Classic Audiobook Collection - The End Of The Tether by Joseph Conrad ~ Full Audiobook [tragedy]

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

The End Of The Tether by Joseph Conrad audiobook. Genre: tragedy In a humid corner of the Malay Archipelago, Captain Henry Whalley is a celebrated seaman at the end of his long career - respected, proud, and quietly desperate. Age has begun to strip away the one thing he cannot admit losing: his ability to see clearly enough to command a ship. With money needed to secure his daughters future and his reputation hanging by a thread, Whalley takes charge of a small coastal steamer and tries to hide his failing eyesight from officers, owners, and crew. Among those closest to him is the hard-edged, observant first mate, a man whose loyalty is tested by the risks Whalley insists on taking and the compromises he asks others to share. As the vessel moves through rivers, ports, and shadowy trading outposts, routine voyages become charged with dread, pride, and moral pressure. Joseph Conrad turns a seafaring predicament into an intense study of dignity, duty, and the terrifying cost of self-deception - when a mans last tether to identity and honor is stretched to its limit. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:08:29) Chapter 02 (00:27:15) Chapter 03 (00:40:17) Chapter 04 (00:58:42) Chapter 05 (01:21:43) Chapter 06 (01:34:47) Chapter 07 (01:47:11) Chapter 08 (02:05:43) Chapter 09 (02:29:10) Chapter 10 (02:52:00) Chapter 11 (03:21:41) Chapter 12 (03:53:05) Chapter 13 (04:31:37) Chapter 14 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad, Chapter 1 For a long time after the cause 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 sun rays seemed to fall violently upon the calm sea, seemed to shatter themselves upon an adamantine surface into sparkling dust, into a dazzling vapour of light that blinded the eye and wearied the brain with its unsteady brightness. Captain Wally did not look at it. When his sarang, 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, word to steady the helm. It was the sarang, an elderly, alert little Malay with a very dark skin who murmured the order to the helmsman. And then slowly Captain Wally sat down again in the armchair 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 50 miles, six hours steaming for the old ship with the tide or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land and by and by three palms would appear on the sky tall and slim and with their dishevelled heads in a bunch as if in confidential criticism of the dark mangroves. The Safala would be headed towards the sombre 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 safala would plough her way upstream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or more, long before he was aware of her existence, long before he had ever thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages. The old ship ought to have known the road better than her men, who had not been kept so long at it without a change, better than the faithful Serang,

whom he had brought over from his last ship to keep the captain's watch, better than he himself, who had been her captain for the last three years only. She could always be depended upon to make her courses. Her compasses were never out, she was no trouble at all to take about, as if her great age had given her knowledge, wisdom and steadiness. She made her landfalls to a degree of the bearing and almost to a minute of her allowed time.

At any moment as he sat on the bridge without looking up or lay sleepless in his bed simply by reckoning the days and the hours he could tell where he was, the precise spot of the beat. He knew it well too, this monotonous hucksters round up and down the straits. He knew its order and its sights,

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 matte sails flitting by silently, and the lowland on the other side in sighted daylight. At noon the three palms of the next place of call up a sluggish river. The only white man residing there was a retired young sailor with whom he had become friendly in the course of many voyages. Sixty miles further 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 Safalas Port of Registry

on the great highway to the east, where he would take up a berth nearly opposite the big stone pile of the harbour office till it was time to start again on the old round of 1600 miles and 30 days. Not a very enterprising life, this for Captain Wally, Henry Wally, otherwise Daredevil Harry, Wally of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. No. Not a very enterprising life for a man who had served famous firms, who had sailed famous ships, more than one or two of them his own, who had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new trades,

who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas and had seen the sunrise and uncharted islands. Fifty years at sea and forty out in the east, a pretty thorough apprenticeship he used to remark smilingly, had made him honourably 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 Admiralty charts. Was there not somewhere between Australia and Chaucer? a Wally Island and a Condor reef? On that dangerous coral formation,

the celebrated skipper 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 steam vessel Fuselia, dispatched to make a survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names,

the enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship. Besides, as anyone who cares may see, the General Directory, Volume 2, page 410, begins the description of the Malatou or Wally passage with the words, This advantageous route first discovered in 1850 by Captain Wally in the ship Condor, etc. 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 isthmth of sewers, like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the east a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the eastern seas and the very spirit of their life, so that his early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.

In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his employer's money and of his own. He had attended faithfully, as by law a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners, charterers and underwriters. He had never lost a ship or consented to a shady transaction, and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the conditions that had gone to the making of his name. He had buried his wife in the Gulf of Petchilly, 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 Travencore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose downfall had shaken the east like an earthquake. And he was 65 years old. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan.

Chapter 2, The End of the Tether. His age sat lightly enough on him, and of his ruin, he was not ashamed. He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the banking corporation. Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert as his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments and had themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference between him and them was that he had lost his all. And yet, not his all, there had remained. to him from his lost fortune a very pretty little bark fair made which he had bought to occupy his

leisure of a retired sailor to play with as he expressed at himself. He had formerly declared himself tired of the sea the year preceding his daughter's marriage. But after the young couple had gone to settle in Melbourne he found out that he could not make himself happy on shore. He was too much of a merchant sea captain for mere yachting to satisfy him. He wanted the illusion of affairs, and his acquisition of the fair maid preserved the continuity of his life. He introduced her to his acquaintances in various ports as, My Last Command. When he grew too old to be trusted with a ship, he would lay her up and go ashore to be buried, leaving directions in his will to have the bark towed out and scuttled decently in deep water on the day of the funeral.

his daughter would not grudge him the satisfaction of knowing that no stranger would handle his last command after him with the fortune he was able to leave her the value of a five hundred ton bark was neither here nor there all this would be said with a jocular twinkle in his eye the vigorous old man had too much vitality for the sentimentalism of regret and a little wistfully withal because he was at home in life taking a genuine pleasure in its feelings and its possessions in the dignity of his reputation and his wealth, in his love for his daughter, and in his satisfaction with the ship, the plaything of his lonely leisure. He had the cabin arranged in accordance with his simple ideal of comfort at sea. A big bookcase, he was a great reader, occupied one side of his stateroom, the portrait of his late wife, a flat, bituminous oil painting, representing the profile and one long black ringlet of a young woman, faced his bed place. Three chronometers ticked him to sleep and greeted him on waking with the tiny competition of their beats.

He rose at five every day. The officer of the morning watch, drinking his early cup of coffee aft by the wheel, would hear through the wide orifice of the copper ventilators, all the splashings, blowings and splutterings of his captain's toilet. These noises would be followed by a sustained deep murmur of the Lord's Prayer, recited in a loud earnest voice. Five minutes afterwards the head and shoulders of Captain Wally emerged out of the companion hatchway. Invariably he paused for a while on the stairs, looking all round at the horizon,

upwards at the trim of the sails, inhaling deep draughts of the fresh air. Only then he would step out on the poop, acknowledging the hand raised to the peak of the cap with a majestic and benign, Good morning to you. He walked the deck till eight scrupulously. sometimes, not above twice a year, he had to use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip, a slight touch of rheumatism, he supposed. Otherwise, he knew nothing of the ills of the flesh. At the ringing of the breakfast bell, he went below to feed his canaries, wind up the

chronometers, and take the head of the table. From there he had before his eyes the big carbon photograph of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies, his grandchildren, set in black frames into the maplewood bulkheads of the cuddy. After breakfast he dusted the glass over these portraits himself with a cloth and brushed the oil painting of his wife with a plume mate kept suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the heavy gold frame. Then with the door of his stateroom shut, he would sit down on the couch under the portrait to read a chapter out of a thick pocket Bible, her Bible. But on some days he only sat there for half an hour with his finger between

the leaves and the closed book resting on his knees. Perhaps he had remembered suddenly how fond of boat sailing she used to be. She had been a real shipmate, but a true woman too. It was like an article of faith with him that there never had been and never could be a brighter, cheery a 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 centre of every panel with a cluster of home flowers. It took her a twelve-month to go round the cuddy with this

labour of love. To him it had remained a marvel of painting, the highest achievement of taste and skill, and as to old Swinburne his mate, every time he came down to his meals he stood transfixed with admiration before the progress of the work. You could almost smell these rose-es. You could almost smell these rose-es. as he declared, sniffing the faint flavour of turpentine, which at that time pervaded the saloon, and, as he confessed afterwards, made him somewhat less hearty than usual in tackling his food. But there was nothing of the sort to interfere with his enjoyment of her singing. Mrs. Wally is a regular out-and-out nightingale, sir, he would pronounce with a judicial air after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the piece.

In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear, her trills and roulette going on to the accompaniment of the piano in the cabin. On the very day they got engaged, he had written to London for the instrument, but they had been married for over a year before it reached them, coming out round the Cape. The big case made part of the first direct general cargo landed in Hong Kong harbour, an event that to the men who walked the busy keys of today seemed as hazy remote as the dark ages of history. But Captain Wally could in half an hour of solitude live again, his life with its romance, its ideal, and its sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself.

She went away from under the ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read the service over her, out of her own prayer book, without a break in his voice. When he raised his eyes, he could see old Swinburne facing him with his cap pressed to his breast and his rugged, weather-beaten, impassive face, streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea dog to cry. He had to read on to the end, but after the splash he did not remember much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sailor of the crew, deft at needlework, put together a mourning frock for the child out of one of her black skirts. He was not likely to forget, but you cannot damn 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, Patterson and Company, the owners of the Condor. It was she who volunteered to look after the little one, and in due course took her to England, something of a journey in those days, even by the Overland Mail route with her own girls to finish her education. It was ten years before he saw her again. 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 oil-skinned coat to watch the big seas hurling themselves upon the condor. The swirl and crash of the wave seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless delight. A good boy spoiled, he used to say of her in joke. He had named her Ivy because of the sound of the word and obscurely fascinated by a vague association of ideas. She had twined herself tightly round his heart, and he intended her to cling close to her father as to a tower of strength,

forgetting while she was little that in the nature of things she would probably elect to cling to someone else. But he loved life well enough for even that event to give him a certain satisfaction, apart from his more intimate feeling of loss. After he had purchased the fair maid to occupy his loneliness, he hastened to accept a rather unprofitable freight to Australia simply for the opportunity of seeing his daughter in her own home. What made him dissatisfied there was not to see that she clung now to somebody else,

but that the prop she had selected seemed on closer examination a rather poor stick, even in the matter of health. He disliked his son-in-law's studied civility, perhaps more than his method of handling the sum of money he had given Ivy at her marriage. But of his apprehensions he said nothing. Only on the day of his departure, with the whole door open already, holding her hands and looking steadily into her eyes, he had said, You know, my dear, all I have is for you and the chicks.

Mind you right to me openly. She had answered him by an almost imperceptible movement of her head. She resembled her mother in the colour of her eyes, and in character, and also in this that she understood him without many words. Sure enough, she had to write, and some of these letters made Captain Wally lift his white eyebrows. For the rest he considered he was reaping the true reward of his life by being thus able to produce on demand whatever was needed. He had not enjoyed himself so much in a way since his wife had died. Characteristically enough, his son-in-law's punctuality in failure

caused him at a distance to feel a sort of kindness towards the man. The fellow was so perpetually being jammed on a lee shore that to charge it all to his reckless navigation would be manifestly unfair. No, no, he knew well what that meant. It was bad luck. His own had been simply marvellous, 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 recognise 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 rumours, 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 catastrophe, the unlucky man away there in Melbourne, gave up his unprofitable game and sat down, in an invalid's bath-chair at that too. He will never walk again, wrote the wife. For the first time in his life, Captain Wally 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 Wally 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 guilt for the gingerbread 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 Paterson and Company 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 gardener or a Paterson in the firm.

There was no longer for Captain Welley, an armchair 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 timetable of appointed routes like a confounded service of tramways.

The winds of December and June were all won to them. Their captains, excellent young men he doubted not, were, to be sure, familiar with Wally 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, while he 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 honour to do something for daredevil Harry Wally. 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 suffered greatly from the smallness of remittances he was able to send his daughter. Meantime, he had given up good cigars, and even in the matter of inferior

shrews limited himself to six a day. He never told her of his difficulties, and she never enlarged upon her struggle to live. Their confidence in each other needed no explanations, and their perfect understanding endured without protestations of gratitude or regret. He would have been shocked if she had taken it into her head to thank him in so many words, but he found it perfectly natural that she should tell him she needed £200. He had come in with a fair maid in Ballas to look for a freight in the Safala's Port of Registry, and her letter met him there. Its tenor was that it was no use mincing matters.

Her only resource was in opening a boarding-house, for which the prospect she judged were good, good enough at any rate to make her tell him frankly that with £200, she could make a start. He had torn the envelope open hastily on deck where it was handed to him by the ship's Chandler's runner who had brought his mail at the moment of anchoring.

For the second time in his life he was appalled and remained stock still at the cabin door with the paper trembling between his fingers. Open a boarding-house, £200 for a start, the only resource, and he did not know where to lay his hands

on two hundred pence. All that night Captain Wally 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 grey 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 round the fair maid the riding lights of ships cast trembling trails upon the water of the roadstead. Captain Wally saw not a gleam anywhere till the dawn broke and he found out that his clothing was soaked through with a heavy dew his ship was awake he stopped short stroked his wet beard and descended the poop bladder backwards with tired feet at the sight of him the chief officer lounging about sleepily on the quarter-deck

remained open-mouthed in the middle of a great early morning yawn "'Good morning to you,' pronounced Captain Wally solemnly, "'passing into the cabin. "'But he checked himself in the doorway, and without looking back. "'By the by,' 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 carpenter to look it over. 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 stateroom slam within the cuddy. Then he beckoned after the second mate with his forefinger to tell him that there was something in the wind. When the bell rang, Captain Wally's authoritative voice boomed out through a closed door, sit down and don't wait for me. And his impressed

officers took their places, exchanging looks and whispers across the table. What? No breakfast? And after apparently knocking about all night on deck too, clearly there was something in the wind. In the skylight above their heads bowed earnestly over the plates, three wire cages rocked and rattled to the restless jumping of the hungry canaries, and they could detect the sounds of their old man's deliberate movements within his stateroom. Captain Wally was methodically winding up the chronometers, dusting the portrait of his late wife,

getting a clean white shirt out of the drawers, making himself ready in his punctilious, unhurried manner to go ashore. He could not have swallowed a single mouthful of food that morning. He had made up his mind to sell the fair maid. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Read by Peter Dan.

