End of the Tether | Page 7

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 him at a distance to feel a sort
of kindness towards the man. The fellow was so perpetually being
jammed on a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation
would be manifestly unfair. No, no! He knew well what that meant. It
was bad luck. His own had been simply marvelous, but he had seen in
his life too many good men--seamen and others--go under with the
sheer weight of bad luck not to recognize the fatal signs. For all that, he
was cogitating on the best way of tying up very strictly every penny he
had to leave, when, with a preliminary rumble of rumors (whose first
sound reached him in Shanghai as it happened), the shock of the big
failure came; and, after passing through the phases of stupor, of
incredulity, of indignation, he had to accept the fact that he had nothing
to speak of to leave.
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 old man in pocket-money and
clothes, with, perhaps, a bill for a few hundred first-class cigars thrown
in at the end of the year. He would have to buckle-to, and keep her
going hard on a scant allowance of gilt for the ginger-bread scrolls at
her stem and stern.
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 in honor to do something for Dare-devil
Harry Whalley. Departed the opportunities which he would have
known how to seize; and gone with them the white-winged flock of
clippers that lived in the boisterous uncertain life of the winds,
skimming big fortunes out of the foam of the sea. In a world that pared
down the profits to an irreducible minimum, in a world that was able to
count its disengaged tonnage twice over every day, and in which lean
charters were snapped up by cable three months in advance, there were
no chances of fortune for an individual wandering haphazard with a
little bark --hardly indeed any room to exist.
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