Java Head Part 16

Their father, always down before the others, had returned from the inspection of his trees, and was tramping back and forth in the library.

The elder seemed unrested by the night, his skin, as Rhoda had pointed out, was baggy.

"Now that the _Nautilus_ is afloat again," Jeremy Ammidon said, "you'll want to be at sea." Examining this natural conclusion, Gerrit was surprised, startled, to find that it was no longer true. For the first time in his memory he was not anxious to be under sail. This of course was caused by a natural perplexity about Taou Yuen's comfort and happiness.

"I don't know what the firm's plans are for me," he answered cautiously.

"There is some talk of taking me out of the China trade for the California runs. I shouldn't like that."

Jeremy was turning at his secretary, and he stopped to pound his fist on its narrow ledge. "It's that d.a.m.ned Griffiths again and his cursed jackknife hull!" he exclaimed. The dark tide suffused his countenance.

Gerrit studied him thoughtfully: he didn't know just how much William had yet told their father about the sweeping changes taking place in Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone. He did see, however, that it was unwise to excite the old gentleman unduly.

"I was saying only yesterday," he put in pacifically, "that you and myself are getting to be old models--" he broke off as William entered the library. The latter evidently grasped at once the subject of their discussion, for he went on in a firm voice somewhat contradicted by a restrained but palpable anxiety:

"Now, father, this was bound to come up and you must sit down and listen quietly." The elder, on the verge of a tempestuous reply, constrained himself to a painful attention. "It's useless to point out to you the beneficial changes in sea carrying, for you are certain to deny their good and drag out the past. So I am simply forced to tell you that after careful consideration we have decided to line the firm with the events of the day and hold our place in the growing pressure of compet.i.tion. This may sound brutal, but it was forced on us by the att.i.tude you have adopted. Shortly, this is what we intend, in fact are doing:

"Orders have been placed with George Raynes at Portsmouth and Jackson up in Boston for clippers of a thousand and twelve hundred tons and another is almost ready to be launched from Curtis' Chelsea shipyard. It oughtn't to be necessary to call your attention again to the fact that the _Sea Witch_ has brought the pa.s.sage from Hong Kong to something like three months. The profits of the California trade will be enormous and depend entirely on speed.

"I'll admit that this is a big thing, it will cut sharply into our funds--something like a quarter of a million dollars. But, if you will be patient for a little only, I can promise that you'll see astonishing returns. At the same time we have no intention of giving up China and India, but we'll limit ourselves more closely in the nature of the cargoes, practically nothing but tea unbroken from Canton to Boston. I'll be glad to go into all this in detail at the countinghouse, where we have the statistics and specifications."

To Gerrit's surprise Jeremy Ammidon sat quietly at the end of William's speech; he wasn't even looking at them, but had his gaze bent upon the floor. There was a commanding, even impressive, quality in his silence that forced the respect of both his sons. More--it made Gerrit overwhelmingly conscious of his affection, his deep admiration, for his father. He recalled the latter's memorable voyage in the little _Two Capes_--the barque of two hundred and nine tons--into the dangers, so imminent to a master, of uncomprehended waters and thousands of miles with, for the most part, only the sheerest dead reckoning. Jeremy Ammidon said finally:

"If it's done it's done. I used to think there were two Ammidons in the firm, not to mention Gerrit; but it seems there's only one. A man who has never been to sea." He rose and marched, slower and more ponderous than ever before, to the cupboard where he kept the square bottle of Medford rum; there, with trembling hands, he poured himself out a measure. He shut the gla.s.s door, but stood for an oppressive s.p.a.ce with his back to the room, seeing that old vision of struggle or accomplishment.

"I suppose I've been a d.a.m.ned nuisance about the countinghouse for a long time," he p.r.o.nounced, turning. William rose. "You made it," he said; "it's you. G.o.d forgive me if I have been impatient or forgetful of all we owe you." There was a stir of skirts in the doorway, and Rhoda entered.

"Breakfast--" she stopped, and with a quick glance at her husband and Gerrit went at once to Jeremy Ammidon. "They've been bothering you again," she declared, and turned an expression of bright anger on the younger men. "Ah, how hard and hateful and blind you are!" she cried.

William, with a hopeless gesture, walked from the room. Gerrit moved to a window facing the Square; but he saw nothing of its sultry yellow-green expanse--he was remembering how as a child, his mother already dead, a nurse had held him up on Derby Wharf to see his father sweep into port from the long voyage to the East. He caught again the resonant voice, as if sounding from a hold of ribbed oak, the tremendous vigor of the arm that swept him up to a bearded face. He couldn't bring himself to move now and see an old haggard man clinging with tremulous emotion and tears to the sympathy, the strength, of a woman.

