chest. A
common cabin lamp with its globe missing, brought up
from below, had been hooked to the wooden framework

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THE END OF THE TETHER

of the awning; the side-screens had been lowered alt
round; Captain Whalley filling the depths of the wicker-
ehair seemed to sit benumbed in a canvas tent crudely ,
lighted, and used for the storing of nautical objects; a
shabby steering-wheel, a battered brass binnacle on a
stout mahogany stand, two dingy life-buoys, an old cork
fender lying in a corner, dilapidated deck-lockers with
loops of thin rope instead of door-handles.

He shook off the appearance of numbness to return
Mr. Van Wyk’s unusually brisk greeting, but relapsed
directly afterwards. To accept a pressing invitation to
dinner “ up at the house ” cost him another very visible
physical effort. Mr. Van Wyk, perplexed, folded his
arms, and leaning back against the rail, with his little,
black, shiny feet well out, examined him covertly.

* Pve noticed of late that you are not quite yourself,
old friend.”

He put an affectionate gentleness into the last two
words. The real intimacy of their intercourse had never
been so vividly expressed before.

“ Tut, tut, tut!”

The wicker-chair creaked heavily.

“ Irritable,” commented Mr. Van Wyk to himself; and
aloud, “ T’ll expect to see you in half an hour, then,” he
said negligently, moving off.

“In half an hour,” Captain Whalley’s rigid silvery
head repeated behind him as if out of a trance.

Amidships, below, two voices, close against the engine-
room, could be heard answering each other—one angry
and slow, the other alert.

[ $80 ]
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“T tell you the beast has locked himself in to get
drunk.”

“Can’t help it now, Mr. Massy. After all, a man has
aright to shut himself up in his cabin in his own time.”

“ Not to get drunk.”

“T heard him swear that the worry with the boilers
was enough to drive any man to drink,” Sterne said
maliciously.

Massy hissed out something about bursting the door
in. Mr. Van Wyk, to avoid them, crossed in the dark
to the other side of the deserted deck. The planking
of the little wharf rattled faintly under his hasty feet.

“Mr. Van Wyk! Mr. Van Wyk!”

He walked on: somebody was running on the path.
“ You’ve forgotten to get your mail.”

Sterne, holding a bundle of papers in his hand, caught
up with him.

“ Oh, thanks.”

But, as the other continued at his elbow, Mr. Van
Wyk stopped short. The overhanging eaves, descend-
ing low upon the lighted front of the bungalow, threw
their black straight-edged shadow into the great body
of the night on that side. Everything was very still.
A tinkle of cutlery and a slight jingle of glasses were
heard. Mr. Van Wyk’s servants were laying the table
for two on the veranda.

“Ym afraid you give me no credit whatever for my
good intentions in the matter I’ve spoken to you about,”
said Sterne.

“T simply don’t understand you.”

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“Captain Whalley is a very audacious man, but he
will understand that his game is up. That’s all that.
anybody need ever know of it from me. Believe me, I
am very considerate in this, but duty is duty. I don’t
want to make a fuss. All I ask you, as his friend, is
to tell him from me that the game’s up. That will be
sufficient.”

Mr. Van Wyk felt a loathsome dismay at this qucer
privilege of friendship. He would not demean himself
by asking for the slightest explanation; to drive the
other away with contumely he did not think prudent—
as yet, at any rate. So much assurance staggered him.
Who could tell what there could be in it, he thought?
His regard for Captain Whalley had the tenacity of
a disinterested sentiment, and his practical instinct com-
‘ing to his aid, he concealed his scorn.

“T gather, then, that this is something grave.”

“Very grave,” Sterne assented solemnly, delighted at
having produced an effect at last. He was ready to add
some effusive protestations of regret at the “ unavoida-
ble necessity,” but Mr. Van Wyk cut him short—very
civilly, however.

Once on the veranda Mr. Van Wyk put his hands in his
pockets, and, straddling his legs, stared down at a
black panther skin lying on the floor before a rocking-
chair. “It looks as if the fellow had not the pluck
to play his own precious game openly,” he thought.

This was true enough. In the face of Massy’s last
rebuff Sterne dared not declare his knowledge. His
object was simply to get charge of the steamer and

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keep it for some time. Massy would never forgive him
for forcing himself on; but if Captain Whalley left
the ship of his own accord, the command would devolve
upon him for the rest of the trip; so he hit upon the
brilliant idea of scaring the old man away. A vague
menace, a mere hint, would be enough in such a brazen
case; and, with a strange admixture of compassion, he
thought that Batu Beru was a very good place for
throwing up the sponge. The skipper could go ashore
quietly, and stay with that Dutchman of his. Weren’t
these two as thick as thieves together? . And on reflec-
tion he seemed to see that there was a way to work the
whole thing through that great friend of the old man’s.
This was another brilliant idea. He had an inborn
preference for circuitous methods. In this particular
case he desired to remain in the background as much
as possible, to avoid exasperating Massy needlessly.
No fuss! Let it all happen naturally.

Mr. Van Wyk all through the dinner was conscious
of a sense of isolation that invades sometimes the close-
ness of human intercourse. Captain Whalley failed
lamentably and obviously in his attempts to eat some-
thing. He seemed overcome by a strange absent-
mindedness. His hand would hover irresolutely, as if
left without guidance by a preoccupied mind. Mr. Van
Wyk had heard him coming up from a long way off in
the profound stillness of the river-side, and had noticed
the irresolute character of the footfalls. The toe of his
boot had struck the bottom stair as though he had come
along mooning with his head in the air right up to the

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steps of the veranda. Had the captain of the Sofala
been another sort of man he would have suspected the
work of age there. But one glance at him was enough.
Time—after, indeed, marking him for its own—had
given him up to his usefulness, in which his simple
faith would see a proof of Divine mercy. ‘ How could
I contrive to warn him?” Mr. Van Wyk wondered, as
af Captain Whalley had been miles and miles away, out
of sight and earshot of all evil. He was sickened by
an immense disgust of Sterne. To even mention his
threat to a man ike Whalley would be positively inde-
cent. There was something more vile and insulting in
its hint than in a definite charge of crime—the debasing .
taint of blackmailing. “ What could anyone bring
against him?” he asked himself. This was a lmpid
personality. “And for what object?” The Power
that man trusted had thought fit to leave him nothing
on earth that envy could lay hold of, except a bare crust
of bread.

“ Won't you try some of this? ” he asked, pushing a
dish slightly. Suddenly it oceurred to Mr. Van Wyk that
Sterne might possibly be coveting the command of the
Sofala. His cynicism was quite startled by what looked
like a proof that no man may count himself safe from
his kind unless in the very abyss of misery. An in-
trigue of that sort was hardly worth troubling about,
he judged; but still, with such a feol as Massy to deal
with, Whalley ought to and must be warned.

At this moment Captain Whalley, bolt upright,’ the
deep cavities of the eyes overhung by a bushy frown,

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and one large brown hand resting on each side of his
empty plate, spoke across the tablecloth abruptly—

“Mr. Van Wyk, you’ve always treated me with the
gnost humane consideration.”

“‘ My dear captain, you make too muck of the simple
fact that I am not a savage.” Mr. Van Wyk, utterly
revolted by the thought of Sterne’s obscure attempt,
raised his voice incisively, as if the mate had been hiding
somewhere within earshot. ‘ Any consideration I have
been able to show was no more than the rightful due
of a character I’ve learned to regard by this time with
an esteem that nothing can shake.”

A slight ring of glass made him lift his eyes from the
slice of pine-apple he was cutting into small pieces on
his plate. In changing his position Captain Whalley
had contrived to upset an empty tumbler.

Without looking. that way, leaning sideways on his
elbow, his other hand shading his brow, he groped
shakily for it, then desisted. Van Wyk stared blankly,
as if something momentous had happened all at once.
He did not know why he should feel so startled; but he
forgot Sterne utterly for the moment.

“Why, what’s the matter? ”

And Captain Whalley, half-averted, in a deadened,
agitated voice, muttered— ¢

“ Esteem ! ”

' * And I may add something more,” Mr. Van Wyk,

very steady-eyed, pronounced slowly.
“Hold! Enough!” Captain Whalley did not
change his attitude or raise his voice. ‘Say no more:
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I can make you no return. I am too poor even for that
now. Your esteem is worth having. You are not a
man that would stoop to deceive the poorest sort of devil
on earth, or make a ship unseaworthy every time he
takes her to sea.”

Mr. Van Wyk, leaning forward, his face gone pink
all over, with the starched table-napkin, over his knees,
-was inclined to mistrust his senses, his power of com-
prehension, the sanity of his guest.

“Where? Why? In the name of God!—what’s this?
What ship? I don’t understand who . . .”

“ Then, in the name of God, it is I! A ship’s unsea-
worthy when her captain can’t see. I am going blind.”
_ Mr. Van Wyk made a slight movement, and sat very
still afterwards for a few seconds; then, with the
thought of Sterne’s “ The game’s up,” he ducked under
the table to pick up the napkin which had slipped off
his knees. This was the game that was up. And at
the same time the muffled voice of Captain Whalley
passed over him—

“ I’ve deceived them all. Nobody knows.”

He emerged flushed to the eyes. Captain Whalley,
motionless under the full blaze of the lamp, shaded his
face with his hand.

** And you had that courage? ”

“ Call it by what name you like. But you are a hu-
mane man—a—a—gentleman, Mr. Van Wyk. You may
have asked me what I had done with my conscience.”

He seemed to muse, profoundly silent, very still in his
mournful pose.

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“I began to tamper with it in my pride. You begin
to see a lot of things when you are going blind. I
could not be frank with an old chum even. I was not
frank with Massy—no, not altogether. I knew he took
me for a wealthy sailor fool, and I let him. I wanted
to keep up my importance—because there was poor Ivy
away there—my daughter. What did I want to trade
on his misery for? I did trade on it—for her. And
now, what mercy could I expect from him? He would
trade on mine if he knew it. He would hunt the old
fraud out, and stick to the money for a year. Ivy’s
money. And I haven’t kept a penny for myself. How
am I going to live for,a year. A year! Ina year there
will be no sun in the sky for her father.”