Chapter 3 The End of the Tether Just at that time the Japanese were casting far and wide for ships of European build and he had no difficulty 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 Wally found himself on a certain afternoon 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 enclosing a draft for 200 pounds and addressed to Melbourne. Captain Wally 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 sidewalks and a soft layer of dust cushioning the whole width of the road. One end touched the slummy street of Chinese shops near the harbour.

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 alternated 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 after business hours as though they had expected to see one of the tigers

from the neighbourhood of the new waterworks on the hill, coming at a loping canter down the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Captain Wally 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 Wally, who had now no ship and no home, remembered in passing that on that very sight 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 boarding-house. In his rank of life, he had that truly aristocratic temperament, characterised by a scorn of vulgar gentility and by prejudiced views as to the derogatory nature of certain occupations. For his own part, he had always preferred sailing merchant ships, which is a straightforward occupation, to buying and selling merchandise, 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 Wally, retired of the H.E.I. Company's service, with very slender means beside his pension, but with distinguished connections. He could remember as a boy how frequently waiters at the inns, country tradesmen and small people of that sort used to my lord the old warrior on the strength of his appearance. Captain Wally 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 among 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 Chinaman 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 colours and the dark faces of the barefooted crows. on the pallid yellow backs of the half-naked jostling coolies, on the accoutiments of a tall Sikh trooper with a parted beard and fierce moustaches 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 human stream with the incessant blare of its horn in the manner of a steamer groping in a fog. Captain Wally emerged like a diver on the other side and in the desert shade between the walls of 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 wally 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 considered 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 Wally, the landlady of her boarding-house. Poo! He replaced his hat, dived into two pockets, and, stopping a moment to apply a flaring match to the end of a cheap charute, 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 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 fortunate she had forced his hand. In another year or two it would have been an utterly barren sail. 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 present 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 proceeds, a sum of £500 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 areas a bird-cage

resounded with the incessant flapping of rat-and screens worried by the wind between the whitewashed square pillars of the sea-front. The rooms were lofty, a ripple of sunshine flowed over the ceilings and the periodical invasions of tourists from some passenger steamer in the harbour flitted through the windswept dusk of the apartments with the tumult of their unfamiliar voices and impermanent presences like relays of migratory shades condemned to speed headlong round the earth without leaving a trace.

The babble of their eruptions ebbed out as suddenly as it had arisen. The drafty corridors and the long chairs of the veranda knew their sightseeing hurry or their prostrate response no more, and Captain Wally, substantial and dignified, left well nigh alone in the vast hotel by each light-hearted scurry, felt more and more like a stranded tourist with no aim in view, like a forlorn traveller without 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 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, 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 £700 in his hands. Striding firmly, without haste along the key, Captain Wally 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 anchorage. His own was sold, and he had been asking himself, 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. The 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 incumbent. of a hairl 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 birth people, he was afraid would not take him seriously? Or else if he succeeded in impressing them, he would maybe obtained 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. 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 successful 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 be looked upon as an archaic curiosity of the eastern waters, a screed traced in obsolete words, in a half-forgotten language. End of chapter three. Chapter 4 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan.

Chapter 4, The End of the Tether. Revolving these thoughts, he strolled on near the railings of the key, 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 modelling of his face. It was full and untanned, and the upper part emerged massively quiet out of the downward flow of silvery hair, 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 attaubility of his attaes. attention acquired the characteristic of a dark and searching scrutiny. With age he had put on flesh a little, had increased his girth like an old tree, presenting no symptom of decay, and even the opulent, lustrous ripple of white hairs upon his chest seemed an attribute of unquenchable vitality and figure. 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 discoloured, this headgear made it easy to pick him out from afar on thronged wolves and in the busy streets. He had never adopted the comparatively modern fashion of pipe-clayed 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 or ways of immaculate whiteness, a suit of thin grey 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-humoured, 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-confidence 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 500 pounds for personal expenses in the hotel disturbed the steady poise of his mind. There was no time to lose. The bill was running up. He nourished the hope that this 500 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 goldmine 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 hundred 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 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 Wally stopped short on the apex of a small bridge spanning steeply the bed of a canalised creek with granite shores. Moored between the square blocks, a sea-going Malay Prao 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 keys,

and an unconfined spaciousness of orderly and silvan aspect opened before him its wide plots of rolled grass, like pieces of green carpet smoothly pegged out, its long range 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 terraced shore, and beyond, upon the level expanse,

profound and glistening like the gaze of a dark blue eye, an oblique band of stippled purple lengthened itself indefinitely through the gap between a couple of verdant twin eyelids. The masts and spars of a few ships far away, hull down and the outer roads sprang straight from the water in a fine maze of rosy lines pencilled on the clear shadow of the eastern board. Captain Wally gave them a long glance.

The ship, once his own, was anchored out there. It was staggering to think that it 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 of the ship.

time on board the fair made. 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 prow lying so still swayed in her shroud of sown 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 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 diverse angles, column now 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 sceptres, diminished in a long perspective

with their globes of white porcelain a top, resembling a barbarous decoration of ostrich's eggs displayed in a row. The flaming sky kindled a tiny crimson spark upon the glistening surface 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 Wally 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 a count in this world than an aimless log adrift upon the sea. The log might be sound enough by itself, tougher fibre 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 way, white grass plots the disks of vibration made by the spokes. The bright domes of the parasols swayed lightly outwards 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 turnout trotted smartly in a wide curve away from the sunset, then pulling 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 to flame under the high foliage, the very ground under the hoofs of the horses was red. The wheels turned solemnly. One after another the sunshades drooped. folding their colours 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 the slight jingling sounds, and the motionless 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 long, 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 shoulder, and the dusky face of the coachman leant forward at once over the hands, taking a fresh grip of the reins. It was a long, dark green landau, having a dignified and buoyant motion between the sharply curved sea springs, and a sort of strictly official majesty in its supreme elegance. It seemed more roomy than as 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 sombre, thick, iron-grey, 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 to crawl painfully at a snail's pace. The lander distanced the whole file in a sort of sustained rush,

the features of the occupant whirling out of sight left behind an impression of fixed stairs and impassioned. passive vacancy, and after it had vanished in full flight, as it were, notwithstanding 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 Wally 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. Denham, this governor with his jacket off, a man who tended night and day, so to speak, the growing prosperity 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 flag staff in front and a police orderly on the veranda. He remembered toiling up that hill under the 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 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 undertaking 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 this 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 himself, men too like poor Evans, for instance, with his red face, his cold black whiskers and his restless eyes, who had set up the first patent slip for repairing small 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 up by dying at home, ducidly 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 powerhouses, with its gigantic sheer legs fit to lift the 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, as you approached the new harbour 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 Wally seemed to be swept out of the Great Avenue by the swirl of a mental backwash. He remembered muddy shores, a harbour without keys, 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 smouldered for days so that a mazed chips came into a

roadstead full of sulphurous smoke and the sun hung blood red at midday. He remembered the things, the faces and something more besides, like the faint flavour of a cup quaffed to the bottom, like a subtle sparkle of the air that was not to be found in the atmosphere of today. In this evocation, swift and full of detail Like a flash of magnesium light Into the niches of a dark memorial hall Captain Wally contemplated things once important The efforts of small men,

The growth of a great place, But now robbed of all consequence By the greatness 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 unchangeable feelings that he stopped short, struck the ground with his stick, and ejaculated mentally,

what the devil am I doing here? He seemed lost in a sort of surprise, 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, wearing a necktie, almost a neckcloth, whose stiff ends projected 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 harbour-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 a vast but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes.

This particular master attendant was reported to consider it miserably inadequate on the ground that it did not include the power of life and death. This was a jocular exaggeration. Captain Elliot was fairly satisfied 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 to dwindle in his hands for want of use the uproarious choleric frankness of his comments on people's character and conduct caused him to be feared at bottom though in conversation 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 meddlesome old ruffian but for almost all of them one of Captain Elliot's outbreaks was nearly as distasteful to face as a chance of annihilation End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad This Librevox recording is in the public domain Read by Peter Dan Chapter 5 The End of the Tether

As soon as he had come up quite close he said Mouthing and a growl What's this I hear wellie is it true you're selling the fair maid. Captain Wally, 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 Wally could not say he 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 Wally who walked easily, staring straight before him. They had been good comrades years ago, almost intimates. At the time when Wally commanded the renowned Condor, Elliot had charge of the nearly as famous ring dove for the same owners, and when the appointment of master attendant was created,

Wally would have been the only other serious candidate. But Captain Wally, then in the prime of life, was resolved to serve no one but his own auspicious fortune. Far away, tending his hot irons, he was glad to hear the other had been successful. There was a worldly suppleness in bluff Ned Elliott 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 Wally'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, presented a closed Gothic portal to the light and glory of the west. The glass of the rosace above the ogive glowed like fire,

fiery coal in the deep carvings of a wheel of stone. The two men faced about. I'll tell you what they ought to do next, Wally, growled Captain Elliot suddenly. Well, they ought to send a real live lord out here when Sir Frederick's time is up, eh? Captain Wally 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 time. We need a lord here now. They've got a lord in Bombay.

He dined once or twice every year at the government house, a many-windowed, arcaded palace upon a hill laid out in roads and gardens. And lately he had been taking about a duke in his master-attend steam launch to visit the harbour 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 herself lunched with them. A big woman with a red face, complexion quite sunburned. He should think ruined, very gracious manners. They were going on to Japan. He ejaculated these details

for Captain Welley's edification, 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 moustache. 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. I sent word of it to the officer's quarters and the sailors home, he continued, while the limp in his gate seemed to grow more accentuated

with the increasing irritation of his voice. Places full of them. Twice as many men as there are berths going in the local trade. All hungry for an easy job. Twice as many. And what do you think, Wally? He stopped short. His hands clenched and thrust deeply downwards seemed ready to burst the pockets of his jacket. A slight sigh escaped Captain Wally. Hey, you'd think they'd 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 he 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 instruct the steward of the sailors home to have him turned out neck and crop. He did not think the birth was good enough, if you please. I have your little records by me, said I. You came ashore here 18 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 be, but if you don't take this chance, away you go to England, assisted passage, by the first homewood steamer that comes along, you're 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. He would not have had any trouble, Captain Wally said,

almost involuntarily, if you had sent for me. Captain Elliot was immensely amused. He shook with laughter as he walked, but suddenly he stopped laughing. A vague recollection had crossed his mind. Hadn't he heard it said at the time of the Traven Corps and Deccan smash that poor Wally had been cleaned out completely? Fellows hard up, by heavens, he thought.

And at once he cast him, to sideline glance at his companion. But Captain Wally was smiling or steely straight before him, with a carriage of the head inconceivable 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 to spring upon him a demand for a small loan put him entirely at his again. There had come a long pause in their talk, however, and, not knowing how to begin again, he growled out soberly, we all fellows ought to take a rest now. The best thing for some of us

would be to die at the awe, Captain Wally said negligently. Come now, aren't you a bit tired by this time of the whole show? muttered the other sullenly. Are you? Captain Elliot was, infernally tired. he only hung on to his birth 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 between him and the workhouse and he had a family, three girls as well he knew.

He gave Harry old boy 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 Wally with a sort of amused absent-mindedness. Doing. doing nothing, that's just it. Lawn, tennis and silly novels

from morning to the 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 popenjay's

too selfish to think of making a good woman happy. The extreme indigence stared him in the face with all that crowd to keep at home. He had cherished the idea of building himself of 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 Wally, 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.

Aye, but mine is doing well, Captain Wally pronounced slowly, staring to the end of the avenue. The master attendant was glad to hear this, uncommonly glad. He remembered her well, a pretty girl she was. Captain Wellie, stepping out carelessly, assented as if in a dream. 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 returned and took possession of the straight wide road. A scyce in white stood at the head of a Burma pony, harnessed to a vanished 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 Elliot waddled up to it

and made as if to clamour in but refrained, 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 bumblebee. Captain Wally 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 Elliot 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 of the ring dove? He wondered if he too had changed to the 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. Not a bad fellow, the pleasant jolly Ned Elliott, 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 Ring Dove happened to be in port together, she would frequently ask him to bring Captain Elliot for dinner. They had not met often since the old days, not once in five years, perhaps. He regarded him from under his white eyebrows, this man he could not bring him to take into his confidence at this juncture, and the other went on in his intimate outpourings and as remote from his hearer as though he had been talking on a hilltop a mile away. He was in a bit of a quandary now as to the steamer Safala. Ultimately every hitch in the port came into his hands to undo. They would miss him when he was gone in another 18 months and most

likely some retired naval officer had been pitched forked into the appointment, a man that would understand nothing and careless. That steamer was a coasting craft having a steady trade connection as far north as to Nassarim, but the trouble was she could get no captain to take her on a regular trip. Nobody would go in her. He really had no power, of course, to order a man to take a job, which was all very well to stretch a point on the demand of a consul general, but... What's the matter with the ship? Captain Wally interrupted in measured tones. Nothing's the matter, sound old steamer. Her owner has been in my mind. office this afternoon, tearing his hair.

Is he a white man? asked Wally 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 ever. See that, Harry? I see, Captain Wally, said thoughtfully. The engineer, I see. Other fellow came to be a shipowner at the same time was quite a tape. He came out third in a home ship nearly fifteen years ago, Captain Elliot remembered, 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 mutinous sort of chap.

Well, he remained out here a perfect nuisance, everlastingly shipped and unshipped, unable to keep a berth very long, pretty nigh went through every engine-room afloat belonging to the colony. Then suddenly, what do you think happened, Harry? Captain Wally, who seemed lost in the 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 Manila lottery. 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 Safala, 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. P. rushed in and bought her. This man had never given any sign of that sort of mental intoxication the mere fact of getting hold of a large sum of money may produce, 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 clerk separately that nobody could put him out now. It was his turn.