Later in the morning, to his immense relief, Jeremy Ammidon regained a surprising amount of composure. At first determined never to return to Liberty Street, toward noon Gerrit found him in the hall with his broad hat and w.a.n.ghee. "I'll just have a slant at those specifications," he remarked. "Like as not they've left off the hatch coamings." Gerrit suggested, "Since it's so hot why don't you have the carriage round?" The other voiced his customary disparagement of that vehicle. "If I see that I'm going to be late for dinner," he added, "I'll get one of the young men to fetch me something. I don't want to give Rhoda any trouble."

Still, on the steps, he lingered, gazing pridefully up at the bulk of the house he had built; his eyes rested on the bra.s.s plate, engraved with the words Java Head, on the dignified white door. "A lot of talk when I had that done," he commented; "people said they'd never heard of it, ought to have my name there for convenience if nothing else. They didn't know. It would take a sailor for that. Don't forget to tell Rhoda not to wait if I'm late. All those girls of hers get hungry. I expect William consulted Laurel about this new move," he ended with a gleam of humor. "She's a great hand for a clipper since she talked to Captain Waterman." He was down the steps, starting deliberately across the street. There was a last mutter of doubt. The bulky slow figure in yellow Chinese silk moved away and Gerrit returned to the shadowed tranquillity of the library.

More than any other place in the house it bore the impression of his father. He wandered about the room, lost in its a.s.sociations, stopped in front of the tall narrow walnut bookcase and took out one of the small company of Jeremy Ammidon's logs, reading disconnectedly in the precise script:

"Tuesday, December 24. 132 days out. All this day gentle breezes and cloudy. Saw kelp, birds, etc.

"Tacked ship to the eastward under short sail. At daylight made all sail to SW. Gentle breezes and clear pleasant weather. Saw huge shoals of flying fish."

"May 19, 11 days out. Hainan in sight, bearing from W by N to NNW. At sunset the breeze died away and hauled off the land. All night light breezes. Made all possible sail to the SSW. At the same time set the extremity of Hainan which bore NW by N to N. Past three Chinese vessels steering NNE. Saw much sc.u.m on the water and at 11 A.M. lost sight of land."

"November 14, 65 days out. These twenty-four hours commences with variable breezes at west and smooth sea. Saw brig steering to the Eastward. The land of Sumatra bearing SW by W to SE by S. Tied rips."

He returned the log to its resting place with a quiet smile at the last period. It was all incredibly simple--a lost simplicity of navigation and a lost innocent wonder at the Mare Atlantic.u.m of old fable.

Neither William nor Jeremy Ammidon was present for dinner. They were, Gerrit concluded, submerged in the effort to bring the changing activities of the firm into the latter's comprehension. His foot was on the stair leading up to his wife, when there was a violent knocking on the front door. It sounded with a startling abruptness in the shut hall, and Gerrit instinctively answered without waiting for a servant. The flushed and breathless young man before him was evidently perturbed by his appearance. He stammered:

"Captain Ammidon, you--you must come down to the countinghouse. At once, please!"

His thoughts, directed upon his father, gathered into a chilling certainty. "Captain Jeremy is sick?" he demanded instantly. The hesitation of the other seemed to confirm an infinitely greater calamity. "Dead?" he asked again, in a flooding misery of apprehension.

The clerk nodded:

"In a second, like," he continued. "All we know they were talking in Mr.

William Ammidon's room--one of the boys was out that minute getting the old gentleman some lunch--when we heard a fall, it was quite plain, and Mr. Saltonstone--"

"That will do," Gerrit cut him short. He turned into the house, rapidly considering what must follow. He'd go, certainly; but first he must warn Rhoda, she would have the girls to prepare.... Rhoda had always been exceptionally considerate and fond of Jeremy Ammidon. He found her at the entrance to her room, and said, "My father is dead." Her warm color sank and tears filled her eyes.

Hurrying over Bath Street to Liberty his grief was held in check by the pressing actualities of the moment. He had time, however, to feel glad that he had spent the morning largely in warm thoughts of the dead man.

He pa.s.sed rapidly into the entrance of the establishment of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone. Immediately on the right there was an open railed enclosure of desks in the center of which a group of clerks watched him with mingled respect and curiosity as he continued to the inner shut s.p.a.ce. It was a large light room with windows on Charter Street. William's expansive flat-topped desk with its inked green baize was on the left, and, under a number of framed sere ships' letters and privateersmen's Bonds of the War of 1812, Gerrit saw the heavy body extended on a broad wooden bench, a familiar orange Bombay handkerchief spread over the face.