His deep voice came out, awfully veiled, as though
he had been overwhelmed by the earth of a landslide,
and talking of the thoughts that haunt the dead in
‘their graves. A cold shudder ran down Mr. Van Wyk’s
back.

“And how long is it since you have .. .?” he
began.

“It was a long time before I could bring myself to
believe in this—this—visitation.” Captain Whalley
spoke with gloomy patience from under his hand.

He had not thought he had deserved it. He had begun
by deceiving himself from day to day, from week to
week. He had the Serang at hand there—an old
servant. It came on gradually, and when he could no
longer deceive himself . . .

His voice died out almost.

[ 337 ]
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“Rather than give her up I set myself to deceive
you all.”

“It’s incredible,” whispered Mr. Van Wyk. Captain
Whalley’s appalling murmur flowed on.

_“Not even the sign of God’s anger could make me
forget her. How could I forsake my child, feeling my
vigor all the time—the blood warm within me? Warm
as yours, It seems to me that, like the blinded Samson,
I would find the strength to shake down a temple upon
-my head. She’s a struggling woman—my own child
that we used to pray over together, my poor wife and I.
Do you remember that day I as well as told you
that I believed God would let me live to a hundred for
her sake? What sin is there in loving your child? Do
you see it? I was ready for her sake to live for ever.
I half believed I would. I’ve been praying for death
since. Ha! Presumptuous man—you wanted to
live . . .”

A tremendous, shuddering upheaval of that big frame,
shaken by a gasping sob, set the glasses jingling all
over the table, seemed to make the whole house tremble
to the roof-tree. And Mr. Van Wyk, whose feeling of
. outraged love had been translated into a form of strug-
gle with nature, understood very well that, for that man
whose whole life had been conditioned by action, there
could exist no other expression for all the emotions; that,
to voluntarily cease venturing, doing, enduring, for his
child’s sake, would have been exactly like plucking his
warm love for her out of his living heart. Something
too monstrous, too impossible, even to conceive.

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Captain Whalley had not changed his attitude, that
seemed to express something of shame, sorrow, and
defiance.

““T have even deceived you. If it had not been for
that word ‘ esteem.’ These are not the words for me.
I would have lied to you. MHaven’t I lied to you?
Weren’t you going to trust your property on board this
very trip?”

“T have a floating yearly policy,” Mr. Van Wyk said
almost unwittingly, and was amazed at the sudden crop-
ping up of a commercial detail.

“The ship is unseaworthy, I tell you. The policy
would be invalid if it were known . . .”

“We shall share the guilt, then.”

“Nothing could make mine less,” said Captain
Whalley.

He had not dared to consult a doctor; the man would
have perhaps asked who he was, what he was doing;
Massy might have heard something. He had lived on
without any help, human or divine. The very prayers
stuck in his throat. What was there to pray for? and
death seemed as far as ever. Once he got into his cabin
he dared not come out again; when he sat down he dared
not get up; he dared not raise his eyes to anybody’s
face; he felt reluctant to look upon the sea or up to
the sky. The world was fading before his great fear
of giving himself away. The old ship was his last
friend; he was not afraid of her; he knew every inch
of her deck; but at her too he hardly dared to look, for
fear of finding he could see less than the day before.

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A great incertitude enveloped him. The horizon was
gone; the sky mingled darkly with the sea. Who was
this figure standing over yonder? what was this thing
lying down there? And a frightful doubt of the reality
of what he could see made even the remnant of sight
that remained to him an added torment, a pitfall always
open for his miserable pretense. He was afraid to
stumble inexcusably over something—to say a fatal Yes
or No to a question. The hand of God was upon him,
but it could not tear him away from his child. And,
as if in a nightmare of humiliation, every featureless
man seemed an enemy.

He let his hand fall heavily on the tani Mr. Van
Wyk, arms down, chin on breast, with a gleam of white
teeth pressing on the lower lip, meditated on Sterne’s
“ The game’s up.”

“The Serang of course does not know.”

“ Nobody,” said Captain Whalley, with assurance.

“Ah yes. Nobody. Very well. Can you keep it up
to the end of the trip? That is the last under the agree-
ment with Massy.”

Captain Whalley got up and stood erect, very stately,
with the great white beard lying like a silver breastplate
over the awful secret of his heart. Yes; that was the
only hope there was for him of ever seeing her again,
of securing the money, the last he could do for her,
before he crept away somewhere—useless, a burden, a
reproach to himself. His voice faltered.

“Think of it! Never see her any more: the only
human being besides myself now on earth that can re-

[ 840 ]
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member my wife. She’s just like her mother. Lucky
the poor woman is where there are no tears shed over
those they loved on earth and that remain to pray not
to be led into temptation—because, I suppose, the
blessed know the secret of grace in God’s dealings with
His created children.”
He swayed a little, said with austere dignity—
“T don’t. I know only the child He has given me.”
And he began to walk. Mr. Van Wyk, jumping up,
saw the full meaning of the rigid head, the hesitating
feet, the vaguely extended hand. His heart was beat-
ing fast; he moved a chair aside, and instinctively ad-
vanced as if to offer his arm. But Captain Whalley
passed him by, making for the stairs quite straight.
“ He could not see me at all out of his line,” Van Wyk
thought, with a sort of awe. Then going to the head
' of the stairs, he asked a little tremulously—
“* What is it like—like a mist—like . . .”
Captain Whalley, half-way down, stopped, and turned
round undismayed to answer.
“Tt is as if the light were ebbing out of the world.
Have you ever watched the ebbing sea on an open
/stretch of sands withdrawing farther and farther away
from you? It is like this—only there will be no flood
to follow. Never. It is as if the sun were growing
smaller, the stars going out one by one. There can’t be
many left that I can see by this. But I haven’t had the
courage to look of late . . .” He must have been able
to make out Mr. Van Wyk, because he checked him by
an authoritative gesture and a stoical—

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“T can get about alone yet.”

‘It was as if he had taken his line, and would accept
no help from men, after having been cast out, like a
presumptuous Titan, from his heaven. Mr. Van Wyk,
arrested, seemed to count the footsteps right out of
earshot. He walked between the tables, tapping
smartly with his heels, took up a paper-knife, dropped
it after a vague glance along the blade; then hap-
pening upon the piano, struck a few chords standing
up before the keyboard with an attentive poise of
the head like a piano-tuner; closing it, he pivoted
on his heels brusquely, avoided the little terrier
sleeping trustfully on crossed forepaws, came upon the
stairs next, and, as though he had lost his balance on
the top step, ran down headlong out of the house. His
servants, beginning to clear the table, heard him mutter
to himself (evil words no doubt) down there, and then
after a pause go away with a strolling gait in the direc-
tion of the wharf.

The bulwarks of the Sofala lying alongside the bank
made a low, black wall on the undulating contour of the
shore. Two masts and a funnel uprose from behind it
with a great rake, as if about to fall: a solid, square
elevation in the middle bore the ghostly snapes of white
boats, the curves of davits, lines of: rail and stanchions,
all confused and mingling darkly everywhere; but low
down, amidships, a single lighted port stared out on
the night, perfectly round, like a small, full moon,
whose yellow beam caught a patch of wet mud, the
edge of trodden grass, two turns of heavy cable

[ 342 ]
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wound round the foot of a thick wooden post in the
ground.

Mr. Van Wyk, peering alongside, heard a muzzy
boastful voice apparently jeering at a person called
Prendergast. It mouthed abuse thickly, choked; then
pronounced very distinctly the word “ Murphy,” and
chuckled. Glass tinkled tremulously. All these sounds
came from the lighted port. Mr. Van Wyk hesitated,
stooped; it was impossible to look through unless he
went down into the mud.

“ Sterne,” he said, half aloud.

The drunken voice within said gladly—

“ Sterne—of course. Look at him blink. Look at
him! Sterne, Whalley, Massy. Massy, Whalley,
Sterne. But Massy’s the best. You can’t come over
him. He would just love to see you starve.”

Mr. Van Wyk moved away, made out farther forward
a shadowy head stuck out from under the awnings as
if on the watch, and spoke quietly in Malay, “Is the
mate asleep? ”

“No. Here, at your service.”

In a moment Sterne appeared, walking as a
as a cat on the wharf.

“It’s so jolly dark, and I had no idea you aula be
down to-night.”

“ What’s this horrible raving?” asked Mr. Van Wyk,
as if to explain the cause of a shudder that ran over
him audibly.

“ Jack’s broken out on a drunk. That’s our second.
It’s his way. He will be right enough by to-morrow

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afternoon, only Mr. Massy will keep on worrying up
and down the deck. We had better get away.”

He muttered suggestively of a talk “ up at the house.”
He had long desired to effect an entrance there, but Mr.
Van Wyk nonchalantly demurred: it would not, he
feared, be quite prudent, perhaps; and the opaque
black shadow under one of the two big trees left at the
landing-place swallowed them up, impenetrably dense,
by the side of the wide river, that seemed: to spin into
threads of glitter the light of a few big stars dropped
here and there upon its outspread and flowing stillness.

“The situation is grave beyond doubt,” Mr. Van Wyk
said. Ghost-like in their white clothes they could not
distinguish each others’ features, and their feet made
no sound on the soft earth. A sort of purring was
heard. Mr. Sterne felt gratified by such a beginning.

“T thought, Mr. Van Wyk, a gentleman of your sort
would see at once how awkwardly I was situated.”

* Yes, very. Obviously his health is bad. Perhaps
he’s breaking up. I see, and he himself is well aware—
I assume I am speaking to a man of sense—he is well
aware that his legs are giving out.”