There was no one over him on earth, and they 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, 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 faces red as fire rushing along up and down the keys 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 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 Safala took up pretty near all the lottery money. He had left himself 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 organised, took the biggest slice out of that cake, of course,

and by and by a squad of confounded German tramps turned up east of the sewers 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 old high times were over for good. For years the Safala had made no more he judged than a fair living. Captain Elliot 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 Safala 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 explained, seemed to go worse

as the time went on. In the last three years he's run through 11 skippers. He had tried every single man here outside of the regular lines. I'd warned him before that this would not do. And now, of course, no one will look at the Safala. I had one or two men up at my office and talk to them, but as they said to me, what was the good of taking the birth to lead a regular dog's life for a month and then get the sack at the end of the first trip? The fellow, of course, told me it was all nonsense that there had been a plot hatching for years 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 Elliot admitted a throaty chuckle. And the fact is that if he misses a couple more trips he'd never trouble

himself to start again. He won't find any cargo in his old trade. There's too much competition nowadays for people to keep their stuff flying about for a ship that does not turn up when she's expected. It's a bad lookout for him. He swears he'll shut himself up 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 ensured value for her. It isn't like selling sailing ships. Steamers do get out of date besides getting old. He must have laid by a good bit of money, though, observed Captain Wally quietly. The harbourmaster puffed out his purple cheeks to an amazing size, Not a stiver, Harry, not a single stiver.

He waited, but as Captain Wally, stroking his beard slowly, looked down on the ground without a word, he tapped him on the forearm, tiptoed and said in a horse whisper, The Manila Lottery has been eating him up. He frowned a little, nodding in tiny affirmative jerks. They were all going in for it, a third of the wages, paid to ship's officers. In my port, he snorted, went to Manila. It was a mania.

That fellow Massey 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'd taken dozens and scores of tickets for every drawing since. What with this vice and his ignorance of affairs, ever since he had improvidently bought that steamer, he'd been more or less short of money. This in Captain Elliot'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 first. 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 that he was no owner unless he was kicking somebody out in the morning and having a row with a 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're

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 and a half about a trifle. He had told Massey that. He had said, This won't do, Mr Massey. We're getting very sick of you here in the maritime office. What you must do now is to try whether you could get a sailor to join you as a partner. That seems to be the only way. And that was sound advice, Harry. Captain Wally, leaning on his stick, was perfectly still all over, and his hand, arrested in the act of stroking, 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 impudent manner. I didn't come here to be laughed at, he had shrieked. I appealed 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 tuppence in his pocket to bless himself with. The very native curs and the bazaar knew that much. And it's true enough, Harry, rumbled Captain Elliot, judicially. They are much more likely one and all to owe money to the Chinaman in Denham Road for the clothes on their backs. Well, said I, you make too much normal.

over it for my taste, Mr Massey, 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, I'll end by being late for dinner, yarning with you here, wife doesn't like it. He clamoured ponderously into the trap, leaned out sideways, and only then wondered weasily what on earth Captain Wally could have been doing with himself of late. they'd had no sight of each other for years and years till the other day when he had seen him unexpectedly in the office. What on earth? Captain Wally 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 seashore across the stretches of grass through the long ranges of trance, through the long ranges of truade. trees, came faintly the to to the cable car beginning to roll before the empty peristyle of the public library on its three-mile journey to the new harbour dogs. It doesn't seem to be so much room in 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 belonging to the young captain of the condor Good fellow, Harry Wally they're very talkative you never knew what he was up to

a bit too offhand with people of consequence and apt to take a wrong view of a fellow'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 like 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 sentimental mood, had it not struck him suddenly that Captain Wally, unstirring and without

a word, seemed to be awaiting something, 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, ah, and the things we've done. The pony plunged, the scy skipped out of the way. Captain Wally raised his arm. Goodbye. End of Chapter 5.

Chapter 6 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Read by Peter Dan. Chapter 6. The End of the Tether 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 of the world. They were gathering low between the deep stone-faced banks of the canal. The Malay prower, half concealed under the arch of the bridge, had not altered its position a quarter of an inch. For a long time Captain Wally 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 reflected gleams left the world below and the water of the canal seemed to turn into pitch. Captain Wally crossed it. 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 seafront 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 500, 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 he could get himself pulled off in the evening. Far away beyond the houses, on the slope of an indigo promontory, closing the view of the keys, 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 white dark trousers high up his yellow thighs, and by a single noiseless fin-like stir of the oars, steered the sampan alongside the steps with the ease and precision of a swimming fish. Sofala articulated Captain Wally 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 Wally 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 sombre, 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 Wally began again.

So far la, Savvy, Sofa la, John? This time the Chinaman made out that bizarre sound and grunted his assent uncouthfully, low down and his bare throat. With the first yellow twinkle of a star that appeared like the head of a pin stabbed deep into the smooth, pale, shimmering fabric of the sky, The edge of a keen chill seemed to cleave through the warm air of the earth. At the moment of stepping into the sampan to go and try for the command of the Safala, Captain Wally shivered a little.

When on his return he landed on the key 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 one dark and polished stone. The lofty vaults of the avenues were black, all black overhead, and the porcelain globes on the lampposts 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 tomorrow.

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 leapt up in tance 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 spectre, something of his own, to have given up to a hungry spectre, his truth and dignity 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 Elliott had rendered him without knowing

at a service for which it would have been impossible to ask. He hoped Ned would not think there had been something underhand in his action. He supposed that now, when he heard of it, he would understand, or perhaps he would only think Wally an eccentric old fool. What would have been the good of telling him, any more that of blurting the whole tail to that man Massey. 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. 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 Wally, with her fires out, with 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 Wally, considering the discretion of his course, met, as it were incidentally, the thought of death. He pushed to you. He pushed to you. He pushed to decide with dislike and contempt. He almost laughed at it, and in the unquenchable 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 500 to be paid back to her integrally 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 anything misleading, and Captain Wally 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 Wally 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.

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 the world. men, and all the time a shadow marched with him, slanting on his left hand, which in the east is a presage of evil. Can you make out the clump of palms yet, Serang? asked Captain Wally from his chair on the bridge of the Safala, approaching the bar of Batu-Beru-Beru. Not one, by and by sea. 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 Wally sat still without lifting his head to look for himself. Three years, 36 times. He had made these palms 36 times from the southward. 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 murmured again, insight yet? The Zun makes very great Glatuan. Watch well, Serang, Yatuan. A white man had ascended the ladder from the deck noiselessly and had listened quietly to this short colloquy. Then he stepped out on the bridge and began to walk from end to end,

holding up the long cherrywood 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 the curved black mouthpiece, he presented such a heavy overhanging profile

that even the sarang could not help reflecting sometimes upon the extreme unloveliness of some white men. Captain Wally seemed to brace himself up in his chair, but gave no recognition whatever to his presence. The other puffed jets of smoke then suddenly, I could never understand that new mania of yours of having this melee here for your shadow, partner. Captain Wally got up from the chair in all his imposing stature and walked across to the binnacle, holding 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 discomfited whisper. then slowly and distinctly he said, I am not dirt, and then added defiantly, as you seem to think. The sarang jerked out, See the palms now, Thuan! Captain Wally 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. this narrow sea. Another white man, the mate, came up on the bridge. He was tall, young, lean, with a moustache like a trooper and something malicious in the eye.

He took up a position beside the engineer. Captain Wally, with his back to them, inquired, What's on the log? 85 answered the mate quickly and nudged the engineer with his elbow. Captain Wally's muscular hands squeezed the iron rail with an extraordinary force. his eyes glared with an enormous effort. He knitted his eyebrows, the perspiration fell from under his hat, and in a faint voice he murmured, Steady a sarang when she's 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 Massey turned upon him. Mr. Stern, he said violently, let me tell you as a ship owner that you are no better than a confounded fool. End of chapter six. Chapter 7 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad.

This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Read by Peter Dan. Chapter 7, The End of the Tether. Stern went down smirking and apparently not at all disconcerted. But the engineer Massey remained on the bridge moving about with uneasy self-assertion. Everybody on board was his inferior, everyone, without 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 difficulties of ship-owning. 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 parasites, and for years he had scowled at everybody connected with the Safala, except perhaps at the Chinese firemen who served to get her along. Their use was manifest. They were an indispensable part of the machinery of which he was the master.

When he passed along his decks, he shouldered those he came across brutally, but the Malay deckhands had learned to dodge out of his way. He had to bring himself to tolerate them because of the necessary manual labour of the ship which must be done. He had to struggle and plan and scheme to keep the Sephala afroat, 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 remained 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 subservience 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.

side. 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 mangroves with the three palms in a bunch at the back grew slowly more distinct in its long straight line without a single feature to arrest attention. The native passengers at the Sophala 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 Wally 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 pygmy, was taking 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, unclouded 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 ranges 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

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 pygmy muttered to each other frequently in quiet tones. Behind them, Massey stood sideways with an expression of disdain and suspense on his face. His globular eyes were perfectly motionless, and he seemed to have forgotten the long pipe he held in his hand. On the foredeck below the bridge, steeply roofed with the white slopes of the awnings, a young Lasker seaman had clamoured outside the rail. He adjusted quickly a broad band of sail canvas under his armpits,

and throwing his chest against it leaned out far over the water. The sleeves of his thin cotton shirt cut off close to the shoulder bared his brown arm of full-rounded form and with a satiny skin like a woman's. He swung it rigidly with a rotary and menaceous. action of a slinger, the fourteen-pound weight, hurtled, circling in the air, then suddenly flew ahead as far as the curve of the bough. 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 declared the depth of the water in his own language. he cried and after each splash and pause gathered in the line busily for another cast digastenga which means three fathoms and a half for 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, without a stir of a single cloud shadow, or the whisper of any other voice. The owner-engineer of the Safala remained very still behind the two seamen of different race, greed and colour, the European, with the time-defying vigour 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 to spare, and Massey, glaring at them from behind, seemed to resent their

attention to their duty like a personal 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 whips of coarse hair on the top of his yellow head. He began to talk slowly. A ledsman you want. I suppose that's your correct mailboat style. Haven't you enough judgment to tell you where you are by looking at the land? Why, before I had been a 12-month in the trade, I was up to that trick, and I'm only an engineer. I can point to you from here where the bar is, and I could tell you besides that you are as likely as not to sticker 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 Wally, without relaxing the set severity of his features, moved his lips to ask and a quick mumble, how near, Serang? Very near now, Toan, the Malay muttered rapidly. Dead slow, said the captain, aloud in a firm tone. The sarang snatched at the hands of the telegraph. A gonged. clang down below. Massey, with a scornful snigger, walked off and put his head down the engine room's skylight. You may expect some rare falling with the engines, Jack, he bellowed. The space into which he stared was deep and full of gloom, and the grey 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 manner and apparently wrapped up in such a taciturn concern 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 Safala he had never been known to exchange as much as a frank good morning 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 recognised his shipmates on shore. At table, the four white men of the

Safala 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 impelled 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 course 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 live-long night in an amazing variety of tones storm sneer and wine with an inexhaustible persistence Massey, in his birth 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 safala for years and years back. He remembered the names of men that had died, that had gone home, that had gone to America.

He remembered in his cups the names of men whose connection with the ship had been so short that Massey had almost forgotten its circumstances and could barely recall their faces. The inebriated voice on the other side of the bulkhead commented upon them all with an extraordinary and ingenious venom of scandalous inventions. It seems they had all offended him in some way and in return he had found them all out. He muttered darkly, he laughed sardonically, he crushed them one after another, but of his chief, Massey, he babbled with an envious and naive admiration. Clever scoundrel. Don't meet the likes of him every other. day. Just look at him. Ha, great. Ship of his own wouldn't catch him going wrong. No fear, the beast. And Massey, after listening with a gratified smile to these artless tributes to his greatness,

would begin to shout, thumping 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 Lasker told off for night duty in harbour, perhaps a youth, fresh from a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck, listening to the endless drunken gable. His heart would be thumping with breathless awe of white men, the arbitrary and obstinate men who pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes, beings with weird intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by inscrutable motives. End of Chapter 7.

Chapter 8 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad This Librevox recording is in the public domain Read by Peter Dan Chapter 8 The End of the Tether For a while after his seconds answering Hoot Massey hung over the engine room gloomily Captain Wally Captain Wally who by the power of 500 pounds

had kept his command for three years might have been suspected of never having seen that coast before He seemed unable 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 moat 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 vibration of the dead slow speed ceased altogether with every sound and tremor of 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 recesses. The illusion of perfect immobility seemed to fall upon her from the luminous blue dome without a 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 narrow, long hull, carrying its way without a ripple, seemed to approach the shoal water of the bay by stealth. The plunge of the lead with the mournful mechanical cry of the Laskar came at longer and longer intervals, and the men on her bridge seemed to hold their breath. The melee at the helm looked fixedly at the compass card. The captain and the sarang stared at the

coast. Massey 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 astonishment, 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 dare 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 changed to a swift, sharp clamour. The weight flew after a single whir. The lion 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, fifteen, fourteen, fourteen. Captain Wally 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 where their eager warning note passed him by as though he had been deaf. Massey, 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 ledsman, anxiously below the bridge, and suddenly the barefooted sarang stepped away noiselessly to steal a glance over the side. Narrow of shoulder in a suit of faded blue cotton, an old grey 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 below to the surface of the blue water, like massive clouds driving slowly upwards on the unfathomable sky. He was not startled at the sight in the least. It was not doubt, but the certitude that the keel

of the safala must be stirring the mud now which made him peep over the side. His peering eyes set a slant 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 grey hat about the doors of the harbour office, till one day seeing Captain Wally coming along to get a crew for the Safala, 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 commander had fallen on him favourably. It must have been an auspicious day, and in less than half an hour

the white men in the office had written his name on a document as Serang of the fire-ships Afala. 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 an 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 unright 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. 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 arrangement of the stars may be read the last word of human destiny. His destiny had been to thrive by the favour 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 sarang, and his placid mind had remained as incapable of penetrating the simplest 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 Safala was out of the proper track for crossing the bar at Batu Baru.

It was a slight error. The ship could not have been more than twice her own length too far to the northward, and the white man at a loss for a cause, since it was impossible to suspect Captain Wally of blundering ignorance, of want of skill or of neglect, would have been inclined to doubt the testimony of his senses. It was some such feeling that kept mass emotionless with his teeth laid bare. by an anxious grin. Not so the sarang. He was not troubled by any intellectual mistrust 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, apparently satisfied, he stepped back from the rail. He had made no sound.