Never in all the memory of his brother had William Ammidon been so stricken. As he entered James Saltonstone left studying a list hastily scribbled on a half sheet of the firm's writing paper. He nodded silently to Gerrit, who advanced to the covered face and lifted the handkerchief.

There were still traces of congestion, but a marblelike pallor had taken the place of the familiar ruddy color. Something of the heaviness of his old age, the blurring thickness of long inactivity, had vanished, giving his still countenance an expression of vigor, resolution, contradicted by an arm trailing like the loose end of a heavy rope on the floor. William, with a clenched hand on his desk, spoke with difficulty:

"You must know this, Gerrit; and then I'll ask you never to allude to it again. It might be argued that--that James and I killed him, but absolutely without intention, by accident. Gerrit, I loved him more than I took time to know. Well, you may or may not have heard that we own two topsail schooners in the opium trade, between India, Ningpo and Amoy, but you do know how father detested anything to do with the drug. We said nothing to him about this; it seemed necessary, no--permissible. But to-day when we were coming to a peaceable understanding about the new contracts he stumbled over one of the schooner's manifests. Mislaid, you see--a clerk! It swept him to his feet in a rage, he couldn't speak, and--and he had walked, it was hot...."

Gerrit Ammidon made no answer; there was nothing to be said. He was shaken by a burning anger at the cupidity, the ugly commercial grasping, to which his father had been sacrificed. A gulf opened between him and his brother and James Saltonstone; he was as different from them as the sea was from the land, as the wind-swept deck of the _Nautilus_ was from this dry building with its stifling papers and greed. He might be in the service of the firm--Gerrit was not incorporated in the partnership--he might carry their cargoes for the multiplication of the profit, but his essential service and responsibility, his life, were addressed to another and infinitely higher and more difficult consummation than the stowed kegs of Spanish dollars, the bills of sale. This was composed of the struggle with the immeasurable elements of the seas and winds, the safety of lives, the endless trying of his endurance and will and luck.

"Now," he spoke with a perceptible bitterness, "you can have your way without interference, without his mixing up your papers or making the blunders of a slow sort of honesty."

"I am under no obligation to your judgment or opinion," William replied stiffly. "There are always complications you will never penetrate nor carry. At present your a.s.sistance is more necessary than any display of temper."

The funeral gathered and ebbed in a long procession of carriages through a sultry noon, the services at the grave concluded by the symbolic dropping of the earth on Jeremy Ammidon's coffin lowered into the deep narrow clay pit. The large varied throng lingered for a breath, as if unable to take their attention from the raw opening that had absorbed the shipmaster, and then there was a determined and rea.s.suring commonplace murmur, a hurrying away into the vital warmth of the day.

The evening was the loveliest summer and the garden of Java Head could afford: a slow moon disentangled itself from the indigo foliage at the back of the stable and soared with an increasing brilliancy, bathing the sod and summerhouse and poplars, the metallic box borders and spiked flower beds, in a crystal clearness. The Ammidons sat about the willow, Rhoda with a hand affectionately on her husband's arm, the children--Laurel and Janet staying without remark long past their accustomed hours for bed--still and white under the blanching moon.

Gerrit intently studied his wife, Taou Yuen, in a concentrated manner.

She, too, was in white, the Chinese mark of sorrow.

Suddenly in the face of his suffering and memories she had appeared startlingly remote, as if, from standing close beside him, she were moving farther and farther away. The image was made profoundly disconcerting by the fact that they acted without their own accord; it took the aspect of a purely arbitrary phenomenon over which they had no control. At the same time Nettie Vollar was surprisingly near, actual--he could see every line and shading of her vivid face; he felt the warm impact of her instant sympathy. He had caught a glimpse of Barzil Dunsack at the funeral; but the other was immediately hidden by the crowd, and Gerrit had been unable to discover whether his son and daughter or Nettie had accompanied him.

His thoughts turned in a score of a.s.sociations and questions to Nettie; but when he found himself trying to picture her exact employment at the present moment he was angrily aroused. He had, he realized, considered nothing else for the past hour, and his preoccupation was growing more intense, personal. He stirred abruptly, and fixed his mind on the imminent changes from his father's death. First the possibility would develop of his becoming a member of the firm; but to this, he silently declared, he would not agree. His gaze rested with a faint underlying animosity on William, seated upright in a somber absorption, and a disparagement of the latter's activities and scale of values. Gerrit saw that there must be a pacific legal knot to untangle; the division of Jeremy's estate would require time--he had somewhere heard that such affairs often dragged on for a year; and now he was again in a fever of impatience to be away, safe, at sea. He added the more portentous word with the vague self-a.s.surance that it was only the customary expression of his notable ignorance of land; but it echoed with an ominous special insistence in his mind.