“ His legs—ah!” Mr. Sterne was disconcerted, and
then turned sulky. “You may call it his legs if you
like; what I want to know is whether he intends to clear
out quietly. That’s a good one, too! His legs!
Pooh!”

“Why, yes. Only look at the way he walks.” Mr.’
Van Wyk took him up in a perfectly cool and undoubt-
ing tone. “The question, however, is whether your

[ 344 ]
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sense of duty does not carry you too far from your true
interest. After all, I too could do something to serve
you. You know who I am.”

_“ Everybody along the Straits has heard of you, sir.”

Mr. Van Wyk presumed that this meant something
favorable. Sterne had a soft laugh at this pleasantry.
He should think so! To the opening statement, that
the partnership agreement was to expire at the end of
this very trip, he gave an attentive assent. He was
aware. One heard of nothing else on board all the
blessed day long. As to Massy, it was no secret that he
was in a jolly deep hole with these worn-out boilers.
He would have to borrow somewhere a couple of hun-
dred first of all to pay off the captain; and then he
would have to raise money on mortgage upon the ship
for the new boilers—that is, if he could find a lender at
all. At best it meant loss of time, a break in the trade,
short earnings for the year—and there was always the
danger of having his connection filched away from him
by the Germans. It was whispered about that he had
already tried two firms. Neither would have anything
to do with him. Ship too old, and the man too well
known in the place. . . . Mr. Sterne’s final rapid wink-
ing remained buried in the deep darkness sibilating with
his whispers.

“ Supposing, then, he got the loan,” Mr. Van Wyk
resumed in a deliberate undertone, “ on your own show-
ing he’s more than likely to get a mortgagee’s man
thrust upon him as captain. For my part, I know that
I would make that very stipulation myself if I had to

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find the money. And as a matter of fact I am thinking
of doing so. It would be worth my while in many ways.
Do you see how this would bear on the case under dis-
cussion? ”

“Thank you, sir. I am sure you couldn’t get any-
body that would care more for your interests.”

“Well, it suits my interest that Captain Whalley
should finish his time. I shall probably take a passage
with you down the Straits. If that can be done, I'll be
on the spot when all these changes take place, and in a
position to look after your interests.”

“Mr. Van Wyk, I want nothing better. I am sure
I am infinitely . . .”

“T take it, then, that this may be done without any
trouble.”

“ Well, sir, what risk there is can’t be helped; but
(speaking to you as my employer now) the thing is
more safe than it looks. If anybody had told me of it
I wouldn’t have believed it, but I have been looking on
myself. That old Serang has been trained up to the
game. There’s nothing the matter with his—his—
limbs, sir. He’s got used to things on his own in a
remarkable way. And let me tell you, sir, that Cap-
tain Whalley, poor man, is. by no means useless. Fact.
Let me explain to you, sir. He stiffens up that old
monkey of a Malay, who knows well enough what to do.
Why, he must have kept captain’s watches in all sorts ef
country ships off and on for the last five-and-twenty
‘years. These natives, sir, as long as they have a white
man close at the hack, will go on doing the right thing

[ 846 ]

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most surprisingly well—even if left quite to themselves.
Only the white man must be of the sort to put starch
into them, and the captain is just the one for that.
Why, sir, he has drilled him so well that now he needs
hardly speak at all. I have seen that little wrinkled
ape made to take the ship out of Pangu Bay on a
blowy morning and on all through the islands; take
her out first-rate, sir, dodging under the old man’s
elbow, and in such quiet style that you could not have
told for the life of you which of the two was doing the
work up there. That’s where our poor friend would be
still of use to the ship even if—if—he could no longer
lift a foot, sir. Provided the Serang does not know
that there’s anything wrong.”

** He doesn’t.”

“Naturally not. Quite beyond his apprehension.
They aren’t capable of finding out anything about us,
sir.”

* You seem to be a shrewd man,” said Mr. Van Wyk
in a choked mutter, as though he were feeling sick.

* You'll find me a good enough servant, sir.”

Mr. Sterne hoped now for a handshake at least, but
unexpectedly, with a “ What’s this? Better not to be
seen together,” Mr. Van Wyk’s white shape wavered,
and instantly seemed to melt away in the black air under
the roof of boughs. The mate was startled. Yes.
There was that faint thumping clatter.

He stole out silently from under the shade. The
lighted port-hole shone from afar. His head swam with
the intoxication of sudden success. What a thing it

[ 347 J
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was-to have a gentleman to deal with! He crept aboard,
and there was something weird in the shadowy stretch
of empty decks, echoing with shouts and blows proceed-
ing from a darker part amidships. Mr. Massy was
raging before the door of the berth: the drunken voice
within flowed on undisturbed in the violent racket of
kicks.

“Shut up! Put your light out and turn in, you
confounded swilling pig—you! D’you hear me, you
beast ? ”

The kicking stopped, and in the peuse the muzzy
oracular voice announced from within—

“ Ah! Massy, now—that’s another thing. Massy’s
deep.”

“Who's that aft there? You, Sterne? He'll drink
himself into a fit of horrors.” The chief engineer ap-
peared vague and big at the corner of the engine:
room skylight.

‘* He will be good enough for duty to-morrow. I would
{et him be, Mr. Massy.”

terne slipped away into his berth, and at once had
to sit down. His head swam with exultation. He got
into his bunk as if in a dream. A feeling of profound _
peace, of pacific joy, came over him. On deck all was
quiet.

Mr. Massy, with his ear against the door of Jack’s
cabin, listened critically to a deep stertorous breathing
within. This was a dead-drunk sleep. The bout was
over: tranquilized on that score, he too went in, and
with slow wriggles got out of his old tweed jacket. It

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was a garment with many pockets, which he used to put
on at odd times of the day, being subject to sudden
chilly fits, and when he felt warmed he would take it off
and hang it about anywhere all over the ship. It would
be seen swinging on belaying-pins, thrown over the
heads of winches, suspended on people’s very door-
handles for that matter. Was he not the owner? But
his favorite place was a hook on a wooden awning
stanchion on the bridge, almost against the binnacle.
He had even in the early days more than one tussle on
that point with Captain Whalley, who desired the
bridge to be kept tidy. He had been overawed then.
Of late, though, he had been able to defy his partner
with impunity. Captain Whalley never seemed to
notice anything now. As to the Malays, in their awe
of that scowling man not one of the crew would dream
of laying a hand on the thing, no matter where or what
it swung from. .

With an unexpectedness which made Mr. Massy jump
and drop the coat at his feet, there came from the next
berth the crash and thud of a headlong, jingling, clat-
tering fall. The faithful Jack must have dropped to
sleep suddenly as he sat at his revels, and now had
gone over chair and all, breaking, as it seemed by the
sound, every single glass and bottle in the place. After
the terrific smash all was still for a time in there, as
though he had killed himself on the spot. Mr.
Massy held his breath. At last a sleepy uneasy groan-
ing sigh was exhaled slowly on the other side of the
bulkhead.

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* T hope to goodness he’s too drunk to wake up now,”
muttered Mr. Massy.

The sound of a softly knowing laugh nearly drove
him to despair. He swore violently under his breath.
The fool would keep him awake all night now for cer-
tain. He cursed his luck. He wanted to forget his
maddening troubles in sleep sometimes. He could detect
no movements. Without apparently making the slight-
est attempt to get up, Jack went on sniggering to him-
self where he lay; then began to speak, where he had
left off as it were—

“ Massy! I love the dirty rascal. He would like tc
see his poor old Jack starve—but just you look where
he has climbed to.” . . . He hiccoughed in a superior,
leisurely manner. . . . “ Ship-owning it with the best.
A lottery ticket you want. Ha! ha! I will give you
lottery tickets, my boy. Let the old ship sink and the
old chum starve—that’s right. He don’t go wrong—
Massy don’t. Not he. He’s a genius—that man is.
That’s the way to win your money. Ship and chum
must go.”

“ The silly fool has taken it to heart,” muttered Massy
to himself. And, listening with a softened expression
of face for any slight sign of returning drowsiness, he
was discouraged profoundly by a burst of laughter full
of joyful irony.

* Would like to see her at the bottom of the sea! Oh,
you clever, clever devil! Wish her sunk, eh? I should
think you would, my boy; the damned old thing and
all your troubles with her. Rake in the insurance money

[ 350 3
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—turn your back on your old chum—all’s well—gentle-
man again.”

A grim stillness had come over Massy’s face. Only
his big black eyes rolled uneasily. The raving fool.
And yet it was all true. Yes. Lottery tickets, too.
All true. What? Beginning again? He wished he
wouldn’t.

But it was even so. The imaginative drunkard on
the other side of the bulkhead shook off the -deathlike
stillness that after his last words had fallen on the dark
ship moored to a silent shore.

“Don’t you dare to say anything against George
Massy, Esquire. When he’s tired of waiting he will do
away with her. Look out! Down she goes—chum and
all. He'll know how to. . .” .

The voice hesitated, weary, dreamy, lost,.as if dying
away in a vast open space.

“. . . Find a trick that will work. He’s up to it—
never fear . . .”

He must have been very anne, for at last the heavy
sleep gripped him with the suddenness of a magie spell,
and the last. word lengthened itself into an interminable,
noisy, in-drawn snore. And then even the snoring
stepped, and all was still.

But it seemed as though Mr. Massy had suddenly come
to doubt the efficacy of sleep as against a man’s troubles ;
or perhaps he had found the relief he needed in the
stillness of a calm contemplation that may contain the
vivid thoughts of wealth, of a stroke of luck, of long
idleness, and may bring before you the imagined form

{ 351 ]
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of every desire; for, turning about and throwing his
arms over the edge of his bunk, he stood there with his
feet on his favorite old coat, looking out through the
round port into the night over the river. Sometimes
a breath of wind would enter and touch his face, a cool
breath charged with the damp, fresh feel from a vast
body of water. A glimmer here and there was all he
could see of it; and once he might after all suppose he
had dozed off, since there appeared before his vision,
unexpectedly and connected with no dream, a row of
flaming and gigantic figures—three nought seven one
two—making up a number such as you may see on a
lottery ticket. And then all at once the port was no
longer black: it was pearly gray, framing a shore
crowded with houses, thatched roof beyond thatched
roof, walls of mats and bamboo, gables of carved teak
timber. Rows of dwellings raised on a forest of piles
lined the steely band of the river, brimful and still, with
the tide on the turn. This was Batu Beru—and the
day had come.