Captain Wally, however, seemed to have observed the movements, his sarang. Holding his head rigidly, he asked with a mere stir of the lips, Going ahead still, Serang? Still going a little twan, answered the Malay, then added casually, She is over. The lead confirmed his words. The depth of water increased at every cast, and the soul of excitement departed suddenly from the lascar, swung in the canvas belt over the sophilus side. Captain Wally ordered the lead in, set the engines ahead without haste, and diverting his eyes from the coast, directed the sarang to keep a course for the middle of the entrance.

Bessie 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? I believe you're trying to scare me.

He talked slowly as if certain, circumspectly, keeping his prominent black eyes on his captain. There was also a slight plaintive note in his rising collar, for primarily it was the clear sense of a wrong suffered undeservedly that made him hate the man, who, for a beggarly £500, claimed a sixth part of the profits under the three years' agreement. Whenever his resentment got the better of the awe the person of Captain Wally inspired, he would positively whimper with fury. You don't know what to invent a play 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 Wally 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. I am puzzled, he went on again with the watchful, unsmiling bearing of his beak teeth. I don't know what to think. I do believe you're trying to frighten me. You're 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 do know very well to be sure, only. His slow volubility, the sideways craning of his neck, the black glances out of the very corners of his eyes, left Captain Wally unmoved.

He looked at the deck with a severe frown. Massey 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 you can take yourself off and pull out your 500 and leave me without a penny to get the new boilers for her. You gloat over that idea, don't you? I do believe you sit here gloating. It's as if I had sold my soul for 500 pounds to be everlastingly damned in the end.

He paused without apparent exasperation, then continued evenly. With the boilers worn out and the survey hanging over my head, Captain Wally, Captain Wally, 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'm not a fool, you know, Captain Wally, partner. Again he paused as though he had done for good. He passed his tongue over his lips, gave a backward glance at the sarang, conning the ship with quiet whispers 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 safala had entered the river. The trail she had stirred up over the bar was a mile astern of her now, out of sight, had disappeared utterly, and the smooth, empty sea along the coast was left behind in the glittering desolation of sunshine. On each side of her low down, the growth of sombre twisted mangroves covered the semi-liquid banks, and Massey 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 have anybody ever got the best of me? me, it is you. I don't mind saying this, I've said it, there. What more can you want? Isn't that

enough for your pride, Captain Wally? 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-gone-white. How could I tell what was wrong about you? There's generally something wrong somewhere. And lo and behold, when 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 wine stopped. He brooded profoundly after the manner of crafty and unintelligent men. It seemed inconceivable the Captain Wally should not laugh at the expression of disgust that overspread the heavy yellow countenance. The Captain Wally never raised his eyes, sitting in his armchair, outraged, dignified,

and motionless. Much good it was to me, Massey remonstrated monotonously, to insert a clause for dismissal for intemperance 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. Captain Wally, you looked so crestfallen that I made sure I'd gone home on your weak spot. A shipowner can't be too careful 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 Wally had only shuffled his feet slightly. A dull animosity became apparent in Massey's sideways stare. But recollect that there are other grounds of dismissal. There's habitual

carelessness amounting to incompetence. There's gross and persistent neglect of duty. I'm not quite as big a fool as you try to make me out to be. You've been careless of late, leaving everything to that sarang. Why, I've seen you letting that old fool of a melee 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 above the bridge, stern, the mate tried to hear, blinking the while from the distance at the second engineer who had come up for a moment and stood in the engine-rimed companion. Wiping his hands on a bunch of cotton waist, he looked about with indifference to the right and left at the river-banks slipping a stern of the Safala steadily. Massey turned full at the chair. The character of his wine became again threatening. Take care, I may yet dismiss you and feast to your money for a year. I may. But before the silent, rigid immobility of the man whose money had come in the near, 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 silence in an absurdly insinuating tone. I want nothing better than to be friends and renew the agreement if you'll consent to find another couple of hundred to help with the new boilers, Captain Wally. I've told you before, she must have new boilers. You know it as well as I do. Have you thought this over? You 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.

It'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? Up on my soul you terrify me with this deaf and dumb trick. What's going on in that head of yours? What are you plotting against me there so hard that you can't say a word? You'll never make me believe that you... You don't know where to lay your hands on a couple of hundred. You've made me curse the day I was born. Mr Massey, said Captain Wally, suddenly without stirring. the engineer started violently.

If that is so, I can only beg you to forgive me. Starboard muttered the serang to the helmsman, and the Sephala began to swing round the bend into the second ridge. Ah, Massey shuddered. You make my blood 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've fastened yourself on me to have easy times and go fat on my lifeblood, 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 Wally, stonily. Stady, murmured the sarang. Massey turned away with his chin on his shoulder. I don't believe it, he said in his dogmetic. tone. Captain Wally 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. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. read by Peter Dan Chapter 9 The End of the Tether On turning to descend Massey perceived the head of Stern

the mate loitering with his sly, confident smile, his red moustaches and blinking eyes at the foot of the ladder. Stern had been a junior in one of the larger shipping concerns before joining the Safala. He had thrown up his birth, he said,

On General Principles. The promotion in the employee was very slow, he complained. thought it was time for him to try and get on a bit in the world. It seemed as though nobody would ever die or leave the firm. They all stuck fast in their birth till they got mildewed. He was tired of waiting, and he feared that when a vacancy did occur, the best servants were by no mean sure of being treated fairly. Besides, the captain he had to serve under, Captain Provost, was an unaccountable sort of man and he fancied 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 it 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 Sephala had been taken to the hospital that morning with a sunstroke, he thought there would be no harm in seeing whether he would not do. He'd come to Captain Wally, freshly shaved, red-faced, thin, flanked, throwing out his lean chest and had recited his little tail with an open and manly assurance.

Now and then his eyelids quivered slightly, his hands would steal up to the end of the flaming moustache, his eyebrows were straight, furry of a chestnut colour, and the directness of his frank gaze seemed to tremble on the verge of impudence. Captain Wally had engaged him temporarily. Then the other man, having been ordered home by the doctors, he had remained for the next trip, and then the next. He had now attained permanency, and the performance of his duties was marked by an air of serious, single-minded application. Director 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 or creation, and impenetrable to other mortals. Grave and smiling, he watched Massey 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. something profound and subtle and incalculable, like an unexpressed understanding, a secret mistrust, or some sort of fear. At last stern, blinking his deep-set eyes and sticking forward his scraped,

clean-cut chin, as crimson as the rest of his face murmured, you've seen? He grazed, you've seen? Massey, 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 Massey, 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. Massey's downward glance wandered right and left, as though the deck all round stern had been bestroon 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. I 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. Stern. Now, if you'd only listen to me for a moment, Mr Massey, sir, I could...

You are a sneak, interrupted Massey in a great hurry, and even managed to get so far. far as to repeat, a common sneak, before the mate had broken in argumentatively. Now, sir, what is it you want? You want, I want, I want, stammered, messy, 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 know, promotion, Stern silenced him with a sort of candid bravado. The engineer's round, soft cheeks quivered still, but he said, quietly enough, you're only worrying my head off and Stern 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 charge. 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 mind. eyes. See, Mr. Massey, I want to get on. I make no secret of it that I am one of the sort that means to get on. These other men to make use of, sir. You haven't arrived at the top of the tree, sir, without finding that out, I dare say. Why are your boss in order to get on, mumbled Massey, 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 the employ for. Is that what you call getting

on is you'll get on in the same way here, if you aren't careful, I can promise you." At this stern 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 occasion he seemed to have lost his tongue for a moment, and Massey, getting in motion, heavily passed him by with an abortive attempt at shouldering. Stern 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 command for a day if only the owners could be made to know. This romantic and naive theory had led him into trouble more than once, but he remained incorrigible, and his character was so instinctively disloyal that whenever he joined a ship, the intention of ousting 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 reverie of careful plans and compromising discoveries the dreams of his sleep with images of lucky turns and favourable accidents Skippers had been known to sicken and die at sea than which nothing could be better than to give a smart mate a chance of showing what he's made of they would also 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 Safala, 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 like, to give up the job before long from one cause or another. Stern was greatly chagrined, however, to notice that he did not seem anywhere 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. Stern never for a moment doubted the obvious nature of his own merits. He was really an excellent 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 Safala 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 circumspection. Massey's sombre and fantastic humours intimidated him as being outside one's usual sea experience, but he was quite intelligent enough to realise almost from the first that he was there in the presence of an exceptional situation. His peculiar, prying imagination 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 observation 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 remaining thunderstruck for a few seconds, he tried to shake it off with self-contumly, 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 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 island 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 Safala, both going and returning on every trip,

led her for a few miles along this reef-infested region. She followed a broad lane of water, dropping a stern 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 season. 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 utterly at times in the thick rain. To reappear, clear-cut and black in the stormy light against the grey 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, 400 years ago, when first beheld by Western eyes from the deck of a high-pooped caraville. It was one of those 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 restlessness, 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, sombre streamers upon the glow of the sky. The palpitating cloud of their wings soared and stooped over the pinnacles of the rocks, over the rocks slender like spires, squat like Martello towers, over the pyramidal heaps of fallen ruins, over the lines of bald, boulders showing like a wall of stones battered to pieces and scorched by lightning, with a sleepy, clear glimmer of water in every bridge.

The noise of their continuous and violent screaming filled the air. This great noise would meet the Sofala coming up from Batu Beiru. It would meet her on quiet evenings, a pitiless and savage clamour, enfeebled by distance, the clamour of sea-birds settling to rest and struggling for a footing at the end of the day. No one noticed it, especially on board. It was the voice of their ship's unerring 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 emitting a strident and cruel uproar, the sound of the familiar scene, the living part of the broken land beneath, of the outspread sea and of the high sky without a floor.

But when the Safala 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 sea. heaven. And the ship's three lights resembling three stars, the red and the green with the white above, the 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, travelling smoothly in the sombre void, the eyes of a naked fisherman in his canoe floating over a reef. He thought drowsily, ah, 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 come for the safala to alter a 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 mundulated slightly to the dip of a paddle,

and the men seemed to hang in the air. They seemed to hang enclosed within the fibers of a dark sodden log, fishing patiently in a strange, unsteady, 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 soul, till the water clung warm and sickly and as if the thickened about the legs of lean men with girded loins, wading thigh-deep in the pale blaze of the shallows. And it would happen now and then that the Sophala, 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 tacitone 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 to watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve off and go by. Their ears caught the panting of that ship, their eyes folly. 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. Everything remained still, crushed by the overwhelming power of the light, and the whole group

opaque in the sunshine, the rocks resembling pinnacles, the rocks resembling 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 silver plate glass of a mirror. The first touch of blowing weather would envelop the hole at once in the spume of the windward breakers, as if in a sudden cloud-like 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 farm, the wide base of the group, the submerged level of broken waste and refuse left over from the building of the coast nearby,

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 Sephala left Pangu Bay early, and Mr. Stern's discovery was to 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 Stern, gazing with indifference, 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 favourable for a stranger attempting 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 side, whereas during a calm you had nothing to depend on but the compass and the practised judgment of your eye. And yet the successive captains of the Safala 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 you see 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 Stern's last train of thought independent of the great discovery. He had just seen to the securing of the anchor

and had remained forward idling away a moment or two. The captain was in charge of the bridge. With a slight yawn he had turned away from his survey of the sea and had leaned his shoulders against the fish david. These, properly speaking, were the very last moments of ease he was to to know on board the sophala. All the instance that came after were to be pregnant with purpose 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 full 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. End of chapter 9. Chapter 10 of the end of the end of of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librovoc's recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan. Chapter 10 The End of the Tether 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 contemplate. Stern had been looking aft in a mood so idle that for once he was thinking no harm of anyone. His captain 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 foredeck bellied upwards and collapsed slowly, and above their heavy flapping the grey stuff of Captain Wally'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 eyebrows overhung heavily the shadows where his glance appeared to be staring ahead piercingly. Stern 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. Stern 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 sarang in close attendance as was usual in this extraordinary steamer. Confound an absurd custom that, he resented it.

Surely the old fellow could have looked after his ship without that loafing native at his elbow. Stone wriggled his shoulders with disgust. What was it? Hindlance or what? That old skipper must have been growing lazy for years. They all grew lazy out east here. Stern was very conscious of his own unimpaired activity. They got slack all over.

But he towered very erect on the 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 sarang peeped over the white canvas screen of the rail. No doubt the Malay was seen. standing back nearer to the wheel, but the great disparity of size in close association amused stern like the observation of a bizarre fact in nature. They were as queer fish out of the sea as

any in it. He saw Captain Wally turn his head quickly to speak to his serene. 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 himself. Stern scorned 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 beckoned 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 attended 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 Massey had called him that very name. But Mr Massey did not mind what he said in his savage fits.

Stern smiled to himself, and gradually the ideas of only the ideas of only, by the sound, by the imagined shape of the word pilot fish. The ideas of aid, of guidance needed and received, came upmost in his mind. The word pilot awakened the idea of trust, of dependence, the idea of welcome, clear-eyed help brought to the seaman groping for the land in the dark, groping blindly in fogs, feeling their 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,

completes the shapes of things hurriedly glimpsed, penetrates the veils of mist spread over the land by the storms of the sea, defines with certitude the outlines of a coast lying under the pall of fog, the forms of landmarks half buried in a starless night as in a shallow grave. He recognises because 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 position

on which may depend a good man's 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 best,

burden of the awaiting mystery. The pilot's knowledge brings relief and certitude to the commander of a ship. The sarang, however, in his fanciful suggestion of a pilot fish attending 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 we 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...