The _Nautilus_, he recalled, was once more afloat, repaired; and a plan occurred to him that seemed to dispose of all his difficulties, even of the distasteful possibility of the California clipper service. He could take the ship as part of his inheritance; and, though ostensibly sailing her in the interest of the firm, make such voyages and ports, carry such cargoes, as his independence dictated. The _Nautilus_, with a cargo out of tin and dyes and cotton manufactures, and forty or fifty thousand trade dollars, would represent a sum of nearly two hundred thousand; but as a family they were very rich; he'd have more than that; and bank the remainder intact to the credit of his wife.

There were many practical aspects of his marriage that he had not stopped to weigh in its precipitant consummation. The problem, pointed out by Rhoda, of his absence from Taou Yuen on cruise could not be solved with the facility he had taken for granted. It was as impossible to leave her happily here--he was aware of her growing impatience with Western habit--as it would be for him to become a contented part of Chinese home life; and not only was she uncomfortably cramped and sick on shipboard, but he doubted whether he could persuade his crews to sail with her.

Superst.i.tious able seamen balked at the presence of even a normal wife aft; and a Chinese would be regarded as a sign of certain disaster.

He would have to establish her somewhere in the East Indies; and he viewed with a new dislike all such tropical settings. His entire life threatened to become an affair of d.a.m.nable palm trees and Oriental stenches. Gerrit Ammidon broke into a cold sweat at the realization of the far more direct implication that had taken substance in his mind. The thing was going entirely too far! He wondered irritably at the obscure cause for such violent inner agitations.

Rhoda Ammidon with a dim smile rose, gathering her daughters about her, and departed in a pale cloud of muslin. Taou Yuen, with her murmuring formal politeness, moved away too, leaving the brothers together.

Whatever sympathetic intercourse they might otherwise have had, whatever shared memories of their boyhood and their father, were made impossible by William's admission of the immediate cause of the elder's death.

"The Saltonstones are going into Boston this fall," William said abruptly. "It is necessary for one of us to live there; and Caroline has always had a hankering for wider society. Rhoda, I was surprised to learn, wishes to remain here at Java Head for a year or so anyway. She has a very real affection for the place. But I tell her when the girls are older Boston, or perhaps New York, will give them far greater opportunities. Sidsall, stranger still, was in tears at the whole thing; she seemed ridiculously upset about leaving."

The vision of Nettie Vollar persisted, bright and disturbing. Once he was at sea, Gerrit told himself, on the circ.u.mscribed freedom of his quarter-deck, he would lose the unsettling fever burning at that instant in his veins. But the memory of long solitary pa.s.sages with nothing to distract his mind through week upon week after the ship took the trades, when hour upon hour his thoughts turned inward on themselves and reviewed every past act and feeling, made doubtful even that old release. The trouble was that he instinctively avoided any square facing of the difficulty that had multiplied with such amazing rapidity--like a banyan tree--about the present and the shadowed future. This he was forced to admit, but grimly added that there could be only one answer to whatever he might lay bare--the adherence to the single fundamental duty of which he never lost sight. No port was gained by changing blindly from course to course, that way lay the reefs; a man could but keep steadily by the compa.s.s. That, at least, was all he could see, propose, for himself, being rather limited and lacking the resources which others of greater knowledge so confidently explored.

After breakfast on the following morning he mounted the dignified staircase, with the sweeping railing of red narra wood and high Palladian window at the turn, to his wife. In their room he was bathed in a cold sweat of dismay at a sudden detached view of Taou Yuen in her complete Manchu mourning for his father. An unhemmed garment of coa.r.s.e white hemp hung in ravelings about slippers of sackcloth; what had been an elaborate headdress was hidden under a binding of the bleached hemp; she wore no paint nor flowers; her pins and earrings were pasted with dough, and her expression was drugged with the contemplative fervor of what had evidently been a religious ceremonial.

"For the wise old man, for your father," she said. She was exhausted and sank onto the day bed; but almost immediately her hand reached out in the direction of her pipe, and she smiled faintly at him. He clenched his sinewy hands, the muscles of his jaw knotted, as he gazed steadily at the woman, the Manchu woman, he had of his own free accord married. It sickened him that, for the drawing of a breath, he had regarded Taou Yuen with such appalling injustice--injustice, the evil he hated and condemned more than any other. What, in the name of G.o.d, was he made of that he could sink so low!

"We'll leave here soon," he declared abruptly; "the _Nautilus_ will be ready for sea almost any time."