Mr. Massy shook himself, put on the tweed coat, and,
shivering nervously as if from some great shock, made
a note of the number. A fortunate, rare hint that.
Yes; but to pursue fortune one wanted money—ready
cash.

Then he went out and prepared to descend into the
engine-room. Several small jobs had to be seen to, and
Jack was lying dead drunk on the floor of his cabin,
with the door locked at that. His gorge rose at the
thought of work. Ay! But if you wanted to do noth-

[ 352 ] “
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ing you had to get first a good bit of money. A ship
won't save you. ‘True, all true. He was tired of
waiting for some chance that would rid him at last of
that ship that had turned out a curse on his life.

XIV

The deep, interminable hoot of the steam-whistle had,
in its grave, vibrating note, something intolerable,
which sent a slight shudder down Mr. Van Wyk’s back.
It was the early afternoon; the Sofala was leaving Batu
-Beru for Pangu, the next place of call. She swung in
the stream, scantily attended by a few canoes, and, glid-
ing on the broad river, became lost to view from the
Van Wyk bungalow.

Its owner had not gone this time to see her off. Gen-
erally he came down to the wharf, exchanged a few
words with the bridge while she cast off, and waved his
hand to Captain Whalley at the last moment. This day
he did not even go as far as the balustrade of the
veranda. ‘He couldn’t see me if I did,” he said to
himself. ‘I wonder whether }.c can make out the house
at all.” And this. thought soraechow made him feel more
alone than he had ever felt for all these years. What
was it? six or seven? Seven. A long time.

He sat on the veranda with a closed book on his knee,
and, as it were, looked out upon his solitude, as if the
fact of Captain Whalley’s blindness had opened his
eyes to his own. There were many sorts of heartaches

[ 353 |
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and troubles, and there was no place where they could
not find a man out. And he felt ashamed, as though
he had for six years behaved like a peevish boy.

His thought followed the Sofala on her way. On the
spur of the moment he had acted impulsively, turning’
to the thing most pressing. And what else could he
have done? Later on he should see. It seemed neces-
sary that he should come out into the world, for a time
at least. He had money—something could be ar-
ranged; he would grudge no time, no trouble, no loss
of his solitude. It weighed on him now—and Captam
Whalley appeared to him as he had sat shading his
eyes, as if, being deceived in the trust of his faith, le
were beyond all the good and evil that can be wrought
by the hands of men.

Mr. Van Wyk’s thoughts followed the Sofala down the
river, winding about through the belt of the coast forest,
between the buttressed shafts of the big trees, through
the mangrove strip, and over the bar. The ship crossed
it easily in broad daylight, piloted, as it happened, by
Mr. Sterne, who took the watch from four to six, and
then went below to hug himself with delight at the prose
pect of being virtually employed by a rich man—like
Mr. Van Wyk. He could not see how any hitch could
occur now. He did not seem able to get over the feelimg
of being “ fixed up at last.” From six to eight, in the
course of duty, the Serang looked alone after the ship.
She had a clear road before her now till about three in
the morning, when she would close with the Pangu
group. At eight Mr. Sterne came out cheerily to take

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charge again till midnight. At ten he was still chir.
ruping and humming to himself on the bridge, and
about that time Mr. Van Wyk’s thought aban-
doned the Sofala. Mr. Van Wyk had fallen asleep
at last. !

Massy, blocking the engine-room companion, jerked
himself into his tweed jacket surlily, while the second
waited with a scowl.

‘“Qh. You came out? You sot! Well, what have
you got to say for yourself? ”

He had been in charge of the engines till then. A
somber fury darkened his mind: a hot anger against
the ship, against the facts of life, against the men for, |
their cheating, against himself too—because of an in-
ward tremor in his heart.

An incomprehensible growl answered him.

“What? Can’t you open your mouth now? You yelp
out your infernal rot loud enough when you are drunk.
Whai do you mean by abusing people in that way?—
you old useless boozer, you!”

“Can’t help it. Don’t remember anything about. it.
You shouldn’t listen.”

“You dare to tell mc! What do you mean by going
on a drunk like this!”

“ Don’t ask me. Sick of the dam’ ieee would
be. Sick of life.”

“ T wish you were dead, then. You’ve made me sick
of you. Don’t you remember the uproar you made last
night? You miserable old soaker!”

“No;I don’t. Don’t want to. Drink is drink.”

[ 355 |
THE END OF THE TETHER

‘‘T wonder what prevents me from kicking you out.
What do you want here?”

“‘ Relieve you. You’ve been long enough down there,
George.”

“ Don’t you George me—you tippling old rascal, you!
If I were to die to-morrow you would starve. Remem-
ber that. Say Mr. Massy.”

“Mr. Massy,” repeated the other stolidly.

Disheveled, with dull blood-shot eyes, a snuffy, grimy
shirt, greasy trowsers, naked feet thrust into ragged
slippers, he bolted in head down directly Massy had
made way for him.

The chief engineer looked around. The deck was
empty as far as the taffrail. All the native passengers
had left in Batu Beru this time, and no others had
joined. The dial of the patent log tinkled periodically
in the dark at the end of the ship. It was a dead calm,
and, under the clouded sky, through the still air that
seemed to cling warm, with a seaweed smell, to her slim
hull, on a sea of somber gray and unwrinkled, the ship
moved on an even keel, as if floating detached in empty
space. But Mr. Massy slapped his forehead, tottered
a little, caught hold of a belaying-pin at the foot of
the mast.

“TI shall go mad,” he muttered, walking across the deck
unsteadily. A shovel was scraping loose coal down be-
low—a fire-door clanged. Sterne on the bridge ‘began
whistling a new tune.

Captain Whalley, sitting on the couch, awake and fully
dressed, heard the door of his cabin open. He @id not

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move in the least, waiting to recognize the voice, with
an appalling strain of prudence.

A bulkhead lamp blazed on the white paint, the crim-
son plush, the brown varnish of mahogany tops. The
white wood packing-case under the bed-place had re-
mained unopened for three years now, as though Cap- -
tain Whalley had felt that, after the Fair Maid was
gone, there could be no abiding-place on earth for his
affections. His hands rested on his knees; his hand-
some head with big eyebrows presented a rigid profile
te the doorway. The expected voice spoke out at
last.

“Once more, then. What am I to call you?”

Ha! Massy. Again. The weariness of it crushed his
heart—and the pain of shame was almost more than he
could bear without crying out.

“Well. Is it to be ‘ partner’ still? ”

“ You don’t know what you ask.”

“T know what I want .. .”

Massy stepped in and closed the door.

“. . . And I am going to have a try for it with you
once more.”

His whine was half persuasive, half menacing.

“ For it’s no manner of use to tell me that you are
poor. You don’t spend anything on yourself, that’s
true enough; but there’s another name for that. You
think you are going to have what you want out of me
for three years, and then cast me off without hearing
what I think of you. You think I would have submitted
to your airs if I had known you had only a beggarly

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five hundred pounds in the world. You ought to have
told me.”

“Perhaps,” said Captain Whalley, bowing his head.

“And yet it has saved you.” . . . Massy laughed
scornfully. ... “I have told you often enough
since.”
'“ And FE don’t believe you now. When I think how
I let you lord it over my ship! Do you remember how
you used to bullyrag me about my coat and your bridge?
It was in his way. His bridge! ‘And I won’t be a
party to this—and I couldn’t think of doing that.’
Honest man! And now it all comes out. ‘I am poor,
and I can’t. I have only this five hundred in the
world.’ ”

He contemplated the immobility of Captain Whalley,
that seemed to present an inconquerable obstacle in
his path. His face took a mournful cast.

“You are a hard man.”

* Enough,” said Captain Whalley, turning upon him.
“You shall get nothing from me, because I have noth-
ing of mine to give away now.”

“ Tell that to the marines!”

Mr. Massy, going out, looked back once; then the deer
. elosed, and Captain Whalley, alone, sat as still as before.
He had nothing of his own—even his own past of honor,
of truth, of just pride, was gone. All his spotless life
had fallen into the abyss. He had said his last good-by
to it. But what belonged to her, that he meant to save.
Only a little money. He would take it to her in his own
hands—this last gift of a man that had lasted too long.

[ 358 ]
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And an immense and fierce impulse, the very passion of
paternity, flamed up with all the unquenched vigor of
his worthless life in a desire to see her face.

Just across the deck Massy had gone straight to his
cabin, struck a light, and hunted up the note of the
dreamed number whose figures had flamed up also with
the fierceness of another passion. He must contrive
somehow not to miss a drawing. That number meant
something. But what expedient could he contrive to
keep himself going?

“ Wretched miser! ”? he mumbled.

If Mr. Sterne could at no time have told him anything
new about his partner, he could have told Mr. Sterne
that another use could be made of a man’s affliction than
just to kick him out, and thus defer the term of a diffi-
cult payment for a year. To keep the secret of the
affliction and induce him to stay was a better move.. If
without means, he would be anxious to remain; and that
settled the question of refunding him his share. He did
not know exactly how much Captain Whalley was dis-
abled ; but if it so happened that he put the ship ashore
somewhere for good and all, it was not the owner’s fault
—was it? He was not obliged to know that there was
anything wrong., But probably nobody would raise
such a point, and the ship was fully insured. He had
had enough self-restraint to pay up the premiums. But
this was not all. He could not believe Captain Whalley
te be so confoundedly destitute as not to have some more
money put away somewhere. If he, Massy, could get
hold of it, that would pay for the boilers, and every-

[ 359 ]
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thing went on as before. And if she got lost in the
end, so much the better. He hated her: he loathed the
troubles that took his mind off the chances of fortune.
He wished her at the bottom of the sea, and the in-
surance moneyé in his pocket. And as, baffled, he left
Captain Whalley’s cabin, he enveloped in the same
hatred the ship with the worn-out boilers and the man
with the dimmed eyes.

