End of the Tether | Page 9

and walked down the street.
It was a recently opened and untidy thoroughfare with rudimentary
side-walks and a soft layer of dust cushion- ing the whole width of the
road. One end touched the slummy street of Chinese shops near the
harbor, the other drove straight on, without houses, for a couple of
miles, through patches of jungle-like vegetation, to the yard gates of the
new Consolidated Docks Company. The crude frontages of the new
Government buildings alter- nated with the blank fencing of vacant
plots, and the view of the sky seemed to give an added spaciousness to
the broad vista. It was empty and shunned by natives after business
hours, as though they had expected to see one of the tigers from the
neighborhood of the New Waterworks on the hill coming at a loping
canter down the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Cap-
tain Whalley was not dwarfed by the solitude of the grandly planned

street. He had too fine a presence for that. He was only a lonely figure
walking purposefully, with a great white beard like a pilgrim, and with
a thick stick that resembled a weapon. On one side the new Courts of
Justice had a low and unadorned portico of squat columns half
concealed by a few old trees left in the approach. On the other the
pavilion wings of the new Colonial Treasury came out to the line of the
street. But Captain Whalley, who had now no ship and no home,
remembered in passing that on that very site when he first came out
from England there had stood a fishing village, a few mat huts erected
on piles between a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went
writhing into a tangled wilderness without any docks or waterworks.
No ship--no home. And his poor Ivy away there had no home either. A
boarding-house is no sort of home though it may get you a living. His
feelings were horribly rasped by the idea of the boarding-house. In his
rank of life he had that truly aristocratic tempera- ment characterized by
a scorn of vulgar gentility and by prejudiced views as to the derogatory
nature of cer- tain occupations. For his own part he had always pre-
ferred sailing merchant ships (which is a straight- forward occupation)
to buying and selling merchandise, of which the essence is to get the
better of somebody in a bargain--an undignified trial of wits at best. His
father had been Colonel Whalley (retired) of the H. E. I. Com- pany's
service, with very slender means besides his pen- sion, but with
distinguished connections. He could re- member as a boy how
frequently waiters at the inns, coun- try tradesmen and small people of
that sort, used to "My lord" the old warrior on the strength of his
appear- ance.
Captain Whalley himself (he would have entered the Navy if his father
had not died before he was fourteen) had something of a grand air
which would have suited an old and glorious admiral; but he became
lost like a straw in the eddy of a brook amongst the swarm of brown
and yellow humanity filling a thoroughfare, that by contrast with the
vast and empty avenue he had left seemed as narrow as a lane and
absolutely riotous with life. The walls of the houses were blue; the
shops of the Chinamen yawned like cavernous lairs; heaps of
nondescript merchandise overflowed the gloom of the long range of
arcades, and the fiery serenity of sunset took the middle of the street
from end to end with a glow like the reflection of a fire. It fell on the

bright colors and the dark faces of the bare-footed crowd, on the pallid
yellow backs of the half-naked jostling coolies, on the accouterments of
a tall Sikh trooper with a parted beard and fierce mustaches on sentry
before the gate of the police compound. Looming very big above the
heads in a red haze of dust, the tightly packed car of the cable tramway
navigated cautiously up the hu- man stream, with the incessant blare of
its horn, in the manner of a steamer groping in a fog.
Captain Whalley emerged like a diver on the other side, and in the
desert shade between the walls 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 Whalley should lay herself open. He had not
expostulated with her, however. He was confident she shared his
feelings; he was sorry for her; he trusted her judgment;