Java Head Part 19

When Gerrit came in it had grown dark with night, and he explained that he had been busy inspecting the _Nautilus'_ spars. She lighted a lamp, then another, all she could find, and studied him un.o.btrusively. She was shocked at the worn expression of his face; it seemed as if he had aged in the few hours since he had left the library. He was uneasy, silent; and, secretly dismayed, she saw that he was indifferent to her changed appearance, too. Taou Yuen debated the wisdom of telling him about the painful scene with Edward Dunsack; against her original intent she decided in the negative. She informed herself that the reason for this was a wish to preserve him, now that they were practically at the day of departure, from an unpleasant duty. But there was an underlying dimly apprehended and far different motive: she was afraid that it would blow into flame a situation that might otherwise be avoided, bring to life a past naturally dying or dead.

She saw that he was scarcely aware of her presence in the room, perhaps in his life. A period of resentment followed. "You are dull," she declared, "and I am going down to the garden for entertainment." Gerrit nodded. He would, he told her, be along shortly. Below she found Roger Brevard, with the oldest Ammidon girl and her mother.

Roger Brevard, she had discovered, was in love with Sidsall. The latter, it developed, was to leave shortly for a party; Mr. Brevard was not going; and, when Gerrit's sister-in-law walked across the gra.s.s with her daughter the man dropped into an easy conversation with Taou Yuen. She had a feeling, which she had tried in vain to lose, of the vulgarity, the impropriety of this. Yet she recognized that there was none of the former in Roger Brevard; he resembled quite a little her dead husband, Sie-Ngan-kwan; and for that reason she was more at ease with him--in spite of such unaccustomed familiarity--than with anyone else in Salem but Gerrit.

He was, she admitted condescendingly, almost as cultivated as the ordinary Chinese gentleman. Many of his thoughts, where she could understand their expression, might have come from a study of the sacred kings. At the same time her feminine perception realized that he had a genuine liking for her.

"You'll be delighted to leave Salem," he said, leaning forward and studying her.

"That would not be polite," she answered formally. "You have been so good. But it will give me pleasure to see Shanghai again. Anyone is happier with customs he understands."

"And prefers," he added. "Indeed, I'd choose some of your manners rather than ours. You see, you have been at the business of civilization so much longer than the rest of us."

"Our history begins two thousand years before your Christ," she told him; "our language has been spoken without change for thirty-three centuries, as you call them. But such facts are nothing. I would rather hear your non--nonsense," she stumbled over the word.

"Do you mean that what we call nonsense is really the most important?"

"Perhaps," she replied. "Devotion to the old and dead is greatly necessary yet you smile at it. I didn't mean that, but moons and lovers and music." He cried in protest, "We're terribly serious about those!"

"I hear nothing but talk about cargoes and sales and money."

"We keep the other under our hats," he instructed her. She was completely mystified, and he explained.

"In China," she remarked tentatively, "it is possible for a man to love two women at once, maybe one a little more than the other, but he can be kind and just and affectionate to them both. Tell me, is--is that possible with an American?"

"No!" he spoke emphatically. "We can love, in the way you mean, only one, perhaps only once. I wouldn't swear to that, but there are simply no exceptions to the first. Men are unfaithful, yes; but at a cost to themselves, or because they are incapable of restraint. To be unfaithful in anything is to fail, isn't it? You can lie to yourself as effectively as to anybody else."

She fixed a painful attention upon him, but lost at least a half of his meaning. However, one fact was clearer than ever--that Edward Dunsack had said an evil thing about her husband. "It seems," he went on, "that even spiritual concerns can be the result of long custom." If he was trying to find an excuse for Chinese habit she immediately disposed of it. "No,"

she said, "you are upside down. The spirit is first, the eternal Tao, everywhere alike, but the personal spirit is different in you and in us."

A sudden dejection seized her--now the difference seemed vaster than anything she had in common with Gerrit. A wave of oppressive nostalgia, of confusion and dread, submerged her in a faintly thunderous darkness.

She felt everywhere about her the presence of evil and threatening shades. The approach of her husband, his heavy settling into a chair, did nothing to lighten her apprehension.

"How soon do we go?" she asked faintly.

"In two weeks, with nothing unexpected," he responded without interest or pleasure. It flashed through her mind that he was depressed at leaving Salem, that other woman. His present indifference was very far from the manner in which he had first discussed their leaving. Yet, even that, she recalled in the light of her present sensitiveness, had been unnaturally abrupt and clothed in a great many loud-sounding words. She told herself arbitrarily that Edward Dunsack had lied--for the purpose which his conduct afterward made clear--but her very feeling was proof that she believed he had spoken the truth.