And our conduct after all is so much a matter of outside
suggestion, that had it not been for his Jack’s drunken
gabble he would have there and then had it out with this
miserable man, who would neither help, nor stay, nor
yet lose the ship. The old fraud! He longed to kick
him out. But he restrained himself. Time enough for
that—when he liked. There was a fearful new thought
put into his head. Wasn’t he up to it after all? How
that beast Jack had raved! ‘ Find a safe trick to get
rid of her.” Well, Jack was not so far wrong. A very
clever trick had occurred to him. Aye! But what of
the risk?

A feeling of pride—the pride of superiority to com-
mon prejudices—crept into his breast, made his heart
beat fast, his mouth turn dry. Not everybody would
dare; but he was Massy, and he was up to it!

Six bells were struck on deck. Eleven! He drank a
glass of water, and sat down for ten minutes or so to
calm himself. Then he got out of his chest a small
bull’s-eye lantern of his own and lit it.

Almost opposite his berth, across the narrow passage
under the bridge, there was, in the iron deck-structure

[ 360 ]
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covering the stokehold fiddle and the boiler-space, a
storeroom with iron sides, iron roof, iron-plated floor,
too, on account of the heat below. All sorts of rubbish
was shot there: it had a mound of scrap-iron ir®a corner ;
rows of empty oil-cans; sacks of cotton-waste, with a
heap of charcoal, a deck-forge, fragments of an old hen-
coop, winch-covers all in rags, remnants of lamps, and
a brown felt hat, discarded by a man dead now (of a
fever on the Brazil coast), who had been once mate of
the Sofala, had remained for years jammed forcibly be-
hind a length of burst copper pipe, flung at some time
or other out of the engine-room. A complete and im-
pervious blackness pervaded that Capharnaum of for-
gotten things. A small shaft of light from Mr. Massy’s
bull’s-eye fell slanting right through ‘it.

His coat was unbuttoned:; he shot the bolt of the door
(there was no other opening), and, squatting before the
scrap-heap, began to pack his pockets with pieces of
iron. He packed them carefully, as if the rusty nuts,’
the broken bolts, the links of cargo chain, had been so
much gold he had that one chance to carry away. He
packed his side-pockets till they bulged, the breast
pocket, the pockets inside. He turned over the pieces.
Some he rejected. A small mist of powdered rust began
to rise about his busy hands. Mr. Massy knew some-
thing of the scientific basis of his clever trick. If you
want to deflect the magnetic needle of a ship’s compass,
soft iron is the best; likewise many small pieces in the
pockets of a jacket would have more effect than a few
large ones, because in that way you obtain a greater

| 361 J
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amount of surface for weight in your iron, and it’s sur-
face that tells.

He slipped out swiftly—two strides sufficed—and in
his cabin he perceived that his hands were all red—red
with rust. It disconcerted him, as though he had found
them covered with blood: he looked himself over hastily.
Why, his trowsers too! He had been rubbing his rusty
palms on his legs.

He tore off the waistband button in his haste, brushed
his coat, washed his hands. Then the air of guilt left
him, and he sat down to wait.

He sat bolt upright and weighted with iron in his
chair. He had a hard, lumpy bulk against each hip,
felt the scrappy iron in his pockets touch his ribs at
every breath, the downward drag of all these pounds
hanging upon his shoulders. He looked very dull too,
sitting idle there, and his yellow face, with motionless

‘black eyes, had something passive and sad in its quiet-
ness,

When he heard eight bells struck above his head, he
rose and made ready to go out. His movements seemed
aimless, his lower lip had dropped a little, his eyes
roamed about the cabin, and the tremendous tension of
his will had robbed them of every vestige of intelligence.

With the last stroke of the bell the Serang appeared
noiselessly on the bridge to relieve the mate. Sterne
overflowed with good nature, since he had nothing more
to desire.

* Got vour eyes well open yet, Serang? It’s middling
dark; I'll wait till you get your sight properly.”

[ 362 ]
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The old Malay murmured, looked up with his worn
eyes, sidled away into the light of the binnacle, and,
clasping his hands behind his back, fixed his eyes on the
compass-card.

“You'll have to keep a good’ look-out ahead for
land, about half-past three. It’s fairly clear, though.
You have looked in on the captain as you came
along—eh? He knows the time? Well, then, I am
off.”

At the foot of the ladder he stood aside for the captain.
He watched him go up with an even, certain tread, and
remained thoughtful for a moment. “ It’s funny,” he
said to himself, “ but you can never tell whether that
man has seen you or not. He might have heard me
breathe this time.”

He was a wonderful man when all was said and done.
They said he had had a name in his day. Mr. Sterne
could well believe it; and he concluded serenely that
Captain Whalley must be able to see people more or less
—as himself just now, for instance—but not being cer-
tain of anybody, had to keep up that unnoticing silence
of manner for fear of giving himself away. Mr. Sterne
was a shrewd guesser.

This necessity of every moment brought home to Cap-
tain Whalley’s heart the humiliation of his falsehood.
He had drifted into it from paternal love, from in-
credulity, from boundless trust in divine justice meted
out to men’s feelings on this earth. He would give his
poor Ivy the benefit of another month’s work; perhaps
the affliction was only temporary. Surely God would

{ 363 }
THE END OF THE TETHER

not rob his child of his power to help, and cast him
naked into a night without end. He had caught: at
every hope; and when the evidence of his misfortune
was stronger than hope, he tried not to believe the mani-
fest thing.

In vain. In the steadily darkening universe a sinister
clearness fell upon his ideas. In the illuminating. mo-
ments of suffering he saw life, men, all things, the whole
earth with all her burden of created nature, as he had
never seen them before.

Sometimes he was seized with a sudden vertigo and an
overwhelming terror; and then the image of his daughter
appeared. Her, too, he had never seen so clearly before.
Was it possible that he should ever be unable to do
anything whatever for her? Nothing. And not see
her any more? Never.

Why? The punishment was too great for a little pre-
sumption, for a little pride. And at last he came to
cling to his deception with a fierce determination to carry
it out to the end, to save her money intact, and behold
her once more with his own eyes. Afterwards—what?
The idea of suicide was reyolting to the vigor of his
manhood. He had prayed for death till the prayers had
stuck in his throat. All the days of his life he had
prayed for daily bread, and not to be led into tempta-
tion, in a childlike humility of spirit. Did words mean
anything? Whence did the gift of speech come? The
violent beating of his heart reverberated in his head—
seemed to shake his brain to pieces.

He sat down heavily in the deck-chair to keep the pre-

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tense of his watch. The night was dark. All the nights
were dark now.

“ Serang,” he said, half aloud.

“ Ada, Tuan. I am here.”

“There are clouds on the sky? ”

“ There are, Tuan.”

“Let her be steered straight. North.”

“She is going north, Tuan.”

The Serang stepped back. Captain Whalley recog-
nized Massy’s footfalls on the bridge.

The engineer walked over to port and returned, pass-
ing behind the chair several times. Captain Whalley
detected an unusual character as of prudent care in this
prowling. The near presence of that man brought with
it always a recrudescence of moral suffering for Captain
Whalley. It was not remorse. After all, he had done
nothing but good to the poor devil. There was also
a sense of danger—the necessity of a greater care.

Massy stopped and said—

“So you still say you must go?”

“T must indeed.”

“‘ And you couldn’t at least leave the money ror a term
of years? ”

** Impossible.”

“ Can’t trust it with me without your care, eh? ”

Captain Whalley remained silent. Massy sighed
deeply over the back of the chair.

“Tt would just do to save me,” he said in a tremulous
voice.

* T’ve saved you once.”

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The chief engineer took off his coat with careful
movements, and proceeded to feel for the brass hook
screwed into the wooden stanchion. For this purpose he
placed himself right in front of the binnacle, thus hid-
ing completely the compass-card from the quarter-
master at the wheel. “ Tuan!” the lascar at last mur-
mured softly, meaning to let the white man know that
he could not see to steer.

Mr. Massy had accomplished his purpose. The coat
was hanging from the nail, within six inches of the
binnacle. And directly he had stepped aside the quarter-
master, a middle-aged, pock-marked, Sumatra Malay,
almost as dark as a negro, perceived with amazement
that in that short time, in this smooth water, with no
wind at all, the ship had gone swinging far out of her
course. He had never known her get away like this
before. With a slight grunt of astonishment he turned
the wheel hastily to bring her head back north, which
was the course. The grinding of the steering-chains,
the chiding murmurs of the Serang, who had come over
to the wheel, made a slight stir, which attracted Cap-
tain Whalley’s anxious attention. He said, “ Take
better care.”” Then everything settled to the usual quiet
on the bridge. Mr. Massy had disappeared.

But the iron in the pockets of the coat had done its
work; and the Sofala, heading north by the compass,
made untrue by this simple device, was no longer mak-
ing a safe course for Pangu Bay.

The hiss of water parted by her stem, the throb of her
engines, all the sounds of her faithful and laborious life,

[ 366 ]
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went on uninterrupted in the great calm of the sea join-
ing on all sides the motionless layer of cloud over the
sky. <A gentle stillness as vast as the world seemed te
wait upon her path, enveloping her lovingly in a su-
preme caress. Mr. Massy thought there could be no
better night for an arranged shipwreck.

