章节正文
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 photographs
of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies
--his grandchildren--set in black frames into the maple-
wood 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 plumate kept
suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the
heavy gold frame. Then with the door of his state-
room 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 re-
membered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she used
to be.
She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too.
It was like an article of faith with him that there never
had been, and never could be, a brighter, cheerier 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 perpetualfestival with
an unfading wreath. She had decorated the center of
every panel with a cluster of home flowers. It took her
a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor
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
roses, he declared, sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine
which at that time pervaded the saloon, and (as he con-
fessed 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. Whalley is a regular out-and-out nightingale,
sir," he would pronounce with a judicial air after listen-
ing 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 roulades 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 Hongkong harbor--an event that to the men
who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily
remote as the dark ages of history. But Captain Whal-
ley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his
life, with its romance, its idyl, 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 to-
gether a mourning frock for the child out of one of
her black skirts.
He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up
life like a sluggishstream. 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 seniorpartner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co.,
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 oilskin coat to watch the big seas hurling
themselves upon the Condor. The swirl and crash of the
waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless de-
light. "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 associa-
tion 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 dis-
satisfied there was not to see that she clung now to some-
body 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 hall-door open already, hold-
ing 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 write to me openly." She had
answered him by an almost imperceptible movement of
her head. She resembled her mother in the color of her
eyes, and in character--and also in this, that she under-
stood him without many words.
Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters
made Captain Whalley lift his white eye-brows. For
the rest he considered he was reaping the true reward of
his life by being thus able to produce on demand what-
ever 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 manifestlyunfair. No, no! He knew well
what that meant. It was bad luck. His own had been
simply marvelous, 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 recognize 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 rumors (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 catas-
trophe, 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
Whalley 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 Whalley 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 gilt for the ginger-bread 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, Patteson, & Co. 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 Gardner
or a Patteson in the firm. There was no longer for Cap-
tain Whalley an arm-chair 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 time-table of appointed routes like a confounded
service of tramways. The winds of December and June
were all one to them; their captains (excellent young
men he doubted not) were, to be sure, familiar with
Whalley 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 Whalley 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 honor to do something for Dare-devil Harry Whalley.
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 boisterousuncertain 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 suf-
fered 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 cheroots
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 photographs
of his daughter, her husband, and two fat-legged babies
--his grandchildren--set in black frames into the maple-
wood 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 plumate kept
suspended from a small brass hook by the side of the
heavy gold frame. Then with the door of his state-
room 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 re-
membered suddenly how fond of boat-sailing she used
to be.
She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too.
It was like an article of faith with him that there never
had been, and never could be, a brighter, cheerier 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 perpetualfestival with
an unfading wreath. She had decorated the center of
every panel with a cluster of home flowers. It took her
a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor
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
roses, he declared, sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine
which at that time pervaded the saloon, and (as he con-
fessed 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. Whalley is a regular out-and-out nightingale,
sir," he would pronounce with a judicial air after listen-
ing 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 roulades 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 Hongkong harbor--an event that to the men
who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily
remote as the dark ages of history. But Captain Whal-
ley could in a half hour of solitude live again all his
life, with its romance, its idyl, 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 to-
gether a mourning frock for the child out of one of
her black skirts.
He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up
life like a sluggishstream. 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 seniorpartner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co.,
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 oilskin coat to watch the big seas hurling
themselves upon the Condor. The swirl and crash of the
waves seemed to fill her small soul with a breathless de-
light. "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 associa-
tion 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 dis-
satisfied there was not to see that she clung now to some-
body 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 hall-door open already, hold-
ing 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 write to me openly." She had
answered him by an almost imperceptible movement of
her head. She resembled her mother in the color of her
eyes, and in character--and also in this, that she under-
stood him without many words.
Sure enough she had to write; and some of these letters
made Captain Whalley lift his white eye-brows. For
the rest he considered he was reaping the true reward of
his life by being thus able to produce on demand what-
ever 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 manifestlyunfair. No, no! He knew well
what that meant. It was bad luck. His own had been
simply marvelous, 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 recognize 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 rumors (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 catas-
trophe, 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
Whalley 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 Whalley 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 gilt for the ginger-bread 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, Patteson, & Co. 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 Gardner
or a Patteson in the firm. There was no longer for Cap-
tain Whalley an arm-chair 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 time-table of appointed routes like a confounded
service of tramways. The winds of December and June
were all one to them; their captains (excellent young
men he doubted not) were, to be sure, familiar with
Whalley 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 Whalley 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 honor to do something for Dare-devil Harry Whalley.