She was a victim of an uneasy curiosity to see... she made a violent mental effort and recaptured the name--Nettie Vollar. Of course the latter had been the deliberate cause of whatever wickedness had threatened at the return of Gerrit with her, Taou Yuen. She had however no doubt of the extent of this: Gerrit was upright, faithful to the necessity Roger Brevard had explained; all that a.s.saulted her happiness was on an incorporate plane, or, anyhow, in a procession of consequences extending far back and forward of their present lives.

But, she recognized, she had no excuse nor opportunity to see Nettie Vollar. Mrs. Ammidon, when she heard of the accident, had at once declared her intention of going to the Dunsacks' house; still that promised no chance of satisfying her own desire. The least politeness in the world prohibited her from going baldly in and demanding to see the woman. She couldn't, all at once, make convincing a sympathy or impersonal interest entirely contradictory to her insistent indifference.

The best she could hope was for them to sail away as quickly as possible; when on the other side of the seas Gerrit would probably return to the simplicity of being she had adored.

Then a trivial and yet serious fear occurred to her--perhaps here, among all these dead-white women, he no longer held her beautiful. The word was his own, or it had been his; he had not repeated it, she realized, twice since they had been in Salem. Personally, she found the American women entirely undistinguished and dressed in grotesquely ugly and cheap clothes--not unlike paper lanterns bobbing along the ground. Their faces were shamelessly bare of paint and their manners would have disgraced the lowest servant in a Chinese courtyard. This was natural, from any consideration of the hideous or inappropriate things that surrounded them, and from the complete lack of what she could distinguish as either discipline or reverence. Yet Gerrit, a part of this, would be unable to share her att.i.tude; she had heard him praise the appearance of women so insipid that she had turned expecting vainly an ironic smile.

Roger Brevard rose and made his bow, the only satisfactory approach to a courteous gesture she had met outside Gerrit's occasional half-humorous effort since leaving Shanghai. He stirred, muttered a perfunctory phrase, and sank back into obscurity.

Little quirks of unfamiliar disturbing feeling ran through Taou Yuen; her mind, it seemed, had become a thing of no importance; all that at one time had so largely ordered her life was superseded by these illogical emotions spreading apparently from her heart. The truth was, she told herself, that--with all her reading and philosophy--she had had little or no experience of actuality: the injury to her hip and quiet life in the gray garden at Canton, her protected existence in the women's apartments, whatever she might have learned from them neglected because of the general silliness of their chatter, the formal early marriage, had all combined for the preservation of her ignorance.

She regarded herself now with distrust; nothing could have been more unpleasant than the failure of her will, this swamping of her equanimity.

She never lost for a moment the image of superiority that should be her perfect example, the non-a.s.sertion that was the way of heaven; but her comprehension was like a figure ruthlessly dragged about by an overpowering unreflective force. A sharp hatred of Nettie Vollar seared her mind and perished in a miserable sense of weakness.

Against the dark, charged with a confusion of the ten thousand things, she stared wearily and wakeful. She reminded herself again that Gerrit would soon be gone from Salem, alone with her on the long voyage to China; but he'd return to America, come back to Salem; and she knew that he would never bring her westward again. A period of depression followed which seemed to have no immediate connection with Gerrit; she had an indefinable feeling of struggling in vain against adversity, of opposition to an implacable power.

For a short while after she rose in the morning it appeared that she had regained her self-control, her reason; and a consequent happy relief irradiated her. But when Gerrit came up after she had finished her toilet and she saw, from his haggard face, that he too must have been awake, tormented, through the night, a pa.s.sion of bitterness enveloped her at which all that had gone before turned pale. She could scarcely restrain herself from a noisy wailing accusation, and stood regarding him with a tense unnatural grimace, the result of her effort to preserve propriety.

She told herself, at the tempest of vulgar phrases storming through her consciousness, that what Edward Dunsack had said about her being no better than the tea house girls was true, and she was aghast at the inner treachery capable of such self-betrayal. Not a quivering word, however, escaped; she managed a commonplace phrase and turned aside in a trivial pretext of occupation.

"I am going into Boston with Captain Dunsack on business connected with his schooners." The girl's grandfather! "Very well." She spoke placidly, and with a tempestuous heart watched him stride quickly about the park.

She settled herself in a long motionless contemplation, fastening her mind upon the most elevated and revered ideas conceivable. She saw the eternal Tao flowing like a great green river of souls, smooth and mighty and resistless; and she willed that she too might become a part of that desirable self-effacement, safe in surrender. Men striving to create a Tao for personal ends beat out their lives in vain. It was the figure of the river developing, like floating on a deliberate all-powerful tide or struggling impotently against it.

Later a message came up from Mrs. Ammidon--she hoped that Taou Yuen would drive with her that afternoon. She dressed with the most particular care, in blue and dark greens, her shoulders thick with embroidered garlands and silver _shou_, her piled hair ornamented in glittering silver leaves and garnets.