Run up high and dry on one of the reefs east «
Pangu—wait for daylight—hole in the bottom—out
boats—Pangu Bay same evening. That’s about it. As
soon as she touched he would hasten on the bridge, get
hold of the coat (nobody would notice in the dark),
and shake it upside-down over the side, or even fling
it into the sea. A detail. Who could guess? Coat been
seen hanging there from that hook hundreds of times.
Nevertheless, when he sat down on the lower step of the
bridge-ladder his knees knocked together a little. ‘The
waiting part was the worst of it. At times he would
begin to pant quickly, as though he had been running,
and then breathe largely, swelling with the intimate
sense of a mastered fate. Now and then he would hear
the shuffle of the Serang’s bare feet up there: quiet, low
voices would exchange a few words, and lapse almost
at once into silence. .

“Tell me directly you see any land, Serang.”

“Yes, Tuan. Not yet.”

“No, not yet,” Captain Whalley would agree.

The ship had been the best friend of his decline. He
had sent all the money he had made by and in the
Sofala to his daughter. His thought lingered on the
name. How often he and his wife had talked over the

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cot of the child in the big stern-cabin of the Condor; she
would grow up, she would marry, she would love them,
they would live near her and look at her happmess—it
would go on without end. Well, his wife was dead, to
the child he had given all he had to give; he wished he
could come near ler, see her, see her face once, live in
the sound of her voice, that could make the darkness of
the living grave ready for him supportable. He had
been starved of love too long. He imagined her tender-
ness.

The Serang had been peering forward, and now and
then glancing at the chair. He fidgeted restlessly, and
suddenly burst out close to Captain Whalley—

“Tuan, do you see anything of the land? ”

The alarmed voice brought Captain Whalley to his feet
at once. He! See! And at the question, the curse of
his blindness seemed to fall on him with a hundredfold
force.

“What’s the time? ” he cried.

“ Half-past three, Tuan.”

‘We are close. You must see. Look, I say. Look.”

Mr. Massy, awakened by the sudden sound of talking
from a short doze on the lowest step, wondered why he
was there. Ah!’ A faintness came over him. It is one
thing to-sow the seed of an accident and another to see
the monstrous fruit hanging over your head ready to
fall in the. sound of agitated voices. ‘There’s no
danger,” he muttered thickly to himself.

The horror of incertitude had seized upon Captain
Whalley, the miserable mistrust of men, of things—of

[ 368 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

the very earth. He had steered that very course thirty-
six times by the same compass—if anything was certain
in this world it was its absolute, unerring correctness.
Then what had happened? Did the Scrang lie? Why
lie? Why? Was he going blind too?

“Ts there a 'mist? Look low on the water. Low down,
I say.”

“ Tuan, there’s no mist. See for yourself.”

Captain Whalley steadied the trembling of his limbs
by an effort. Should he stop the engines at once and
give himself away. A gust of irresolution swayed all
sorts of bizarre notions in his mind. The unusual had
come, and he was not fit to deal with it. In this passage
of inexpressible anguish he saw her face—the face of
a young girl—with an amazing strength of illusion.
No, he must not give himself away after having gone
so far for her sake. ‘You steered the course? You
made it? Speak the truth.”

“Ya, Tuan. On the course now. Look.”

Captain Whalley strode to the binnacle, which to him
made such a dim spot of light in an infinity of shape-
less shadow. By bending his face right down to the
glass he had been able before . . .

Having to steop so low, he put out, instinctively, his
arm to where he knew there was a stanchion to steady
himself against. His hand closed on something that
was not wood but cloth. The slight pull adding to the
weight, the loop broke, and Mr. Massy’s coat falling,
struck the deck heavily with a dull thump, aceompanied
by a lot of clicks.

[ 369 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

“ What’s this? ”

Captain Whalley fell on his knees, with groping. hands
extended in a frank gesture of blindness. They trem-
bled, these hands feeling for the truth. He saw it. Iron
near the compass. Wrong course. Wreck her! His
ship. Oh no. Not that.

“ Jump and stop her!” he roared out in a voice not
his own.

’ He ran himself—hands forward, a blind man, and
while the clanging of the gong echoed still all over the
ship, she seemed to butt full tilt into the side of a
roountain.

Tt was low water along the north side of the strait.
Mr. Massy had not reckoned on that. Instead of run.
ning aground for half her length, the Sofala butted the
sheer ridge of a stone reef which would have been
awash at high water. This made the shock absolutely
terrific. Everybody in the ship that was standing was
thrown down headlong: the shaken rigging made a great
rattling to the very trucks. All the lights went out;
several chain-guys, snapping, clattered against the
funnel; there were crashes, pings of parted wire-rope,

\ splintering sounds, loud cracks; the masthead lamp flew
over the bows, and all the doors about the deck began
to bang heavily. Then, after having hit, she rebounded,
hit the second time the very same spot like a battering-
ram. This completed the havoc: the funnel, with all
the guys gone, fell over with a hollow sound of thunder,
smashing the wheel to bits, crushing the frame of the
awnings, breaking the lockers, filling the bridge with

[ 370 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

a mass of broken wood. Captain Whalley picked
himself up and stood knee-deep in wreckage, torn,
bleeding, knowing the nature of the danger he had es-
caped mostly by the sound, and holding Mr. Massy’s
coat in his arms.

By this time Sterne (he had been flung out of his
bunk) had set the engines astern. They worked for a
few turns, then a voice bawled out, “ Get out of the
damned engine-room, Jack!’’—and they stopped; but
the ship had gone clear of the reef and lay still, with a
heavy cloud of steam issuing from the broken deck-
pipes, and vanishing in wispy shapes into the night.
Notwithstanding the suddenness of the disaster there
was no shouting, as if the very violence of the shock
had half-stunned the shadowy lot of people swaying
here and there about her decks. The voice of the Serang
pronounced distinctly above the confused murmurs—

“No bottom” Te had heaved the lead.

Mr. Sterne cried out next in a strained pitch—

‘Where the devil has she got to? Where are we? ”

Captain Whalley replied in a calm bass—

““ Amongst the reefs to the eastward.”

“You know it, sir? Then she will never get out
again.”

“She will be gone in five minutes. Boats, Sterne.
Even one will save you all in this calm.”

The Chinaman stokers went in a disorderly rush for
the port boats. Nobody tried to check them. The
Malays, after a moment of confusion, became quict,
and Mr. Sterne showed a good countenance. Captain

[ 371 ]
THE END OF 1HE TETHER

Whalley had not moved. His thoughts were darker
than this night in which he had lost his first ship.

“‘He made me lose a ship.”

Another tall figure standing before him amongst the
litter of the smash on the bridge whispered insanely—

“ Say nothing of it.”

Massy stumbled closer. Captain Whalley heard the
chattering of his teeth.

“ T have the coat.”

“ Throw it down and come along,” urged the chatter-
ing voice. ‘ B-b-b-b-boat!”

“You will get five years for this.”

Mr. Massy had lost his voice. His speech was a mere
dry rustling in his throat.

“* Have mercy!”

““ Had you any when you made me lose my ship? Mr,
Massy, you shall get five years for this!”

“I wanted money! Money! My own money! I will
give you scme money. Take half of it. You love
money yourself.”

“ There’s a justice . . .”

Massy made an awful effort, and in a strange, half-
choked utterance—

“You blind devil! It’s you that drove me to it.”

Captain Whalley, hugging the coat to his breast,
made no sound. The light had ebbed for ever from the
world—let everything go. But this man should not
escape scot-free.

Sterne’s voice commanded—

* Lower away!”

{ 372 }
THE END OF fHE TETHER

The blocks rattled.

““ Now then,” he cried, “over with you. This way.
You, Jack, here. Mr. Massy! Mr. Massy! Captain!
Quick, sir! Let’s get aa

“I shall go to prison for trying to cheat the insurance,
but you'll get exposed; you, honest man, who has been
cheating me. You are poor. Aren’t you? You’ve
nothing but the five hundred pounds. Well, you have
nothing at all now. The ship’s lost, and the insurance
won’t be paid.”

Captain Whalley did not move. True! Ivy’s money!
Gone in this wreck. Again he had a flash of insight.
He was indeed at the end of his tether.

Urgent voices cried out together alongside. * Massy
did not seem able to tear himself away from the bridge.
He chattered and hissed despairingly—

“Give it up to me! Give it up!”

“ No,” said Captain Whalley; “I could not give it up.
You had better go. Don’t wait, man, if you want to
live. She’s settling down by the head fast. No; I shall
keep it, but I shall stay on board.”

Massy did not seem to understand ; but the love of life,
awakened suddenly, drove him away from the bridge.

Captain Whalley laid the coat down, and stumbled
amengst the heaps of wreckage to the side.

“Ts Mr. Massy with you?” he called out into the
night.

Sterne from the boat shouted—

“Yes; we’ve got him. Come along, sir. It’s madness
to stay longer.”

 

ras |
THE END OF THE TETHER

Captain Whalley felt along the rail carefully, and,
without a word, cast off the painter. They were ex-
pecting him still down there. They were waiting, till
a voice suddenly exclaimed—

“We are adrift! Shove off!”

“ Captain Whalley! Leap! ... pullupa little...
leap! You can swim.”

In that old heart, in that vigorous body, there was,
that nothing should be wanting, a horror of death that
apparently could not be overcome by the horror of
blindness. But after all, for Ivy he had carried his
point, walking in his darkness to the very verge of a
crime. God had not listened to his prayers. The light
had finished ebbing out of the world; not a glimmer. It
was a dark waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley
who had gone so far to carry a point should continue
to live. He must pay the price.

“Leap as far as you can, sir; we will pick you up.”

They did not hear him answer. But their shouting
seemed to remind him of something. He groped his
way back, and sought for Mr. Massy’s coat. He could
swim indeed; people sucked down by the whirlpool of
a sinking ship do come up sometimes to the surface, and
it was unseemly that a Whalley, who had made up his
mind to die, should be beguiled by chance into a
struggle. He would put all these pieces of iron into his
own pockets.

