E-text prepared by Lionel Sear
by
"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
At Surat, by a window of his private office in the East IndiaCompany's factory, a middle-aged man stared out upon the broad riverand the wharves below. Business in the factory had ceased for theday: clerks and porters had gone about their own affairs, and hadleft the great building strangely cool and empty and silent.The wharves, too, were deserted—all but one, where a Hindu sat inthe shade of a pile of luggage, and the top of a boat's mast waveredlike the index of a balance above the edge of the landing-stairs.
The luggage belonged to the middle-aged man at the window: the boatwas to carry him down the river to the Albemarle, East Indiaman,anchored in the roads with her Surat cargo aboard. She would sailthat night for Bombay and thence away for England.
He was ready; dressed for his journey in a loose white suit, which,though designed for the East, was almost aggressively British.A Cheapside tailor had cut it, and, had it been black or gray orsnuff-coloured instead of white, its wearer might have passed all theway from the Docks to Temple Bar for a solid merchant on 'Change—aself-respecting man, too, c