The End of the Tether quotes

who had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas, and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands.

Fifty years at sea, and forty out in the East (“a pretty thorough apprenticeship,” he used to remark smilingly), had made him honorably known to a generation of shipowners and merchants in all the ports from Bombay clear over to where the East merges into the West upon the coast of the two Americas.

His fame remained writ, not very large but plain enough, on the Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef?

He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish stream.

It will break out and flow over a man’s troubles, it will close upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has gone to the bottom.

And the world is not bad. People had been very kind to him; especially Mrs. Gardner, the wife of the senior partner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co., the owners of the Condor.

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 manhood, 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 work;

or else if he succeeded in impressing them, he would maybe obtain their pity, which would be like stripping yourself 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.

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.

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;

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.

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 discretion of that step—and there was the whole long night before him. In the full light his long beard would glisten like a silver breastplate covering his heart;

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 downright, alarming manner of white men, he would have displayed the hesitation of ignorance.

I always wondered what was your motive? You fastened yourself on me to have easy times and grow fat on my life blood, I tell you. Was that it? I believe you are the greatest miser in the world, or else why …”

“No. I am only poor,” interrupted Captain Whalley, stonily.

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

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 confronted each other as if there had been something between 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;

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 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;

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 occurring 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.

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?

He struck first a heavy blow on his inflated chest: and, throwing out horizontally a big arm that remained steady, extended in the air like the limb of a tree on 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.

I am nothing,” he said in his effortless strong voice, that seemed to come out as naturally as a river flows. He picked up the stump of the cigar he had laid aside, and added peacefully, 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.

“Then, in the name of God, it is I!

A ship’s unseaworthy when her captain can’t see. I am going blind.

”

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 forever. I half believed I would. I’ve been praying for death since. Ha! Presumptuous man—you wanted to live …”

“

It 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.

He wished her at the bottom of the sea, and the insurance money 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!

His coat was unbuttoned; he shot the bolt of the door (there was no other opening), and, squatting before the scrapheap, 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.

He sat down heavily in the deck-chair to keep the pretense of his watch.

The night was dark. All the nights were dark now.

“Serang,” he said, half aloud.

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.

Captain Whalley, hugging the coat to his breast, made no sound.

The light had ebbed forever from the world⁠—let everything go.

But this man should not escape scot-free.