They, looking from the boat, saw the Sofala, a black
mass upon a black sea, lying still at an appalling cant.
No sound came from her. Then, with a great bimarre

[ 874]
THE END OF THE TETHER

shuffling noise, as if the boilers had broken through the
bulkheads, and with a faint muffled detonation, where
the ship had been there appeared for a moment some-
thing standing upright and narrow, like a rock out of
the sea. Then that too disappeared.

When the Sofala failed to come back to Batu Beru at
the proper time, Mr. Van Wyk understood at once that
he would never see her any more. But he did not know
what had happened till some weeks afterwards, when,
in a native craft lent him by his Sultan, he had mada
his way to the Sofala’s port of registry, where already
her existence and the official inquiry into her loss was
beginning to be forgotten.

It had not been a very remarkable or interesting case,
except for the fact that the captain had gone down with
his sinking ship. It was the only life lost; and Mr. Van
Wyk would not have been able to learn any details had
it not been for Sterne, whom he met one day on the quay
near the bridge over the creek, almost on the very spot
where Captain Whalley, to preserve his daughter’s five
hundred pounds intact, had turned to get a sampan
which would take him on board the Sofala.

From afar Mr. Van Wyk saw Sterne blink straight at
him and raise his hand to his hat. They drew into the.
shade of a building (it was a bank), and the mate re-
lated how the boats with the crew got into Pangu Bay
about six hours after the accident, and how they had
lived for a fortnight in a state of destitution before they
found an opportunity to get away from that beastly

[ 875 }
THE END OF THE TETHER

place. ‘The inquiry had exonerated everybody from all
blame. The loss of the ship was put down to an un-
usual set of the current. Indeed, it could not have been
anything else: there was no other way to account for
the ship being set seven miles to the eastward of her
position during the middle watch.

“A piece of bad luck for me, sir.”

Sterne passed his tongue on his lips, and glanced aside.
““T lost the advantage of being employed by you, sir.
I can never be sorry enough. But here it is: one man’s
poison, another man’s meat. This could not have been
handier for Mr. Massy if he had arranged that ship-
wreck himself. The most timely total loss I’ve ever
heard of.”

“What became of that Massy? ” asked Mr. Van Wyk.

“He, sir? Ha! ha! He would keep on telling me
that he meant to buy another ship; but as soon as he
had the money in his pocket he cleared out for Manilla
by mail-boat early in the morning. I gave him chase
right aboard, and he told me then he was going to make
his fortune dead sure in Manilla. I could go to the
devil for all he cared. And yet he as good as promised
to give me the command if I didn’t talk too much.”

“You never said anything . . .” Mr. Van Wyk
began.

“ Not I, sir. Why should I? I mean to get on, but
the dead aren’t in my way,” said Sterne. His eyelids
were beating rapidly, then drooped for an instant.
* Besides, sir, it would have been an awkward business.
You made me hold my tongue just a bit too long.”

[ 376 J
THE END OF THE TETHER

*Do you know how it was that Captain Whalley re-
mained on board? Did he really refuse to leave? Come
now! Or was it perhaps an accidental . . .?”

“ Nothing!” Sterne interrupted with energy. “TI tell
you i yelled for him to leap overboard. He simply
must have cast off the painter of the boat himself. We
all yelled to him—that is, Jack and I. He wouldn’t even
answer us. The ship was as silent as a grave to the last.
Then the boilers fetched away, and down she went.
Accident! Not it! The game was up, sir, I tell you.”
‘ This was all that Sterne had to say.

Mr. Van Wyk had been of course made the guest of
the club for a fortnight, and it was there that he met
the lawyer in whose office had been signed the agreement
between Massy and Captain Whalley.

“Extraordinary old man,” he said. “ He came into
my office from nowhere in particular as you may say,
with his five hundred pounds to invest, and that engineer
fellow following him anxiously. And now he is gone out
a little inexplicably, just as he came. I could never
understand him quite. There was no mystery at all
about that Massy, eh? I wonder whether Whalley re-
fused to leave the ship. It, would have been foolish.
He was blameless, as the- court. found.”

Mr. Van Wyk had known him well, he said, and he
could not believe in suicide. Such,an act would not
have been in character with what he knew of the man.

“It is my opinion, too,” the lawyer agreed. The gen
eral theory was that the captain had remained too long
op board trying to save something of importance. Per-

[ 377 J
THE END OF THE TETHER

haps the chart which would clear him, or else something
of value in his cabin. The painter of the boat had
come adrift of itself it was supposed. However, strange
to say, some little time before that voyage poor Whalley
had called in his office and had left with him a sealed
envelope addressed to his daughter, to be forwarded to
her in case of his death. Still it was nothing very un-
usual, especially in a man of his age. Mr. Van Wyk
shock his head. Captain Whalley looked good for a
hundred years.

“Perfectly true,” assented the lawyer. “The old
fellow looked as though he had come into the world full-
grown and with that long beard. I could never, some- :
how, imagine him either younger or older—don’t you
know. There was a sense of physical power about that
man too. And perhaps that was the secret of that some-
thing peculiar in his person which struck everybody who
came in contact with him. He looked indestructible by
any ordinary means that put an end to the rest of us.
His deliberate, stately courtesy of manner was full of
significance. It was as though he were certain of hav-
ing plenty of time for everything. Yes, there was
something indestructible about him; and the way he
talked sometimes you might have thought he believed
it himself. When he called on me last with that letter
he wanted me to take charge of, he was not depressed at
all. Perhaps a shade more deliberate in his talk and
manner. Not depressed in the least. Had he a pre-
sentiment, I wonder? Perhaps! Still it seems a misera-
ble end for such a striking figure.”

[ 378 ]
THE uND OF THE TETHER

“Oh yes! It was a miserable end,” Mr. Van Wyk said,
with so much fervor that the lawyer looked up at him
curiously; and afterwards, after parting with him, he
remarked to an acquaintance—

** Queer person that Dutch tobacco-planter from Batu
Beru. Know anything of him?”

“ Heaps of money,” answered the bank manager. “I
hear he’s going home by the next mail to form a com-
pany to take over his estates. Another tobacco district
thrown open. He’s wise, I think. These good times
won't last for ever.”

In the southern hemisphere Captain Whalley’s daugh-
ter had no presentiment of evil when she opened the
envelope addressed to her in the lawyer’s handwriting.
She had received it in the afternoon; all the boarders
had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat
upstairs in his big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced,
wrapped up in rugs to the waist. The house was still,
and the grayness of a cloudy day lay against the panes
of the windows.

In a shabby dining-room, where a faint cold smell of
dishes lingered all the year round, sitting at the end of
a long table surrounded by many chairs pushed in with
their backs close against the edge of the perpetually laid
table-cloth, she read the opening sentences: “ Most pro-
found regret—painful duty—your father is no more—
in accordance with his instructions—fatal casualty—
consolation—no blame attached to his memory. . . .”

Her face was thin, her temples a little sunk under the
smooth bands of black hair, her lips remained resolutely

[ 379 ]
THE END OF THE TETHER

compressed, while her dark eyes grew larger, till at last,
with a low cry, she stood up, and instantly stooped to
pick up another envelope which had slipped off her
knees on to the floor

She tore it open, snatched out the inclosure. . . .
‘My dearest child,” it said, “I am writing this while
I am able yet to write legibly. I an: trying hard to
save for you all the money that is left; I have only kept
it to serve you better. It is yours. It shall not be lost:
it shall not be touched. There’s five hundred pounds,
Of what I have earned I have kept nething back till
now. For the future, if I live, I must keep back some—
a little—to bring me to you. I must come to you. I

f once more.

“ Tt iste o'believe that you will ever look on these
ee 5 to have forgotten me. I want to see
at E death would be a greater favor. If you
ever read these words, I charge you to begin by thank-
ing a God merciful at last, for I shall be dead then, and
it will be well. My dear, I am at the end of my tether.”

The next ‘paragraph began with the words: “ My sight
is going . . .”

She read no more that day. The hand holding up the
paper to her eyes fell slowly, and her slender figure in
a plain black dress walked rigidly to the window. Her
eyes were dry: no cry of sorrow or whisper of thanks

‘went up to heaven from her lips. Life had been too
hard, for all the efforts of his love. It had silenced her
emotions. But for the first time in all these years its
sting had departed, the carking care of poverty, the

[ 380 ]

 

 
  
  
 
>

THE END OF THE TETHER

meanness of a hard struggle for bread. Even the image
of her husband and of her children seemed to glide away
from her into the gray twilight; it was her father’s
face alone that she saw, as though he had come to see
her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him last, but
with something more august and tender in his aspect.

She slipped his folded letter between the two buttons
of her plain black bodice, and leaning her forehead
against a window-pane remained there till dusk, per-
fectly motionless, giving him all the time she could
spare. Gone! Was it possible? My God, was it possi-
ble? The blow had come softened by the spaces of the
earth, by the years of absence. There had been whole
days when she had not thought of him at all—had_ no
time. But she had loyed him, she felt she had loved
him, after all.

THE END.

[ ssf 1
 

 

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SATURDAY’S CHILD.
Frontispiece by F. Graham Cootes.

Out on the Pacific coast a normal girl, obscure and lovely,
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THE HEART OF RACHAEL,
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‘The gold fever of '49 is pictured with vividness. A part of the

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into the story, and the book asa whole isa marvelous work both
historically and romantically.

THE FATR GOD. By General Lew Wallace. <A Tale of the

Conquest of Mexico. With Eight Illustrations by Eric Pape.

All the annals of conquest have nothing more brilliantly daring
and dramatic than the drama played in Mexico by Cortes, Asa
oe penta of Mexico and the Montezumas it leaves nothing ta

esir :

The artist has caught with rare enthusiasm the spirit of the
Spanish conquerors of Mexico, its beauty and glory and romance.

