The End of the Tether eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 194 pages of information about The End of the Tether.

The End of the Tether eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 194 pages of information about The End of the Tether.
the ship had been so short that Massy 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, Massy, he babbled with an envious and naive admiration.  Clever scoundrel!  Don’t meet the likes of him every day.  Just look at him.  Ha!  Great!  Ship of his own.  Wouldn’t catch him going wrong.  No fear—­the beast!  And Massy, 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 lascar told off for night duty in harbor, perhaps a youth fresh from a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck listening to the endless drunken gabble.  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.

VIII

For a while after his second’s answering hoot Massy hung over the engine-room gloomily.  Captain Whalley, who, by the power of five hundred 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 mote 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 together with every sound and tremor in 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,

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The End of the Tether from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.