Stern'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 colour of the sea seemed changed, appeared queer to his wandering eye, 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 of evil 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 quick as the first emotion of discovery, and for the next 24 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 Wally opposite. He watched the deliberate upward movement 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 stern, 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 looking 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 the 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 stern, 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 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 possess a 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 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 faltering intonations of the deep voice,

the taciturnity put on like an armour, the deliberate as if guarded movements, 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 confirmatory import. Every day that passed over the Safala appeared to stern simply crammed full of proofs with incontrovertible 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-stock at nearby. On the stretches of easy navigation it is not usual for a coasting captain to remain on deck. all the time of his watch. The sarang 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,

stern would hear a low voice above him, exclaiming nervously. Duang? Duan? You are watching the compass well? Yes, I am watching Tuan. The ship is making her course. She is Twan, very straight. It is well, and remember Serang, that the order is that you are to mind the helmsman 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 stern 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 emotion 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 reckless perversity of avarice. What else could it be? At the mad and sombre resolution that for the sake of a few dollars more seemed to set at north 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 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. But then, the very monstrosity 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 at worst, 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 stern kicked out of the ship

and everlastingly damaged his prospects in this part of the east. Yet if you want to get on, something might be able to get on, be risked. At times Stern thought he had been unduly timid of taking action in the past, and what was worse had had come to this, that in the present he did not seem to know what action to take. Massey'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 Stern in bodily fear for himself, but it frightened him exceedingly as to his prospect. Though, of course, inclined to credit himself

with exceptional 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 Safala. Jack, the second engineer, was too dull to notice anything that took place out of his engine room, remained Massey, the owner, the interested person, nearly going mad with worry. Stern had heard and seen more than enough on board to know what ailed him, but his exasperation seemed to make him deaf to cautious 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 stern in his watches below, toss and mutter, open-eyed in his bunk for hours as though he'd been burning with fever. Occurances like the crossing of the bar just now were extremely alarming to his prospect. He did not want to be left behind by some swift catastrophe. Massey being 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 Massey had been emboldened to find fault this time. Stern, listening at the foot of the ladder, had heard the

others 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. I may yet lose my life at this fooling, let alone my chance, stern mumbled angrily to himself after the stooping back of the chief engineer disappeared round the corner of the skylight. Yes, no doubt, he thought, but to blurt out his knowledge would not advance his prospect. On the contrary, it would blast the mutterly 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,

inexplicably enough for he had done nothing to them envy you 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 a brute without a spark of anything human about him without so much a 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. Massey's state of exasperation seemed to Stern to have made him stupid beyond the ordinary silliness of ship-owners. Stern meditating on the embarrassments of that stupidity forgot himself completely. His stony, unwinking 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 Safala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the coast belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher in firm sloping 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 bows, 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 cannonball, 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, spread a thin dusky veil over the sombre water, which, checked by the flood tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole straight length of the reaches. Stern'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 treetops caught the rays of the low sun

and seemed to shine with a golden green light of their own 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 Beiru, kneeling on the planks, were engaged in rolling their bedding of mats busily.

They tied up bundles, they snapped the locks of wooden tides, chests. A pock-marked 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. Nots of travelling 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 coloured serongs twisted across their bronze shoulders, squatted on their hams, squatted on their hams, chewing beetle 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 arm, gazed ahead eagerly. A wandering cling rubbed his teeth with a bit of wood pouring over the side a bright stream of water out of his lips. The fat Raja dozed in a shabhawed. 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 habits. habitation, 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 appeared 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 a man and a woman, together with a dozen green coconuts in a heap, rocked helplessly after the safala had passed, like a

navigating contrivance of venturesome insects, of travelling 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 upstream smoothly, fretting their outer ends into a brown whispering tumble of froth against the miry foot of each bank. I must thought Stern bring that brute Massey to his bearings that's getting too absurd in the end. Here's the old man up there buried in his chest. chair, he may just as well be in his grave for all the years he'll ever be in the world, and the sarang'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 bearings, 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 around his neck, became panic-struck at once. He dropped the banana he had been munching and ran to the knee of a grave dark Arab in flowing robes, sitting like a biblical figure incongruously on a yellow tin trunk corded with a rope of twisted ratan. The father, unmoved, put out his hand to pat the little shaven pole protectingly. End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan. the end of the tether.

Stern 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. Massey was nowhere to be seen. He must have gone straight into his berth. Stern scratched at the door softly, then, putting his lips to the rows of the ventilator, said, I must speak to you, Mr Massey.

me a minute or two. I'm busy, go away from my door. But pray, Mr. Massey, you go away, do you hear? Take yourself off altogether, to the other end of the ship, quite away. The voice inside dropped low to the devil. Stern 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 stern with a very firm expression of face turned the handle. Mr Massey's stateroom, a narrow one-birth 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 under 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 teakwood top of the washing stand seemed hermetically 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, and a folded mosquito net against the nights spent in harbour. There was not a scrap of paper anywhere in sight, no boots on the floor, no litter of any sort, not a speck of dust anywhere, no traces of pipe-bash even, which in a heavy smoker was morally revolting

like a manifestation of extreme hypocrisy, and the bottom of the old wooden armchair, 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 in the round opening of the port, sent a wavering network of light and shade into the place. Stern, holding the door open with one hand, had thrown. in his head and shoulders. At this amazing intrusion, Massey, who was doing absolutely nothing, jumped up speechless. Don't call names, murmured stern hurriedly.

I won't be called names. I think of nothing, but you're good, Mr. Massey. A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have lost their tongues. Then the mate went on with a 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 to, too upright, Mr Massey, to suspect anybody of such a, it's enough to make your hair stand on end.

He watched for the effect. Massey seemed dazed, uncomprehending. 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 audacity, stern hastened on. Remember that there's only six weeks left to 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,

Massey gave a start and seemed ready to shriek. He contained himself by a great effort. Require a captain, he repeated, with scathing slowness. Who requires a captain? You dare to 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 hurt me less to throw my money overboard. Pampered, useless 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. Stern had taken heart of grace meantime. And the silly insurance people too, as well, he said 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 uttered a short hollow gopher, familiarly. I didn't make the law, but there it is, and I'm an active young fellow. I quite hold with your ideas. I know your ways by this time, Mr. Massey. I wouldn't try to give myself airs like that, that lazy specimen of an old man up there. He put a mark to emphasis on the last sentence to lead Massey away from the track in case,

but he did not doubt of now holding his success. The chief engineer seemed nonplussed, like a slow man invited to catch hold of a whirlig 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 sarang, because that's what it amounts to you. Do you know, sir, that a damn malay like a monkey is in charge of yours?

ship and no one else. Just listen to his feet patting above us on the bridge. Real officer in charge. He's taking her up the river while the great 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. Massey, with lowered forehead, one hand grasping the back of the armchair, did not budge. You think, sir, that the man has got you tight in his agreement? Massey 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 so on? Why, yes. But if you say the word, sir, I can tell you something 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 Beir,

and make him pay a dollar a day for his keep till we get back, if you like. Now, what do you think of that? Come, sir, say the word. It's really well worth your while, and I'm 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 statement, and he thought to himself that he would manage somehow to stick in his birth 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 scare the fellows off. Massey would have to keep him. A definite statement from me would be enough, Massey repeated slowly. Yes, sir, it would. Stern stuck out his chin cheerily and blinked at close quarters with that unconscious impudence which had the power to enrage Massey beyond anything.

The engineer spoke very distinctly. Well, listen to me then, Mr Stern. Stern. do you hear? I wouldn't promise you the value of two pence for anything you can tell me. He struck Stern's arm away with a smart blow and catching hold of the handle pulled the door too. The terrific slam darkened the cabin instantaneously to his eye 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 forest seemed to flow into that bare cabin with the odour of rotting leaves of soddened soil, the strong muddy smell of the living earth steaming uncovered after the passing 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 david, 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. Massey's blanket. Then the ship shearing out in the stream, the light 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 invaded, 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, greyish paper covered with a mass of printed figures, and began to scan them attentively 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 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 Sephala, driven by the faithful Jack, wore out of boilers in tramping up and down the straits from Cape to Cape, from river to river, from bay to bay, accumulating by that hard labour of an overworked, starved ship, the blackened mass of these documents. Massey 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, pouring over the rows of disconnected figures, bewildering by their senseless sequence, resembling the hazards of destiny itself. He nourished a conviction that there must be some logic, somewhere in the result of chance. He thought that 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 remains tensely on the stretch. Nine, nine, aught, four, two. He made a note. The next winning number of the great prize was 47,05. These numbers, of course, would have to be avoided in the future when writing to Manila for the tickets. He mumbled pencil in hand, and five. Hmm, hmm. He wetted his finger, the papers rustled. Ah, but what's this? Three years ago in the September drawing, it was number nine ought four, two that took the first prize. Most remarkable. There was a hint there of a definite rule. He was afraid of missing some reckoned-oed 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 a decision of unshaken confidence, jump 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 disdained. He needed every penny of profit that Safala 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 earnings of the ship went that way and also the wages he allowed himself as chief engineer.

It was the wages he paid to others that he begrudged with a reasoned and at the same time a passionate regret. He scowled at the laskers with their deck brooms at the quartermasters 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 streaming 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 see 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 skippers, of absolute nobodies in a steamship after all. And now that he had risen to be a ship-owner, 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 engineer, 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 repair she required, for the coal bills he had to pay, for the poor beggarly freight she earned. 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 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 ship-owning. 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 boilermaker, going 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 sovereigns. 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'd been out of work for a long time before he won his prize and he remembered how Carlo Mariani,

commonly known as Ponci Charlie, the Maltese hotel keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, had grinsed joyfully before him in the evening when the news had come. Poor Charlie, he made his living by ministering to various abject vices, gave credit for their food to many a piece of white wreckage. He was naively overjoyed at the idea of his old bills being paid, and he reckoned confidently on a spell of festivities in the cavernous grog shop downstairs. Massey remembered the curious, respectful looks of the trashy white men in the place. His heart had swelled within him.

Massey had left Charlie's infamous den directly he had realised the possibilities open to him and with his nose in the air. Afterwards the memory of these edulations 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 no-beckymed, How could he have been such a fool as to purchase that accursed ship? He had been abominably swindled. There was no end to the swindling. As the difficulties of his improvident ambition gathered thick around him, he really came to hate everybody he had ever come in contact 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 tormentor. 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 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 interrogatively the words, Mr Massey, Mr Massey 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 machinery Massey had been struck done 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'm doing no business can't you see that this ship is laid up Massey 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 Massey. He was almost afraid. But it was no dream. Five hundred pounds are not a number. 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, Massey was asking himself, what is his motive? He spent the night in hammering out the clauses of the agreement, a unique instrument of its sort whose tenor got brooded abroad somehow and became the talk and wonder of the port. Massey'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. Captain Wally'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 and the strength of his love for her, he accepted, with stately serenity, Massey's stupidly cunning, paragraphs against his incompetence, 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 partnership taking his money with him. Provision was made for forming a fund to pay him off, but if he left the Safala before the term from whatever cause, barring death, Massey was to have a whole year for paying. illness the lawyer had suggested, a young man fresh from Europe and not overburdened with business, who was rather amused. Massey began to whine unctuously. How could he be expected? Let that go, Captain Wally had said, with a 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 my first illness will be my last i've 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 Oh, curmudgeon, won't. He must have lots of money, but he would like to get hold of a soft birth and the sixth part of my profits for nothing if he only could. And during these years, Massey's dislike grew under the restraint of something resembling fear. The simplicity of that man appeared dangerous. Of late he had changed, however, it appeared less formidable, and with a lessened vigour of life as though he had received a secret wound. But still he remained incomprehensible in his simplicity, fearlessness and rectitude. And when Massey 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 Stern could have told him nothing he did not know. He had much ado in trying to terrorise that mean sneak into silence. He wanted to deal alone with the situation, and incredible as it might have appeared to Mr. Stern, he had not yet given up the desire 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, 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 sombre. He put the list away. 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 immobility confined in the darkness of this shut-up little place seemed to make him a thing apart, infinitely removed 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 Wally's voice above. Stations, Mr. Stern, and the answer from somewhere on deck forward. Aye, aye, sir. We shall more head upstream this time the ebb has made. Head upstream, sir. You will see to it, Mr. Stern. The answer was covered by the autocratic clang on 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. Massey did not move.

A shorelight on the other bank, a quarter of a mile across the river, drifted, no bigger than a tiny star, passing slowly athwart the circle of the port. Voices from Mr. Van Wicks' jetty answered the hails from the ship. Ropes were thrown, and mist and thrown again. The swaying flame of a torch carried in a large

sampan coming to fetch away in state the Raja from down the coast, cast a sudden ruddy glare into his cabin over his very person. Mr Massey 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 bordered the offside of the safala. Then, after a time, the tumult of splashing, of cries, of shuffling feet, of packages dropped with a thump, the noise of the native passengers 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 Wick. This was from stern, answering 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, shall I? The voice interrupted negligently. I'll come on board. Mr. Van Wick, stern, suddenly broke out with an eager effort. Will you do me the favour? The mate walked away quickly towards the gangway. A silence fell. Mr. Massey in the dark did not move. He did not move, even. when he heard slow, shuffling footsteps past 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 opening, shadowy in the sheen of the skylight at his back, with his face apparently as black as the rest of his figure.

We've been very long coming up this time, Mr Massey growled without changing his attitude. What'd expect with half the boy tubes plugged up for leaks. The second defended himself loquaciously. None of your lip, said Massey. None of your rotten boilers, I say, retorted his faithful subordinate without animation, huskily. Go down there and carry a hit of steam on them yourself, if you dare. I don't. You aren't worth your salt then, Massey said. The other made a faint noise which resembled a laugh, but might have been a snarl. Better go

slow than stopped the ship altogether he admonished his admired superior. Mr. Massey moved at last. He turned in his chair and, grinding his teeth. Damn you and the ship, I wish you were at the bottom of the sea, then you'd have to starve. The trusty second engineer closed the door gently. Massey listened. Instead of passing on to the bathroom where he should have gone to clean himself, the second engineer entered his cabin which was next door. Mr. Massey jumped up and waited. Suddenly he heard the lock snap in there. He rushed out and gave a violent kick to the door. I believe you're 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,

Massey cried. An obstinate silence followed that threat. Massey moved away perplexed. On the bank two figures appeared, approaching the gans. He heard a voice tinged with contempt. I'd rather doubt your word, but I shall certainly speak to him of this. The other voice, stern, said with a sort of regretful formality, Thanks, that's all I want, I must do my duty. Mr Massey was surprised. A short, dapper figure leapt lightly on the deck and neatly bounded into him

where he stood beyond the circle of light from the gangway lamp. When it had passed towards the bridge after exchanging a hurried good, evening, Massey said surlily. When it had passed towards the bridge after exchanging a hurried good evening, Massey said surlily to Stern, who followed with slow steps, What is it you're making up to Mr Wick for now? Far from it, Mr Massey, I'm not good enough for Mr Van Wick. Neither are you, sir, in his opinion, I'm afraid.