TARRY THOU TILL I COME or, Salathiel, the Wandering
Jew. By George Croly. With twenty illustrations by T. de Thulstrup

A historical novel, dealing with the momentous events that oc-
curred, chiefly in Palestine, from the time of the Crucifixion to the
destruction of Jerusalem. :

The book, as a story, is replete with Oriental charm and richness,
and the character drawing is marvelous. No other novel ever written
has portrayed with such vividness the events that convulsed Rome
and destroyed Jerusalem in the early days of Christanity.

 

 

 

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Pofular Cofyrighed Fiction
Gresser & Duntap, 526 West 26th St.. New York

 

 

 

 
 

 

NOVELS OF SOUTHERN LIFE

By THOMAS DIXON, JR.

May be had wherever books are scid. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap’s list

 

 

TUE LEOPARD’S SPOTS: A Story of the White Man’s
Burden, 1865-1900. ‘With illustrations by C. D. Williams.

A tale of the South about the dramatic events of Destruction,
Reconstruction and Upbuilding. The work is able and eloquent and
the verifiable events of history are followed closely inthe develop.
ment of a story full of struggle.

THE CLANSMAN. With illustrations by Arthur I. Keller.

While not connected with it in any way, this is a companion vok
ume to the author’s “epoch-making” story Zhe Leopard’s Spots. It
is a novel with a great deal to it, and which very propeny is going to
interest many thousands of readers, * * * It is, first of all, a forceful,
dramatic, absorbing love oo with a sequence of events so surprisi
that one is prepared for the fact that much of it is founded on actua
happenings; but Mr. Dixon has, as before, a deeper Paipeie he hag
aimed to show that the original formers of the Ku Klux Klan were
modern knights errant taking the only means at hand to right
intolerable wron7s,

THE TRAITOR. A Story of the Fall of the invisiNe Empire,
Illustrations by C. D. Williams.

The third and last book in this remarkable trilogy of novels relat-
Ing to Southern Reconstruction, It is a thrilling story of love, ad-
venture, treason. and the United States Secret Service dealing with
the decline and fall of the Ku Klux Klan,

COMRADES. Illustrations by C, D) Williams.

A novel dealing with the establishment of a Socialistic Colony
upon a deserted island off the coast of California, Tie way of dis
ilusionment is the course over which Mr. Dixon conducts the reader,

THE ONE WOMAN. A Story of Modern Utovia,

A love story and character study of three strong men and two fas-
cinating women. In swift, unified, and dramatic action, we see So-
cialism a deadly torce, in the hour of the eclipse of Faiin, destroying
the home life and weakening the fiber of Anglo Saxon manhood.

 

——

Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Pofular Copyrighted Fiction
Grosser & Duniap, 526 Wesr 26th St., New York

 

 

 
 

 

CHARMING BOOKS FOR GIRLS

May bo had wilisrover basks ara sold, Ask fcr Grosset & Duniap’s [ict

WHEN PATTY WENT TO COLLEGE, By Jean Webster.
illustrated by C. D, Williams.

_ One of the best stories of life in a girl’s college that has ever been
written. Itis bright, whimsical and entertaining, lifelike, laughable
and thoroughly human.

JUST PATTY, By Jean Webster.)
IMustrated by C. M. Retyea,

Patty is full of the joy of living, fun-loving, given to ingenious
mischief for its own sa!:<, with a disregard for pretty convention which
is an unfailing source of joy to her fellows.

. THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, By Eleanor Gates, }
‘With four full page iilustsations. ; :
This story relates the experience of one of those unfortunate chil-
dren whose early days are passed inthe companionship of a governess,

seldom seeing either parent, and famishing for natural love and tender-
ness, A charming play as dramatized by the author.

REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, By Kate Douglas
Wiggin,

One of the most beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca’s artistic,
unusual and quaiany. charming qualities stand out midst a circle of

austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenominal
cramatic record.

NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA, By Kate Douglas Wiggin.
Llustrated by F. C. Yohn,

Additionat episodes in the girlhood of this delightful heroine that’
carry Rebecca through various stages to her eighteenth birthday,

REBECCA MARY, By Annie Hamilton Donnell,
{Wuctrated by Elizabeth Skippen Green.

This author possesses the rare gift of portraying all the grotesque
little joys and sorrows and scruples of this very small girl with a pa-
thos that is peculiarly genuine and appealing.

EMMY LOU: Her Book and Heart, By George Madden Martin.

illustrated by Charles Louis Hinton,

Emmy Lou is irresistibly lovable, because she is so absolutely real,
She is just 2 bewitchingly innocent, hugable littlemaid, The book is
wonderfully human. :

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighed Fiction
Grosser & Duntap, 526 West 26th Sr. New Yorx

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

TITLES SELECTED FROM

GROSSET & DUNLAP’S LIST

May be had wherever books are sold, Ask for Grosset & Duntan’s list

—s
—

 

 

THE SILENT CALL. By Edwin Milton Royle. Illustrated
with scenes from the play.

The hero of this story is the Squaw Man’s son. He has
been taken to England, but spurns conventional life for the sake
of the untamed West and a girl’s pretty face.

JOHN MARCH, SOUTHERNER. By George W. Cable.

A story of the pretty women and spirited men of the South.

As fragrant in sentiment as a sprig of magnolia, and as full of

mystery and racial troubles as any romance of “after the war”
jays.

MR. JUSTICE RAFFLES. By E. W. Hornung.

This engaging rascal is found helping a young cricket player
out of the toils of a money shark. Woral in plot, thrilling and
amusing.

FORTY MINUTES LATE. By F. Hopkinson Smith. Illustrated
by S. M. Chase,

Delightfully human stories of every day happenings; of a
lecturer’s laughable experience because he’s late, a young woman’s
excursion into the stock market, etc.

OLD LADY NUMBER 31, By Louise Forsslund.

A heart-warming story of American rural life, telling of the
adventures of an old couple in ar old folk’s home, their sunny,
philosophical acceptance of misfortune and ultimate prosperity.

THE HUSBAND’S STORY. By David Graham Phillips,

A story that has given all Europe as well as all America much
food for thought, A young couple begin life in humble circum-
stances and rise in worldly matters until the husband is enormously
rich—the wife in the most aristocratic European socjety—but at the
price of their happiness.

THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT. By Robert W. Service.
Illustrated by Maynard Dixon.

One of the best stories of “Vagabondia” ever written, and
one of the most accurate and picturesque descriptions of the stam-
pede of gold seekers to the Yukon. The love story embedded in
the narrative is strikingly original.

 

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction

 

Grosser & Duwnuap, 526 West 26th St.,. New York

ILE

 
 

 

JOHN FOX, JR’S.
STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS

May be had wherever books aresold. Ask for Grosset and Duniap’s fist.

THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE.
Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.

 

 

 

 

 

aT The “lonesome pine” from which the

| story takes its name was a tall tree that
stood i1solitary splendor on a mountain
top. The fame of the pine lured a young
engineer through Kentucky to catch the
trail, and when he finally climbed to its
shelter he found not only the pine but the
Sootprints of a girl, And the girl proved
to be lovely, eacans and _ the trail of
these girlish foot-prints led the young
engineer a madder chase than “the trail
of the lonesome pine.”

THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME

Tiustrated by F. C. Yohn.

This isa story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as “King.
dom Come.” It is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural
and honest, from which often springs the flower of civilization.

“ Chad.” the “little shepherd” did not know who he was nor
whence he came—he had just wandered from door to door since
early childhood, seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who
gladly fathered and mothered this waif about whem there was
such a mystery—a charming waif, by the way, who could play
the banjo better that anyone else in the mountains,

A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND.
Illustrated by F.C. Yohn.

The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland»
the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. ‘The knight is a moon-
shiner’s son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely chris-
tened “The Blight.” | Two impetuous young Southerners’ fall
under the spell ef “The Blight’s” charms and she learns what
a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of the
mountaineers.

Included in this volume is “Hell fer-Sartain” and other
stories, some of Mr. Fox’s most entertaining Cumberland valley
narratives.

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
Grosser & Dunztap, 526 West 26th St.. New York

  

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

B. M. Bower’s Novels
Thrilling Western Romances
Large 12 mos. Handsomely bound in cloth. Illustrated

 

 

 

CHIP, OF THE FLYING U

A, breezy wholesome tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and
Della Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. hip’s
jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to “e a big. blue
eyed young woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story of
‘the American Cow-puncher.

THE HAPPY FAMILY

A lively and amusing story, dealing with the adventures of
eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowbeys. Foremost amongst
them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative
powers cause many lively and exciting adventures.

HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT

A realistic story of the plains, describing a gay party of Eas-
terners who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeli-
ness of a Montana ranch-house, The merry-hearted cowboys, the
fascinating Beatrice, and the effusive Sir Redmond, become living,
breathing personalities,

THE RANGE DWELLERS

Here are everyday, genuine cowboys, just as they really exist.
Spirited action, a range feud between two families, and a Romeo
and Juliet courtship make this a bright, jolly, entertaining story,
withont a dull page.

THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS

A vivid portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author,
among the cowboys of the West, in search of “local color” fora
new novel. “Bud? Thurston learns many a lesson while followin
“the lure of the dim trails’? but the hardest, and probably the mos,
welcome, is that of love.

THE LONESOME TRAIL

“Weary”? Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where con
ventional city Jife palls on him, A little branch of sage brush
pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection o!
@ pair of large brown eyes soon compel his return, A wholesome
love story,

THE LONG SHADOW

A vigorous Wester story, sparkling with the free, outdoor,
Jife of a mountain ranch, Its scenes shift rapidly and its actors play
the game of life fearlessly and like men. It isa fine love story from
start tofinish.

 

—

3 Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction,
Grosset & Duntap, 526 West 26TH St.. New Yore.

en