The Shadow Line | Page 5

our busi- ness in the Harbour
Office. It was a lofty, big, cool, white room, where the screened light of
day glowed serenely. Everybody in it--the officials, the public--were in
white. Only the heavy polished desks gleamed darkly in a central
avenue, and some papers lying on them were blue. Enor- mous punkahs
sent from on high a gentle draught through that immaculate interior and
upon our perspiring heads.
The official behind the desk we approached grinned amiably and kept it
up till, in answer to his perfunctory question, "Sign off and on again?"
my Captain answered, "No! Signing off for good." And then his grin

vanished in sudden solemnity. He did not look at me again till he
handed me my papers with a sorrowful expression, as if they had been
my passports for Hades.
While I was putting them away he murmured some question to the
Captain, and I heard the latter answer good-humouredly:
"No. He leaves us to go home."
"Oh!" the other exclaimed, nodding mournfully over my sad condition.
I didn't know him outside the official building, but he leaned forward
the desk to shake hands with me, compassionately, as one would with
some poor devil going out to be hanged; and I am afraid I performed
my part ungraciously, in the hardened manner of an impenitent
criminal.
No homeward-bound mail-boat was due for three or four days. Being
now a man without a ship, and having for a time broken my connection
with the sea--become, in fact, a mere potential passenger--it would
have been more appropriate perhaps if I had gone to stay at an hotel.
There it was, too, within a stone's throw of the Harbour Office, low, but
somehow palatial, displaying its white, pillared pavilions surrounded
by trim grass plots. I would have felt a passenger indeed in there! I
gave it a hostile glance and directed my steps toward the Officers'
Sailors' Home.
I walked in the sunshine, disregarding it, and in the shade of the big
trees on the esplanade without enjoying it. The heat of the tropical East
de- scended through the leafy boughs, enveloping my thinly-clad body,
clinging to my rebellious dis- content, as if to rob it of its freedom.
The Officers' Home was a large bungalow with a wide verandah and a
curiously suburban-looking little garden of bushes and a few trees
between it and the street. That institution partook some- what of the
character of a residential club, but with a slightly Governmental flavour
about it, because it was administered by the Harbour Office. Its
manager was officially styled Chief Steward. He was an unhappy,

wizened little man, who if put into a jockey's rig would have looked the
part to perfection. But it was obvious that at some time or other in his
life, in some capacity or other, he had been connected with the sea.
Possibly in the comprehensive capacity of a failure.
I should have thought his employment a very easy one, but he used to
affirm for some reason or other that his job would be the death of him
some day. It was rather mysterious. Perhaps everything naturally was
too much trouble for him. He cer- tainly seemed to hate having people
in the house.
On entering it I thought he must be feeling pleased. It was as still as a
tomb. I could see no one in the living rooms; and the verandah, too,
was empty, except for a man at the far end dozing prone in a long chair.
At the noise of my footsteps he opened one horribly fish-like eye. He
was a stranger to me. I retreated from there, and cross- ing the dining
room--a very bare apartment with a motionless punkah hanging over
the centre table --I knocked at a door labelled in black letters: "Chief
Steward."
The answer to my knock being a vexed and dole- ful plaint: "Oh, dear!
Oh, dear! What is it now?" I went in at once.
It was a strange room to find in the tropics. Twilight and stuffiness
reigned in there. The fellow had hung enormously ample, dusty, cheap
lace curtains over his windows, which were shut. Piles of cardboard
boxes, such as milliners and dressmakers use in Europe, cumbered the
corners; and by some means he had procured for himself the sort of
furniture that might have come out of a respectable parlour in the East
End of London --a horsehair sofa, arm-chairs of the same. I glimpsed
grimy antimacassars scattered over that horrid upholstery, which was
awe-inspiring, in- somuch that one could not guess what mysterious
accident, need, or fancy had collected it there. Its owner had taken off
his tunic, and in white trousers and a thin, short-sleeved singlet prowled
behind the chair-backs nursing his meagre el- bows.