Chapter 3

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 Whalley 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 two hundred pounds, and addressed to Melbourne.
Captain Whalley 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
side-walks and a soft layer of dust cushioning 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 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
neighborhood of the New Waterworks on the hill coming at a loping canter
down the middle to get a Chinese shopkeeper for supper. Captain 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 temperament characterized 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