Captain Wellie is, it seems. He's gone to ask him to dine up at the house this evening. Then he murmured to himself darkly. I hope he will like it. End of Chapter 11. Chapter 12 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Read by Peter Dan.

Chapter 12, The End of the Tether. Mr. Van Wick, the white man of Batu Beiru, an ex-naval officer who, for reasons best known to himself, had thrown away the promise of a brilliant career to become a pioneer of tobacco planting on that remote part of the coast, had learned to like Captain Wally. The appearance of the new skipper had attracted his attention. Nothing more unlike, all the diverse types he had since exceeding each other on the bridge of the Safala could be imagined.

At that time, Batu Beru was not what it has become since, the centre of a prosperous tobacco-growing district, a tropically suburban-looking little settlement of bungalows on one long street, shaded with two rows of 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 Wick prospered alone on the left bank on his deep clearing, carved out of the forest, which came down above and below to the 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 savour 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 between the house and the river,

in rows of three or four deep all along the front. Not seldom the visit began at daybreak. Mr Van Wick tolerated these inroads. He would nod out of his bedroom window, toothbrush or razor in hand, or passed through the throng of courtiers in his bathing robe. He appeared and disappeared, humming a tune, polished his nails with attention, rubbed his shaved face with odicolone, drank his early 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 absolutely forced to speak, he gave evasive, vaguely soothing answers out of pure compassion. The same feeling perhaps made him so lavishly hospitable with the aerated 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 own kind that Mr Van Wick sought, he could not have pitched upon a better place. Even the mailboats of the subsidised company calling on the various clusters of palm-thetched 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, Bartu-Beru-Beru would be included in the service. meantime all Mr Van Wick's mail was addressed to Malacca

whence his agents sent it across once a month by the Safala it followed that whenever Massey had run short of money through taking too many lottery tickets or got into a difficulty about a skipper Mr Van Wick was deprived of his letters and newspapers in so far he had a personal interest in the fortunes of the sophala 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 detagere, it had come last year by the Sephala. Everything came by the Sephala. 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 worldwide green wrappers,

an illustrated Dutch publication without a cover, the numbers of a German magazine with covers of the Bismarck-Millard colour. There were also parcels of new music, though the piano, it had come years ago by the Safala, in the damp atmosphere of the forests, was generally out of tune. It was vexing to be cut off from everything for 60 days at a stretch sometimes without any means of knowing what was the matter. And when the Sapphalla reappeared, Mr Van Wick would do that.

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, Massey 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 positively pitiful, while all the time he tried to compose his big lips into a smile.

No, Mr Van Wick, 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 Wick. He moaned at great length apologetically. The words conspiracy, plot, envy, came. out prominently whined with greater energy. Mr. Van Wick, examining with a faint grimace his polished fingernails, would say, hmm, very unfortunate, and turn his back on him.

Fastidious, clever, slightly sceptical, accustomed to the best society, he had held a much envied shore appointment at the Ministry of Marine for a year preceding his 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 something an enemy might have called fopish in his aspect, like a distorted echo of past elegance. He managed to keep an almost military 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 crimson sash above his hips as a concession to the wilderness, once his adversary now his vanquished companion. 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 arranged moustache, an ungarnished forehead, the gleam of low patent shoes peeping under the wide bottom of trousers cut straight from the same stuff as the gossamer coat, completed a figure recalling with its sash, a pirate chief of romance, and at the same time the elegance of a slightly bald, dandy, indulging in seclusion, a taste for unorthodox costume. It was his evening get-up. The proper time for the Safala to arrive at Batu Beru was an hour before sunset and he looked picturesque and somehow quite correct 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 sophala 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 Massey, in his opinion, was a contemptible idiot. The first time the Sephala reappeared under the new agreement, swinging out of the bend below, after he had almost given up or 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 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 Sophala. He exasperated out of his quiet superciliousness, Without looking at anyone right or left, he accosted Massey straightway and so determined a manner that the engineer, taken aback, began to stammer unintelligibly.

Nothing could be heard but the words, Mr Van Wick! Indeed, Mr Van Wick! For the future, Mr Van Wick! And by the suffusion of blood, Massey's vast, bilious face acquired an unnatural orange tint, out of which the disconcerted coal-black eyes shone in an extraordinary manner. nonsense I'm tired of this I wonder you have the impudence to come alongside my jetty as if I had it made for your convenience alone Massey tried to protest earnestly Mr Van Wick 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

the right without delay. In his agitation Massey 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 Wick turned on his heel. The other three whites on the bridge had not stirred during the scene. Massey walked hastily from side to side, puffed at 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 right 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 Wally, his new partner, would not let him,

probably, besides it would only be putting off the evil day. For his own party, 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 Wally, 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 interest as much as mine? It's no joking matter. He took the foot of the table, growling between his teeth. Unless you have a few thousands put away somewhere, I haven't. Mr. Van Wick dined in his thoroughly lit-up bungalow, putting a point of splendour in 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 fingertips at rest on the keyboard. His little terrier barked violently, backing in from the veranda. A deep voice apologised gravely for this intrusion. He walked out quickly. At the head of the steps, the patriarchal figure, who was the new captain of the Safala apparently, he had seen a round dozen of them, but not one of that sort,

towered without advancing. The little dog barked unceasingly till a flick of Mr Van Wicks' handkerchief made him spring aside into silence. Captain Wally, opening the matter, was met by a punctiliously polite, but determined opposition. They carried on their discussion standing where they had come face to face. Mr Van Wick observed his visitor with attention.

Then at last as if forced out of his reserve, I am surprised that you should intercede for such a confounded fool. This outbreak was almost complimentary as if its meaning had been that such a man as you should intercede. Captain Wally let it pass by without flinching. One would have thought he had heard nothing. He simply went on to state that he was personally interested in putting things straight between them, personally. But Mr. Van Wick really carried away by his disgust with Massey 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 Wally, 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 closely associated? A sort of solemn silence lasted for a moment. He was not used to asking favours, but the importance he attached to this affair had made him willing to try. Mr Van Wick, favourably impressed and suddenly mollified 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 Wally stepped forward heavily. As to the regularity of the service for the future, he made himself responsible for it, and his name was Wally. Perhaps to a sailor, he was speaking to a sailor, was he not, not altogether unfamiliar? There was a lighthouse now on an island, maybe Mr. Van Wick himself. Oh, yes, oh indeed, Mr. Van Wick caught on at once. He indicated a chair. How very interesting. For his own party, it seemed some service in the last Archeon War, but had never been so far east. Wally Island, of course. Now that was very interesting. What changes his guest must have seen since? I can look further back even on a whole half century. Captain Wally expanded a bit.

The flavour 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 furnished 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 through 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 shows. shapes, with a great profusion of skin rugs strewn on the teakwood planking all over the veranda. The flower and creepers scented the air, their foliage clipped out between the uprights, made

as if several frames of thick, unstirring leaves, reflecting the lamplight in a green glow. Through the opening at his elbow, Captain Wally could see the gangway lantern of the Safala burning dim by the shore, the shadowy masses of the town beyond the open, lustrous darkness of the river, and as if hung along the straight edge 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, someone 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 root,

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 Wick 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 Wally had been also the pioneer. of the early trade in the Gulf of Pat G. Lee. He even found occasion to mention that he had buried his dear wife there six and twenty years ago. Mr Van Wick, impassive, could not help speculating in his mind swiftly as to the sort of woman that would mate with such a man. Did they make an adventurous and well-matched pair? No. Very possible she had been small, frail, no doubt very feminine, or most likely commonplace, with domestic instinct, utterly insignificant. But Captain Wally 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. Van Wick's solitude. Mr. Van Wick affirmed that sometimes he had more company than he wanted. He mentioned smilingly some of the peculiarities of his intercourse with my soul. 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 Wally remembered immediately that in 47, the then-Sulton, this man's grandfather, had been notorious as a great protector of the piratical fleets of prows from farther east. They had a safe refuge in the river at Batu-Beru-Beru. He financed more

especially a Balanini chief called Hajidaman. Captain Wally, nodding significantly, his bushy white eyebrows, had very good reason to know something of that. The world had progressed since that time. Mr Van Wick demurred with unexpected acrimony, progressed in what he wanted to know. Why, in knowledge of truth, in decency, in justice, in order, in honesty too, since men harmed each other mostly from ignorance. It was Captain Wally, concluded quaintly, more pleasant to live in. Mr. Van Wick whimsically would not admit that Mr. Massey, for instance, was more pleasant naturally than the Balanini pirates. The river had not gained much by the change. They were, in their way, every bit as honest. Massey was less ferocious than Haji Daman, no doubt, but.

And what about you, my good sir? Captain Wally laughed, a good deep laugh. You are an improvement, surely. He continued in a vein of pleasantry. A good cigar was better than a knock on the head, the sort of welcome he would have found on this river 40 or 50 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, peaceable, 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'd ever slid 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 60 miles south-west of Tampa-Suck. It did one's heart good 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 Wally believed a disposition 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 dispossed.

position had to be helped up pretty sharply sometimes, he admitted. They might be silly, wrong-headed, unhappy, but naturally evil, no. There was, at bottom, a complete harmlessness at least. Is there, Mr Van Wick's snapped acrimoniously? Captain Wally laughed at the interjection, in the good humour 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 murmured after a pause, I'm 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 Wick,

who got up and wriggled his shoulders with an enigmatic half-smile. They walked out together amicably into the starry night towards the riverside. Their footsteps resounded unequally on the dark path. At the shore end of the gangway, the lantern, hung low to the handrail, threw a vivid light on the white legs and the big black feet of Mr Massey waiting about anxiously. From the waist upward he remained shadowy, with a row of buttons gleaming up to the vague outline of his chin. You may thank Captain Wally for this, Mr Van Wick said curtly to him before turning away. The lamps on the veranda hung 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 Flowerbeds 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 And a soft glow all along the front And everything near and far Stood still in a great immobility in a great sweetness. Mr Van Wick, 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 Welley'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 completely, 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 sail 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 man reduced to such a humble position

but the expression of something essentially noble in the character. With all his trust in mankind he was no fool. The serenity of his temper at the end of so many years, since it could not obviously have been appeased by success, wore an air of profound wisdom. Mr Van Wick was amused at it sometimes. Even the very physical trays of the old captain of the Sephala, his powerful frame, his reposeful mean,

his intelligent handsome face, the big limbs, the benign courtesy, the touch of rugged severity and the shaggy eyebrows made up a seductive personality. Mr Van Wick disliked a 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 fastidiousness.

They kept their respective opinions on all-worldly matters. his other convictions Captain Wally never intruded. The difference of their ages was like another bond between them. Once, when twitted with the uncharitableness of his youth, Mr Van Wick running his eye over the vast proportions of his interlocutor retorted 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 look good for around hundred. But he could not help his stinging incisiveness. and, though moderating it by an almost affectionate smile, he added, and by then you will probably consent to die from sheer disgust. Captain Wally, smiling too, shook his head.

God 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 to his maker to provide a manner of going out of which he need not be ashamed. For the rest, he had to have to come. hoped he would live to a hundred if need be. Other men had been known. It would be no miracle. He expected no miracles. The pronounced argumentative tone caused Mr Van Wick to raise his head and look at him steadily. Captain Wally was gazing fixedly with a rapt expression as though he had seen his

creator's favourable decree written in mysterious characters on the wall. He kept perfectly motionless for a few seconds, then got his vast bulk onto his feet, so impetuously that Mr Van Wick was startled. 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. This isn't a boast of it, you know, 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 Wick detected a faint smile of assurance flitting under the the heavy moustache.

Later on, Captain Wally 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 humanely, my dear Mr. Van Wick from the very first. You'll admit there was some merit, Mr Van Wick hinted slyly, an associate of that excellent Massey.

Well, well, my dear Captain, I won't say a word against him. It would be no use of saying anything against him, Captain Well, he affirmed a little moodily. As I've told you before, my life, my work is necessary, not for myself, for 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 solid, thank God. You can't understand how one feels. Bone of my 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 if by an effort of meditation. But generally his mind seemed steeped in the serenity of boundless trust in a higher power. Mr Van Wick wondered sometimes how much of it was due to the splendid vitality of the man, to the bodily vigour which seemed to impart something of its force to the soul.

but he had learned to like him very much. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Peter Dan. Chapter 13, The End of the Tether. This was the reason why Mr. Stern's confidential communication, 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, Rodolfo Burley, very yellow chinaman, resembling Mr Massey, waited apathetically with a 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 of the awning.

The side screens had been lowered all round. Captain Wally, filling the depths of the wicker chair, 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 boys, 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 Wicks'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 Wick, perplexed, folded his arms, and, leaning back against the rail, with his little black, shiny feet well out, examined him covertly.

I've noticed of late that you're 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. Dut, dot, dot, dot. The wicker chair creaked heavily. irritable commented Mr Van Wick to himself and aloud, I expect to see you in half an hour then, he said negligently, moving off. In half an hour, Captain Wally's rigid silvery head repeated behind him as if out of a trance.

Amid ships below, two voices close against the engine room, could be heard answering each other, one angry and slow, the other alert. I tell you, the beast has locked himself in to get a bit of the engine room, could be heard answering each other, one angry and slow, the other alert. The beast has locked himself in to get drunk. Can't help it now, Mr. Massey, after all a man has a right to shut himself up in his cabin and his own time. Not to get drunk. I heard him swear that the worry with the boilers was enough to drive any man to drink, Stern said maliciously. Massey hissed out something about bursting the door in.

Mr. Van Wick 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 Wick! Mr Van Wick! He walked on. Somebody was running on the path. You've forgotten to get your mail! Stern, holding a bundle of papers in his hand, caught up with him. Oh, thanks.

