End of the Tether

J >> Joseph Conrad >> End of the Tether


Massy did not seem to understand; but the love of life, awakened
suddenly, drove him away from the bridge.

Captain Whalley laid the coat down, and stumbled amongst the heaps of
wreckage to the side.

"Is Mr. Massy in with you?" he called out into the night.

Sterne from the boat shouted--

"Yes; we've got him. Come along, sir. It's madness to stay longer."

Captain Whalley 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 Whalley! 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 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 Whalley
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. Massy'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 Whalley,
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 Sofala, 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. Then that too disappeared.


When the Sofala failed to come back to Batu Beru at the proper time, Mr.
Van Wyk 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 Sofala'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 Wyk would not have been able to learn any
details had it not been for Sterne, whom he met one day on the quay
near the bridge over the creek, almost on the very spot where Captain
Whalley, to preserve his daughter's five hundred pounds intact, had
turned to get a sampan which would take him on board the Sofala.

From afar Mr. Van Wyk saw Sterne 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."

Sterne passed his tongue on his lips, and glanced aside. "I 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. Massy if he had arranged that shipwreck
himself. The most timely total loss I've ever heard of."

"What became of that Massy?" asked Mr. Van Wyk.

"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 Manilla by mail-boat early in the morning. I gave him chase
right aboard, and he told me then he was going to make his fortune dead
sure in Manilla. I could go to the devil for all he cared. And yet he as
good as promised to give me the command if I didn't talk too much."

"You never said anything . . ." Mr. Van Wyk began.

"Not I, sir. Why should I? I mean to get on, but the dead aren't in my
way," said Sterne. His eyelids were beating rapidly, then drooped for an
instant. "Besides, sir, it would have been an awkward business. You made
me hold my tongue just a bit too long."

"Do you know how it was that Captain Whalley remained on board? Did he
really refuse to leave? Come now! Or was it perhaps an accidental . . .?"

"Nothing!" Sterne 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 to 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 tell you."

This was all that Sterne had to say.

Mr. Van Wyk 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 Massy and Captain Whalley.

"Extraordinary old man," he said. "He came into my office from nowhere
in particular as you may say, with his five hundred pounds to place, and
that engineer fellow following him anxiously. And now he is gone out
a little inexplicably, just as he came. I could never understand him
quite. There was no mystery at all about that Massy, eh? I wonder
whether Whalley refused to leave the ship. It would have been foolish.
He was blameless, as the court found."

Mr. Van Wyk 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 Whalley 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 Wyk shook his head. Captain Whalley 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 were 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 Wyk said, with so much fervor
that the lawyer looked up at him curiously; and afterwards, after
parting with him, he remarked to an acquaintance--

"Queer person 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 for ever."

In the southern hemisphere Captain Whalley'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
boarders had gone out, her boys were at school, her husband sat upstairs
in his big arm-chair with a book, thin-faced, wrapped up in rugs to the
waist. The house was still, and the grayness 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 table-cloth, 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
his memory. . . ."

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 on
to the floor.

She tore it open, snatched out the inclosure. . . .

"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 five hundred 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 favor. 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
her husband and of her children seemed to glide away from her into the
gray 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
bodice, 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 spaces 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.