She went down when she heard the horses on the street below but the barouche was empty except for the coachman. "Mrs. Ammidon left a half hour ago," a servant told her; "and sent the carriage back for you." They moved forward, going, she saw, into a part of the town where they seldom drove--the narrow crowded way by the wharves--and, turning shortly into a street that ended abruptly at the water, drew up before a dingy house on her right.

The door was open, and they waited, confident that Mrs. Ammidon would hear the clatter of hoofs and come out; but a far different appeared. She gazed for a silent s.p.a.ce at Taou Yuen seated above her, as if confused by the glittering magnificence. It was probable that Gerrit's brother's wife had come there on an errand of charity for the woman was poor, dingy like the house, with a face drawn by suffering and material struggle.

"Of course you're Captain Ammidon's wife," she said; "and you are here after Mrs. William Ammidon. Well, she's gone; but she left a message for you. She will be at Henry Whipple's, the bookseller. After she saw Nettie she went right off to send her some things; wouldn't wait for the carriage. A kind-hearted determined body."

Taou Yuen leaned out to command the coachman to drive on; but the other, plainly bent on making the most of a rare opportunity for such a conversation, continued talking in her low resigned way.

"I was glad to have her too; Nettie gets pretty fretful up there with n.o.body but me, really. She hasn't been so well, either, since--" here she stopped abruptly, recommenced. "I like to see a person myself of Mrs.

Ammidon's kind. I've been alone all day; father's gone to Boston and Edward away I don't know where."

Taou Yuen's curiosity to see Nettie Vollar returned infinitely multiplied; here, miraculously, was an opportunity for her to study the woman who was beyond any doubt an important part of Gerrit's past, present--it might be, his future. The men were gone. ... She got resolutely down from the barouche. "Take me up to your daughter," she directed quietly.

"Why, that's very kind, but I don't know--Yes, certainly. Mind these stairs with your satin skirt; I don't always get around to the whole house."

Taou Yuen saw at once that Nettie Vollar was far sicker than she had realized: her head lay on the pillow absolutely spent, her brow damply plastered with hair and her eyes enlarged and dull. Taou Yuen drew a chair forward and sat beside a table with a gla.s.s bowl of small dark pills which from a just perceptible odor she recognized as opium. She looked intently, coldly, at the prostrate figure. A flush like match flames burned in Nettie Vollar's cheeks, and she said in a voice at once weak and sharp:

"You're her!"

Taou Yuen nodded slowly, disdainfully.

"Oh, how could he!" the other exclaimed in what sounded like the thin echo of a pa.s.sionate cry. "I knew you were Chinese, but I never realized it till this minute."

As Gerrit Ammidon's wife had feared she was totally unable to judge a single quality or feature of the girl before her. She looked exactly like all the others she had seen in Salem: in order to realize her she needed Gerrit's eyes, Gerrit's birth. Then one fact crept insidiously into her consciousness--here, in a way, was another being who had Gerrit Ammidon's childlike simplicity. That was the most terrifying discovery she could have made. Taou Yuen felt the return of the hateful irresistible emotions which had destroyed her self-control. She wanted to hurt Nettie Vollar in every possible way, to mock her with the fact that she had lost Gerrit perhaps never to see him again; she wanted to tell her that she, Taou Yuen, entirely understood her hopes, efforts, and that they were vain.

An utter self-loathing possessed her at the same time, a feeling of imminent danger as if she were walking with willfully shut eyes on the edge of a precipice above a black fatal void. Not a trace of this appeared on her schooled countenance; and once more she completely restrained any defiling speech. She deliberately shifted her point of view to another possible aspect of all that confronted her--it might be that this woman was a specter, a _kwei_, bent on Gerrit's destruction.

Such a thing often happened. How much better if Nettie Vollar had been killed! She studied her with a renewed interest--a fresh question.

Perhaps the other would die as it was. She was extremely weak; her spirit, Taou Yuen saw, lay listlessly in a listless body. Nettie Vollar slightly moved her injured arm, and that little effort exhausted her for a moment; her eyes closed, her face was as white as salt.

A further, almost philosophical, consideration engaged Taou Yuen's mind--this extraordinary occasion, her being with the other alone, Nettie Vollar's fragility, were, it might be, all a part of the working of the righteous _Yang_. In the light of this, then, she had been brought here for a purpose ... the ending of a menace to her husband. She hesitated for a breath--if it were the opposite malignant _Yin_ there was no bottom to the infamy into which she might fall. It was a tremendous question.

The actual execution of the practical suggestion, from either source, was extremely easy; she had but to lean forward, draw her heavy sleeve across the strained face, hold it there for a little, and Nettie Vollar would have died of--of any one of a number of reasonable causes. She, Taou Yuen, would call, politely distressed, for the mother ... very regrettable.

Gerrit free--

Perhaps.