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 boisterousuncertain 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 suf-
fered 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 cheroots
- account [ə´kaunt]
vi.说明 vt.认为 n.帐目 (初中英语单词) - supposed [sə´pəuzd] a.想象的；假定的 (初中英语单词)
- otherwise [´ʌðəwaiz] ad.另外 conj.否则 (初中英语单词)
- carbon [´kɑ:bən] n.碳；(一张)复写纸 (初中英语单词)
- painting [´peintiŋ] n.绘画；(油)画；着色 (初中英语单词)
- ashore [ə´ʃɔ:] ad.向岸上 (初中英语单词)
- wreath [ri:θ] n.花圈；花环；圈状物 (初中英语单词)
- cluster [´klʌstə] n.一串 v.群集；丛生 (初中英语单词)
- marvel [´mɑ:vəl] n.令人惊异的事；奇迹 (初中英语单词)
- achievement [ə´tʃi:vmənt] n.完成；成就，成绩 (初中英语单词)
- admiration [,ædmə´reiʃən] n.赞赏，钦佩 (初中英语单词)
- flavor [´fleivə] n.滋味 vt.给....调味 (初中英语单词)
- interfere [,intə´fiə] vi.干涉；妨碍；打扰 (初中英语单词)
- romance [rəu´mæns] n.中世纪骑士小说 (初中英语单词)
- shower [´ʃauə] n.展出者；阵雨；淋浴 (初中英语单词)
- splash [splæʃ] v.&n.溅水声；涉水而进 (初中英语单词)
- mourning [´mɔ:niŋ] n.悲伤；治丧；戴孝 (初中英语单词)
- stream [stri:m] n.河 vi.流出；飘扬 (初中英语单词)
- partner [´pɑ:tnə] n.伙伴 v.同....合作 (初中英语单词)
- intimate [´intimit] a.亲密的 n.知己 (初中英语单词)
- examination [ig,zæmi´neiʃən] n.检查；考试；检验 (初中英语单词)
- departure [di´pɑ:tʃə] n.离开，出发 (初中英语单词)
- steadily [´stedili] ad.坚定地；不断地 (初中英语单词)
- movement [´mu:vmənt] n.活动；运动；动作 (初中英语单词)
- reward [ri´wɔ:d] n.&v.报答；报酬；奖赏 (初中英语单词)
- failure [´feiljə] n.失败；衰竭；破产 (初中英语单词)
- charge [tʃɑ:dʒ] v.收费；冲锋 n.费用 (初中英语单词)
- marvelous [´mɑ:viləs] (=marvellous) a.奇异的 (初中英语单词)
- earnest [´ə:nist] a.认真的 n.认真；诚恳 (初中英语单词)
- welcome [´welkəm] a.受欢迎的；可喜的 (初中英语单词)
- extremely [ik´stri:mli] ad.极端地；非常地 (初中英语单词)
- uncertain [ʌn´sə:tn] a.不定的；不可靠的 (初中英语单词)
- meantime [´mi:ntaim] n.&ad.其间；同时 (初中英语单词)
- majestic [mə´dʒestik] a.雄伟的；崇高的 (高中英语单词)
- perpetual [pə´petʃuəl] a.永恒的；终身的 (高中英语单词)
- festival [´festivəl] n.节日；庆祝；欢庆 (高中英语单词)
- saloon [sə´lu:n] n.大厅；餐车 (高中英语单词)
- hearty [´hɑ:ti] a.热忱的；强健的 (高中英语单词)
- enjoyment [in´dʒɔimənt] n.享受；愉快；乐趣 (高中英语单词)
- solitude [´sɔlitju:d] n.孤独；寂寞；荒凉 (高中英语单词)
- rugged [´rʌgid] a.不平的；粗犷的 (高中英语单词)
- granite [´grænit] n.花岗岩 (高中英语单词)
- senior [´si:niə] a.年长的 n.前辈 (高中英语单词)
- breathless [´breθlis] a.屏息的 (高中英语单词)
- tightly [´taitli] ad.紧，紧密地 (高中英语单词)
- reckless [´rekləs] a.不注意的；鲁莽的 (高中英语单词)
- strictly [´striktli] ad.严格地 (高中英语单词)
- rumble [´rʌmbəl] v.(使)隆隆响 n.隆隆声 (高中英语单词)
- indignation [,indig´neiʃən] n.愤慨；气愤 (高中英语单词)
- minimum [´miniməm] n.最小量 a.最小的 (高中英语单词)
- inferior [in´fiəriə] n.下级的 n.下级；晚辈 (高中英语单词)
- rheumatism [´ru:mətizəm] n.风湿病 (英语四级单词)
- afloat [ə´fləut] ad.&a.漂浮；在海上 (英语四级单词)
- judicial [dʒu:´diʃəl] a.法庭(官)的，审判的 (英语四级单词)
- profoundly [prə´faundli] ad.深深地 (英语四级单词)
- unfair [ʌn´feə] a.不公平的；不正直的 (英语四级单词)
- unlucky [ʌn´lʌki] a.倒霉的，不幸的 (英语四级单词)
- trying [´traiiŋ] a.难堪的；费劲的 (英语四级单词)
- ensign [´ensain] n.旗；徽章；标志 (英语六级单词)
- sluggish [´slʌgiʃ] a.呆滞的；偷懒的 (英语六级单词)
- overland [´əuvə,lænd, ,əuvə´lænd] a.陆上的 ad.陆上 (英语六级单词)
- manifestly [´mænifestli] ad.明显的 (英语六级单词)
- unprofitable [ʌn´prɔfitəbl] a.没有利润的；无益的 (英语六级单词)
- first-class [´fə:st-´klɑ:s] a.头等的 ad.乘头等车 (英语六级单词)
- departed [di´pɑ:tid] a.已往的；已故的 (英语六级单词)
- boisterous [´bɔistərəs] a.狂暴的；吵闹的 (英语六级单词)
- tonnage [´tʌnidʒ] n.吨位，吨数 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
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