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Down the lane of music and chatter and drink he passed slowly, like a man just wakened, assailed by Oriental noise and smells, jostled by the races of all latitudes and longitudes, surrounded and solitary, unheeded and self-conscious. With a villager's awkwardness among crowds, he made his way to a German shipping-office.
To be in a shipping-office is not perhaps to be the rose, but it is to live near it, the great rose of the sea. You are, so to say, a land-sailor, a supercargo left on shore. Your office-windows are lashed with hurricanes; your talk is frequently of cyclones. The names of far romantic isles are constantly on your lips, and your bills of lading are threepenny romances in themselves.
I have a shrewd suspicion that my chief, Mr. Foster, used his good offices on my behalf with the shipping company's manager. Three months went slowly by. And then one morning a laconic note reached me from the shipping-office. 'Could you do a bit of clerking in a purser's office? If so, please see me to-day.
Yet I wanted to see him again before he left, and went past the Board of Trade Office hoping for signs of the Medea, for I had heard she was assembling a crew that morning. But the marine-store shops, with their tarpaulin suits hanging outside open-armed and oscillating, looked across to the men lounging against the shipping-office railings, and the idlers stared across at the tarpaulins.
The man I married was a failure, but I loved him, and because I loved him I followed him to the world's end. We were engaged two years before we married. My father disapproved; but when he died I was left lonely, so I followed Eric, whom I had not seen for eighteen months, to Australia. We were married in Sydney. He had work at that time in a shipping-office, but he did not manage to keep it.
He had never done anything so reckless as actually to ask a skipper for the chance to go a-sailing, but he had once gone into a mission society's free shipping-office on West Street where a disapproving elder had grumped at him, "Are you a sailor? No? Can't do anything for you, my friend. Are you saved?"
In answer to his question, the clerk replied that he didn't need a boy just then, but when he did he would send his carriage around to the Metropolitan for him. When Tom timidly introduced his errand to an old gentleman in spectacles, as he sat at his desk in a large shipping-office, the old fellow exclaimed in an awed voice, "Great Heavens, no! I don't want to hire any boy."
At length, according to his own account, being desirous of returning home, he went to a shipping-office, where the shipping articles of the California were open. Upon asking where the ship was going, he was told by the shipping-master that she was bound to California. Not knowing where that was, he told him that he wanted to go to Europe, and asked if California was in Europe.
In Manchester he made the acquaintance of several people with whom Doran was familiar, among them Edward Spence, then in the shipping-office, and Jacob Bush Bradshaw, well on his way to making a fortune out of silk. On Banks's death, Mallard, now nearly twenty-one, went to London for a time.
There had been two blows, I believe; and, if so, the second must really have been a work of supererogation, for I was conscious only of the one crash. In one illuminating instant I recalled my visit to the bank, my two hundred and forty-seven pounds ten shillings, my intended visit to the shipping-office, the approaching end and climax of my work in Sydney and Dursley six years of it.
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