But as the other continued at his elbow, Mr. Van Wick stopped short. The overhanging eaves descending 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 Wick's servants were laying the table for two on the veranda. I'm afraid you give me no credit whatever for my good intentions in the matter I've spoken to you about, said Stern. I simply don't understand you. Captain Wally is a very audacious man, but he will understand that his game is up. That's all that anybody ever need know of it.

from me. Believe me, I'm 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 Wick felt a loathsome dismay at this queer 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 Wally had the tenacity of a disinterested sentiment and his practical instinct coming to his aid, he concealed his scorn.

I gather, then, that this is something grave. Very grave, stern assented solemnly, delighted at having produced an effect at last. He was ready to add some effusive protestations of regret at the unavoidable necessity, but Mr Van Wick cut him short, very civil. however. Once on the veranda, Mr Van Wick 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. And this was true enough. In the face of Massey's last rebuff, Stern dared not to clear his

knowledge. His object was simply to get charge of the steamer and keep it for some time. Massey would never forgive him for forcing himself on, but if Captain Wally 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 reflection 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 Massey needlessly. No fuss. Let it all happen naturally. Mr Van Wick, all through the dinner, was called. conscious of a sense of isolation that invades sometimes the closeness of human intercourse. Captain Wally failed lamentably and obviously in his attempts to eat something. He seemed overcome by a strange absent-mindedness. His hand would hover irresolutely as if left without guidance by a

preoccupied mind. Mr Van Wick had heard him coming up from a long way off in the profound stillness of the riverside 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 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 Wick wondered, as if Captain Welley had been miles and miles,

miles away, out of sight and earshot of all evil. He was sickened by an immense disgust of stern. To even mention his threat to a man like Wally would be positively indecent. There was something more vile and insulting in its hint that in a definite charge of crime, the debasing taint of blackmailing. What could anyone bring against him, he asked himself? This was a limpid 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 seemed to Mr Van Wick that Stern might possibly be coveting the command of the Safala. 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 intrigue of that sort was hardly worth troubling about, he did. judged, but still, with such a fool as Massey to deal with, Wally ought to and must be warned. At this moment, Captain Wally, bolt upright, the deep cavities of the eyes overhung by a bushy frown, and one large brown hand resting on each side of his empty plate, spoke across the tablecloth abruptly. Mr Van Wick, you've always treated me with the utmost humane consideration.

My dear Captain, you make too much of a simple fact that I am not as savage. Mr Van Wick, utterly revolted by the thought of Stern'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 pineapple he was cutting into small pieces on his plate. In changing his position, Captain Wally had condemned to him.

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 Wick stared blankly as if something momentous has happened all at once. He did not know why he should feel so startled, but he forgot stern utterly for the moment.

Why, what's the matter? And Captain Wally, half averted in a deadened agitated voice, muttered, esteem. And I may add something more, Mr. Van Wick, very steady-eyed, pronounced slowly. Hold, enough! Captain Wally did not change his attitude or raise his voice. Say no more. 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 see. Mr. Van Wick, leaning forward, his face gone pink all over with a starched table napkin over his knees, was inclined to mistrust his senses, his power of comprehension,

the sanity of his guest. Where? Why? In the name of God, what's this? What ship? I don't understand. Then in the name of God it is I. A ship's unworthy when her captain can't see. I am going blind. Mr. Van Wick made a slaguer. movement and sat very still afterwards for a few seconds. Then, with a thought of Stearns, 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 Wally passed over him.

I've deceived them all, nobody knows. He emerged flushed to the eyes. Captain Wally, 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 humane man, "'a gentleman, Mr. Van Wick.

"'You may have asked me what I had done with my conscience.' "'He seemed to muse profoundly silent, "'very still in his mournful pose. "'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 me.

Massey. No, not altogether. I knew he took me for a wealthy sailor-full, 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, in a 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 to you of the thoughts that haunt the dead in their graves. A cold shudder ran down Mr Van Wicks 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 visitation, Captain Wally 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 sarang at hand there, an old servant. It came on gradually and when he could no longer deceive himself, his voice died out almost.

Rather than give her up, I set myself to deceive you all. It's incredible, whispered Mr. Van Wick. Captain Wally's appalling murmur flowed on. Not even the sign of God's anger could make me forget her. How could I forget my child, feeling my vigour 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.

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. Ah, 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 Wick, whose feeling of outraged love had been translated into a form of struggle 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. Captain Wally had not changed his attitude that seemed to express something of shame, sorrow, and defiance. I 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. Haven't I lied to you? "'Weren't you going to trust your property on board this very trip?' "'I have a floating yearly policy,' Mr Van Wick said almost unwittingly,

"'and was amazed at the sudden cropping 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 Wally. "'He had not dared to consult a doctor. "'The man would have perhaps asked who he was, he was doing, as he 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. 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 table. Mr Van Wick, arms down, chin on breast, with a gleam of white teeth pressing on the lower lip, meditated on sterns, the games up.

The sarang, of course, does not know. Nobody, said Captain Wally, with assurance. Ah, yes, nobody, very well. Can you keep it up to the end of the trip? That is the last under the agreement with Massey? Captain Wally 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 reprash to himself. His voice faltered. Think of it, never to see her any more. the only human being beside myself now on earth that can remember 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, I don't. I know only the child who is given. me, and he began to walk. Mr. Van Wick, jumping up, saw the full meaning of the rigid head, the hesitating feet, the vaguely extended hand. His heart was beating fast. He moved a chair aside and instinctively advanced as if to offer his arm, but Captain Wally passed him by, making for

the stairs quite straight. He could not see me at all out of his line, Van Wick thought with a sort of war. Then going to the head of the stairs, he asked a little tremulous. What is it like? Like a mist? Like Captain Wally halfway down stopped and turned round, undismayed to answer. It is as if the light were ebbing out of the world. Have you ever watched the ebbing sea on an open stretch of sand 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 Wick because he checked him by an authoritative gesture and a stoical. I 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 Wick, arrested, seemed to count the footsteps right out of earshaw. 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 happening upon the piano, struck a few chords again and again vigorously, 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 four paws, 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 gate in the direction of the wharf. The bullocks of the Safala 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 shapes of white boats, the curves of davits, lines of rail and stanchions, all confused and mingling darkly everywhere. But low down, amid ships, a single lighted port steered 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 wound round.

the foot of a thick wooden post in the ground. Mr. Van Wick, peering alongside, heard a mussy, 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 Wick hesitated, stooped. It was impossible to look through unless he went down into the mud. stern he said half aloud the drunken voice within said gladly stern of course look at him blink look at him stern wally massey massey wallie stern but massy's the best you can't come over him he would just love to see you starve mr van wick 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, Stern appeared, walking as noiselessly as a cat on the wharf.

It's so jolly dark, and I had no idea you would be down tonight. What's this horrible raving? asked Mr. Van Wick, 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'll be right enough by tomorrow afternoon, and Mr. Massey will keep on worrying up and down the deck. We'd better get away. He muttered suggestively of a talk up at the house. He had long desired to affect an entrance there, but Mr. Van Wick nonchonately demurred. It would not, he feared, be quite prudent, perhaps. The opaque black windows 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 the 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 Wick said. Ghost-like in their white clothes they could not distinguish each other's features and their feet made no sound on the soft earth.

A sort of purring was heard. Mr. Stern felt gratified by such a beginning. I thought Mr. Van Wick, a gentleman of your sort, 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. Stern 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. Why, yes, only look at the way he walks, Mr. Van Wick took him up in a perfectly cool and undoubting tone.

The question, however, is whether your 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 Wick presumed that this meant something favourable. stern 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 Massey 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 hundred, 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. Stern's final rapid winking remained buried in the deep darkness, simulating with his whispers. Supposing then he got the loan, Mr Van Wick resumed in a deliberate undertone.

On your own showing, 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 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 discussion? Thank you, sir. I am sure you couldn't get anybody that was. would care more for your interest. Well, it suits my interest that Captain Wally 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 Wick, I want nothing better. I'm sure I am infinitely. I 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've been looking on myself. That old Serang has been trained up to the game. There's nothing the matter with his limbs, sir. He's got used to doing things himself in a remarkable way. And let me tell you, sir, that Captain Wally, poor man, is by no means

useless. In 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 of 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 back, will go on doing the right thing most surprisingly well, even if left quite to themselves. Only the white man must be 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 make to take the ship out of Pankham. Gou 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 a 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 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 Wick, in a choked mutter, as though he were feeling sick. You'll find me a good enough, servant, sir. Mr. Stern hoped now for a handshake at least, but unexpectedly with a,

what's this, better not to be seen together, Mr Van Wick'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 porthole shone from afar. His head swam with the intoxication of sudden success. What a thing it 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 proceeding from a darker part amid ships. Mr. Massey 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 your confounded swelling pig you. Do you hear me, you beast? The kicking stopped, and in the pause the muzzly oracular voice announced from within, Ah, a massy now, that's another thing. A mass he's deep.

Who's after, you stern? He'll drink himself into a fit of horrors. The chief engineer appeared vague and big at the corner of the engine room. He will be good enough for duty tomorrow. I would let him be, Mr Massey. Stern 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. Massey, with his ear again, the door of Jack's cabin listened critically to a deep, stertorous breathing within. This was a dead drunk sleep. The bout was over, tranquilised on that score. He too went in and with slow wriggles got out of his old tweed jacket. It 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 favourite place was a hook on a wooden awning stanchion on the bridge almost against the binnacle yet even in the early days

more than one tussle on that point with Captain Wally who desired the bridge to be kept tidy he'd been overawed then of late though he'd been able to defy his partner with impunity Captain Wally never seemed to notice anything now. As to the malaise 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 had swung from. With an unexpectedness which made Mr Massey jump and dropped the coat at his feet, there came from the next berth a crash and thud of a headlong, jingling, clattering fall. The faithful Jack must have dropped to sleep suddenly as he sat at his revels, and now he 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 outright on the spot. Mr. Massey held his breath. At last a sleepy, uneasy, groaning sigh was exiled slowly on the other side of the bulkhead. I hope to goodness he's too drunk to wake up now, muttered Mr Massey. The sound of a softly knowing line. nearly drove him to despair. He swore violently under his breath. The fool would keep him awake all night now for certain. He cursed his luck. He wanted to forget his maddening troubles in sleep sometimes.

He could detect no movements. Without apparently making the slightest attempt to get up, Jack went on sniggering to himself where he lay, then began to speak where he left off, as it were. Massey, I love the dirty rascal. He would like to see his poor old Jack starve, but just you look where he has climbed to. He hiccoped in a superior leisurely manner, ship-boning it with the best. A lottery ticket you want.

Ha, ha! I'll give you lottery tickets, my boy. Let the old ship sink and the old chum starve. That's right. He don't go wrong. Massey 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 old fool has taken it to heart muttered Massey 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. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

I would like to see her at the bottom of the sea Oh, you clever, clever devil. Oisha Sankai, I should think you would, my boy, the damned old thing, and all your troubles wither. Raking the insurance money, turn your back on your old chum, all's well, gentlemen again. A grim stillness had come over Massey'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 death-like 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 Massey, Esquire? When he's tired of waiting, he will do away with her. Look out, down she goes, chum and all. He knows 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 drunk, for at last the heavy sleep gripped him with the suddenness of a magic spell, and the last word lengthened itself into an entom.

permissible, noisy, indrawn snore. And then even the snoring stopped, and all was still. But it seemed as though Mr Massey 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 of every desire, for turning about and throwing his up, arms over the edge of his bunk, he stood there with his feet on his favourite 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 grey framing ashore crowded with houses thatched roof beyond thatch 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 at the turn. This was Batu Baru, and the day had come. Mr Massey 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. Aye, but if you wanted to do nothing, you had to get first a good bit of money. A ship won't save you. He cursed the Safala. 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.

End of Chapter 13. Chapter 14 of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Read by Peter Dan. Chapter 14, The End of the Tether. The deep interminable hoot of the steam whistle had in its grave vibrating note something intolerable which sent a slight shudder down Mr Van Wicks' back.

It was the early afternoon, the Safala was leaving Batu-Beru for Pangu the next place of call. She swung in the stream, scantily attended by a few canoes, and, gliding on the broad river, became lost to view from the Van Wick bungalow. Its owner had not gone this time to see her off. Generally he came down to the wharf, exchanged a few words with the bridge while she cast off, and waved his hand to Captain Wally at the last moment. day he did not even go so far as the balustrade of the veranda. He couldn't see me if I did, he said to himself. I wonder whether he can make out the house at all.

And this thought somehow 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 Wally's blindness had opened his eyes to his own. There were many sorts of heartaches 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 Sephala 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 necessary that he should come out into the world for a time at least he had money something could be arranged he would grudge no time no trouble no loss of his solitude it weighed on him now and captain wellie appeared to him as he had sat shading his eyes as if being deceived in the trust of his faith he were beyond all the good and evil that can be wrought by the hands of men

Mr Van Wick's thoughts followed the Sephala 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. Stern, who took the watch from four to six, and then went below to hug himself with delight at the prospect of being virtually employed by a rich man like Mr. Van Wick. He could not see how any hitch could occur now. He did not seem able to get over the feeling 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 Stern came out cheerily to take charge again till midnight.

At ten he was still chirruping and humming to himself on the bridge and about that time Mr Van Wick's thought abandoned the Safala. Mr. Van Wick had fallen asleep at last. Massey, blocking the engine-room companion, jerked himself into his tweed jacket surlily, while the second waited with a scowl. Oh, 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 sombre 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 inward tremor of his heart. An incomprehensible growl answered him. What, can't you open your mouth now? You yelp out your infernal rock loud enough when you're drunk. What do you mean by abusing people in that way, you useless old booze are you? Can't help it.

Don't remember anything about it. You shouldn't listen. You dare to tell me what do you mean by going on a drunk like this? Don't ask me, sick of the damn boilers, you would be, sick of life. I 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. I 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 tomorrow, you would starve. Remember that? Say, Mr. Massey. Mr. Massey, repeated the other stolidly. Disheveled with dull bloodshot eyes, a snuffy, grimy shirt, greasy trousers,

naked feet thrust into ragged slippers. He bolted in head down directly Massey 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 Beiru 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 a slim hull. On a sea of sombre grey and unwrinkled, the ship moved on an even keel, as if flywood.

floating detached in empty space. But Mr Massey slapped his forehead, tottered a little, caught hold of a belaying pin at the foot of the mast. I shall go mad, he muttered, walking across the deck unsteadily. A shovel was scraping loose coal down below. A fire door clanged. Stern on the bridge began whistling a new tune. Captain Wally, sitting on the couch, awake and fully dressed,

heard the door of his cabin open. He did not move in the lower. waiting to recognise the voice with an appalling strain of prudence. A bulkhead lamp blazed on the white paint, the crimson plush, the brown varnish of mahogany tops. The white wood-packing case under the bed-place had remained unopened for three years now, as though Captain Wally 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 handsome head with big eyebrows,

a rigid profile to the doorway. The expected voice spoke out at last. Once more, then, what am I to call you? Ah, Massey, 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. I know what I want. Messy stepped in and closed the door, and I'm going to have to try for it with you once more. His wine was half persuasive, half menacing. For it's no manner of use to tell me that you're poor.

You don't spend anything on yourself, that's true enough, but there's another name for that. You think you're 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 ears if I'd known you had only a beggarly £500 in the world? You ought to have told me. "'Perhaps,' said Captain Wally, bowing his head,

"'and yet it has saved you.' "'Massie laughed scornfully. "'I've told you often enough since. "'And I don't believe you now, "'when I think how I let you lord it over my ship, "'do you remember how he used to bully rag 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'm poor and I can't. I've only this five hundred in the world.' He contemplated the immobility of Captain Wally that seemed to present an unconquerable obstacle in his path. His face took a mournful cast. "'You're a hard man!'

"'Enough,' said Captain Wally, turning upon him. "'You shall get nothing from me because I have nothing of mine to give away now.' "'Tell that to the Marines.' Mr Massey going out looked back once, then the door closed, and Captain Wally alone sat as still as before. He had nothing of his own, even his past of honour, of truth, of just pride, was gone. All his spotless life had fallen into the abyss. He had set his last goodbye 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. And an immense and fierce impulse, the very passion of paternity, flamed up with all the unquenched vigour of his worthless life in a desire to see her face. Just across the deck, Massey 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. Stern could at no time have told him anything new about his partner, he could have told Mr. Stern that another use could be made of a man's affliction than just to kick him out and thus defer the term of a difficult 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 Wally was disabled but if it so happened that he put his ship ashore somewhere for good and all that 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 Wally to be so confoundedly destitute as not to have some more money put away somewhere. If he Massey could get hold of it, that would pay for the boilers and everything 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 insurance money in his pocket. And as baffled, he left Captain Wally's cabin.

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 a, 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 common prejudices crept into his breast,

made his heart beat fast, his mouth turned 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 covering the stokehold fiddle and the boiler space a store-room 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 in 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, winched covers all in rags, remnants of lamps and a brown felt hat, discarded by a dead man now on a fever on the Brazil coast, who had been once made of the Safala, had remained for years.

jammed forcibly behind a length of burst copper pipe, flung at some time or other out of the engine room. A complete and imperious blackness pervaded that kaffar norm of forgotten things. A small shaft of light from Mr Massey's bullseye 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 Massey knew something of the scientific basis of his clever trick. If you wanted 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 amount of surface for weight in your iron, and its surface 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 trousers 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 quietness. 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 Sarang appeared noiselessly on the bridge to relieve the mate. Stern overflowed with good nature since he had nothing more to desire. Got your eyes well open yet, Serang? It's middling dark. I'll wait till you get your sight properly. The old Malay murmured, looked up with his worn eyes, sidled away into the light of the binnacle, and, crossing 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 there? He knows the time? Well then, I'm 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 Stern could well believe it, and he concluded serenely that Captain Wally must be able to see people more or less as himself just now, for instance. But not being certain of anybody had to keep up that unnoticing silence of manner for fear of giving himself away. Mr. Stern was a shrewd guesser.

This necessity of every moment brought home to Captain Wally his heart the humiliation of his falsehood. He had drifted into it from paternal love, from incredulity, from boundless trust in divine justice metered 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 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 misfile fortune was stronger than hope, he tried not to believe the manifest thing. In vain, in the steadily darkening universe, a sinister clearness fell upon his ideas. In the illuminating

moments 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 presumption, 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 revolting 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 temptation in a childlike humility of spirit. Did words mean anything? Whence did the gift of spirit? Whence did the gift of spirit? And, whence did the gift of beach 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 pretense of his watch. The night was dark. All the nights were dark now. Zerang, he said, half aloud. I d'artuan, I am here. There are clouds in the sky? There are Tuan. Let it be steered straight. North. She's going north, Twan.

The sarang stepped back. Captain Wally recognized Massey's footfalls on the bridge. The engineer walked over to port and returned, passing behind the chair several times. Captain Wally 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 Wally. that 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. Messi stopped and said, So you still say you must go?

I must, indeed. And you couldn't at least leave the money for a term of years? Impossible. Can't trust it with me without your care, eh? Captain Wally remained safe. silent, Massey sighed deeply over the back of the chair. It would just do to save me, he said in a tremulous voice. I've saved you once. 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 hiding completely the compass card from the quartermaster at the wheel. "'Duan,' the Lasker at last murmured softly, "'meaning to let the white man know that he could not see to steer. "'Mr Massey had accomplished his purpose. "'The coat was hanging from the nail within six inches of the binnacle, "'and directly he had stepped aside the quartermaster,

"'a middle-aged, pock-marked, Sumatra Malay, "'al 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 the sea. 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 sarang who had come over to the wheel,

made a slight stir which attracted Captain Wally's anxious attention. He said, Take better care. Then everything settled to the usual quiet on the bridge. Mr. Massey had disappeared. But the iron in the pockets of the coat had done its work and the safala, heading north by the compass, made untrue by this simple device, was no longer making 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 went on uninterrupted in the great calm of the sea, joining on all sides the motionless layer of cloud over the sky.

A gentle stillness as vast as the world seemed to wait upon her path, enveloping her lovingly in a supreme caress. Mr Massey thought there could be no better night for an arranged shipwreck. Run up iron dry on one of the reefs east of Pangu, wait for daylight, hole in the bottom, outboats, 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. over the side or even fling it into the sea. A detail, who could guess.

Cote had 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 sarang'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, Sarang? Yes, Tuan, not yet. No, not yet, Captain Wiley 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

Saffala to his daughter. His thought lingered on the name. How often he and his wife had talked over the 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 happiness. 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 her, 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 had been starved of love too long. He imagined her tenderness. The sarang had been peering forward and now and then glancing at the chair. He fidgeted restlessly and suddenly burst out close to Captain Wally.

Twan, do you see anything of the land? The alarmed voice brought Captain Wally 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, Twan. We are close. You must see. Look, I say, look. Mr. Massey, awakened by the sudden sound of talking from a short dose 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. The horror of incertitude had seized upon Captain Wally, the miserable mistrust of men,

of things of the very earth. He had steered that very course thirty-six times by the same compass. If anything was certain in the world, it was its absolute unerring correctness. Then what had happened? Did the Serang lie? Why lie? Why? Was he going blind, too? Is there a mist? Look low on the water. Look down, I say. there's no mist, see for yourself. Captain Wally steadied the trembling of his limb 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. Yeah, Tuan, on the course now, look. Captain Wally strode to the binnacle, which to him made such a dim spot of light in an infinity of shapeless shadow. By bending his face right down to the glass he had been able before, having to stoop 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. Massey's coat falling, struck the deck heavily with a dull thump accompanied by a lot of cliques.

What's this? Captain Wally fell on his knees with groping hands extended in a frank gesture of blindness. They trembled these hands feeling for the truth. He saw it iron near the compass. "'Rong course, wrecker, 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 mountain.

"'It was low water along the north side of the strait. "'Mr Massey had not reckoned on that. "'Instead of running her ground for half her length, "'the Safala butted the sheer ridge of a ridge of a street. a stone reef which would have been a wash at high water. This made this 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 ropes, splintering sounds,

loud cracks, the mast-head lamp flew over the bows and all the doors about the deck began to bang heavily. Then, after having hit, she reached. 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 a massive splinters, sticks and broken wood. Captain Wally picked himself up and stood knee-deep in wreckage, torn, bleeding, knowing the nature of the danger he had escaped mostly by the sound and holding Mr. Massey. coat in his arms. By this time stern, 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 sarang pronounced distinctly above the confused murmurs, Eight fathom! He had heaved the lead. Mr. Stern cried out next in a strained pitch. Where the devil has she got to? Where are we?

Captain Wally replied in a calm base, amongst the reefs to the eastward. You know it, sir? Then she will never get out again. She'll be sunk in five minutes. "'Boats, Stern! 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 malaise, after a moment of confusion, became quiet, and Mr. Stern showed a good countenance. Captain Wally 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 of the bridge whispered insanely, Say nothing of it. Massey stumbled closer. Captain Wally heard the chattering of his teeth. I have the coat.

Throw it down and come along, urged the chattering voice. Bap out! You will get fifteen years for this. Mr. Massey had lost his voice. His speech was a mere dry rustling in his throat. Have mercy. Had you had any when you made me lose my ship? Mr Massey, you shall get fifteen years for this.

I wanted money, money, my own money, I will give you some money, take half of it, you love money yourself. There's a justice. Massey made an awful effort and in a strange half-choked utterance, You blind devil, it's you that drove me to it. Captain Wally, 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 Scott Free.

Stern's voice commanded, Lower away! The blocks rattled. Now then he cried over with you. This way, you Jack here, Mr Massey, Mr Massey, Captain, quick sir, let's get... 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 have nothing but the 500 pounds. Well, you have nothing at all now. their ships lost and the insurance won't be paid. Captain Wally did not move. True, I have his 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.

Massey did not seem able to tear himself away from the bridge. He chatted and hissed despairingly. Give it up to me, give it up. No, said Captain Wally. 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. Massey did not seem to understand, but the love of life awakened suddenly drove him away from the bridge. Captain Wally laid the coat down and stumbled

amongst the heaps of wreckage to the side. Is Mr. Matthew with you? He called out into the night. Stern from the boat shouted, yes, we've got him. Come along, sir. It's madness to stay longer. Captain Wally felt along the rail carefully and, without a word, cast off the painter. They were expecting him still down there. They were waiting till a voice suddenly exclaimed, We are adrift, shove off! Captain Wally, leap! Pull up a 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 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 wally 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. Massey'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 wally, 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 Sephala, a black mass upon a black sea, lying still at an appalling cant.

No sound came from her. Then, with a great bizarre, 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 something standing upright and narrow, like a rock out of the sea, and then that too disappeared. When the Sofala failed to come back to Batu Beiru at the proper time,

Mr Van Wick understood at once that he would never see, her any more. But he did not know what had happened till some months afterwards when, in a native craft, lent him by his sultan, he had made his way to the Safala'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 Wick would not have been able to learn any details had it not been for Stern, whom he met one day on the key near the bridge over the creek, almost on the very spot where Captain Wally, to preserve his daughter's £500 intact,

had turned to get a sampan which would take him on board the safarer. From afar Mr Van Wick saw Stern 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 related how the boat 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 place. The inquiry had exonerated everybody from all blame. The loss of the ship was put down to an unusual 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. Stern passed his tongue on his lips and glanced aside. I'd 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 Massey if he had arranged that shipwreck himself,

the most timely total loss I've ever heard of. What became of that, Massey? asked Mr. Van Wick. 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 Manila by mailboat early in the morning. I gave him chase right aboard, and he told me that he was going to make his fortune dead shore in Manila.

I could go to the devil for all he cared. And yet he is good as promised to give me the command if I didn't talk too much. You never said anything, Mr Van Wick began? Not I, sir. Why should I? I mean to get on, but the dead aren't it? in my way, said Stern. His eyelids were beating rapidly, then trooped for an instant. Besides, sir, it would have been an awkward business. You made me hold my tongue just a bit too long. Did you know how it was that Captain Wally remained on board? Did he really refuse to leave?

Come now, or was it perhaps an accidental? Nothing, Stern interrupted with energy. I tell you, I yelled for him to leap overboard. He simply must have cast off the painter of the boat himself. we all yelled for 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'd tell you. This was all that Stern had to say.

Mr Van Wick 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 Massey and Captain Wally. Extraordinary old man, he said. He came into my office from nowhere in particular, as you may say, with his 500 pounds to place, and that engineer fellow following him anxiously, and now he's gone out a little inexplicably just as he came.

I could never understand him quite. There was no mystery at all about that Massey, eh? I wonder whether Wally refused to leave the ship. It would have been foolish, and he was blameless as the court found. Mr Van Wick 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 general theory was that the captain had remained too long on board trying to save something of importance, perhaps 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 Wally 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 unusual, especially in a man of his age. Mr. Van Wick shook his head. Captain Wally 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 somehow 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 something 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 was certain of having 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 presentiment, I wonder. Perhaps. Still, it seems a miserable end for such a striking figure. Oh yes, it was a miserable end, Mr Van Wick said, with so much fervour that the lawyer looked up but curiously, and afterwards, after parting with him, he remarked to an acquaintance, Queerperse and 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 company to take over his estates, another tobacco district thrown open. He's wise, I think,

these good times won't last forever. In the southern hemisphere, Captain Welley's daughter 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 borders had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat upstairs in his big armchair with a book, thin-faced, wrapped up in rugs to the waist. The house was still and the greyness of a cloudy day lay against the panes of three lofty 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 tablecloth.

She read the opening sentence, Most profound regret, painful duty, Your father is no more, in accordance with his instructions, fatal casualty, consolation, no blame attached to him, his mammary. Her face was thin, her temples a little sunk under the smooth bands of black hair.

Her lips remained resolutely 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 onto the floor. She tore it open, snatched out the enclosure. My dearest child, it said, I am writing this while I am able yet to write legibly. I am 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 500 pounds. Of what I have earned, I have kept nothing 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 must see you once more. It is hard to believe that you will ever look on these lines. God seems to have forgotten me.

I want to see you, and yet death would be a greater favour. If you ever read these words, I charge you to begin by thanking 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 meanness of a hard struggle for bread. Even the image of a husband and of her children

seemed to glide away from her into grey 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 boddus, and leaning her forehead against a window pane remained there till dusk, perfectly motionless, giving him all the time she could spare. Gone. Was it possible, my God, was it possible? The blow had come softened by the space 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 loved him. She felt she had loved him, after all. End of Chapter 14. End of The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad.