Java Head Part 4

Jeremy began to hum, and in a moment was intoning in a loud monotonous voice, sweeping a hand up and down:

_"To my hero, Bangedero, Singing hey for a gay Hash girl."_

"I don't think that's very nice," she said primly.

"What do you mean--not very nice?" he demanded, incensed. "There's nothing finer with a rousing chanteyman leading it and the watch hauling on the braces. You'd never hear the like at any Ballad Soiree. And:

_"Sweet William, he married a wife, 'Gentle Jenny,' cried Rose Marie, To be the sweet comfort of his life, As the dew flies over the mulberry tree."_

"There isn't much sense to it," she observed.

For a little, indignant at her disparagement of such n.o.ble fragments, he tramped silently back and forth, followed by a cloud of smoke from the cheroot. No one on land could understand the absorbing significance of every detail of a ship's life.... Only Gerrit, of all his family, knew the chanteys and watches, the anxiety and beauty of landfalls--the blue Falklands or Teneriffe rising above the clouds, the hurried making and taking of sail in the squalls of the Doldrums.

"In India," he told her, stopping in his measured course, "female children are given to the crocodiles."

Her mouth parted at this, her eyes became dilated, and she slipped from the chair. "That's perfectly awfully appalling," she breathed. "The little brown girl babies. Oh, father," she cried, as William Ammidon came into the library, "what do you suppose grandfather says, that in India female children are...crocodiles." Words failed her.

"What's the sense in frightening the child, father?" William remonstrated. "I wish you would keep those horrors for the old heathen of the Marine Society."

Jeremy had a lively sense of guilt; he had been betrayed by Camilla's confounded airs and pretensions. He ought to be ashamed of himself, telling the girl such things. "The British Government is putting a stop to that," he added hastily, "and to suttees--"

"What are they?" she inquired.

"Never mind, Camilla," her father interposed; "go up with your mother and sisters.

"I suppose it's no good speaking to you," William continued; "but my family is not a crew and this house isn't the _Two Capes_. You might make some effort to realize you're on land."

"I know I'm on land, William; tell that any day from a sight of you. You can afford to listen a little now and then about the sea. That's where all you have came from; it's the same with near everybody in Salem.

Vessels brought them and vessels kept them going; and, with the wharves as empty as they were this afternoon, soon there won't be any Salem to talk about."

"The tide's turned from here," the other replied; "with the increase in tonnage and the importance of time we need the railway and docking facility of the larger cities--Boston and New York."

"It's running out fast enough," Jeremy agreed; "and there's a lot going out with it you'll never see again--like the men who put a reef in England in 'twelve."

"You are always sounding the same strings; we're at peace with the world now, and a good thing for shipping."

"Peace!" the elder declared hotly; "you and the Democrats may call it that, but it's a d.a.m.ned swindle, with the British to windward of you and hardly a sail now drawing in your ropes. What did Edmund Burke tell Parliament in 'seventy-five about our whalers, hey! Why, that from Davis Strait to the Antipodes, from the Falklands to Africa, we outdrove Holland, France and England. After the laws and bounties Congress pa.s.sed in 'eighty-nine what could you see--something like a half million tonnage gained in three years or so. In the war of 'twelve your land soldiers were a pretty show, with the Capitol burning; but when it was finished the privateers had sunk over nine million dollars of British shipping to their sixty thousand. The Chesapeake luggers have gone out with the tide, too. And then, by G.o.d, by G.o.d, what then: the treaty of Ghent, with England impressing our seamen and tying our ships up in what ports she chose under a right of search! On top of this your commissioners repeal the ship laws and the British allow you to carry only native cargoes to the United Kingdom with a part of the customs and harbor dues off.

"But in spite of Congress and political sharks we went out to India and China direct, with _The George_ home from Calcutta in ninety-five days, and the East Indiamen six or seven months on the shorter run to England. I can show you what the London _Times_ said about that, it's in my desk: 'Twelve years of peace, and...the shipping interest...is half ruined...thousands of our manufactures are seeking redemption in foreign lands.' It goes on to tell that American seamen already controlled an important part of the British carrying trade to the East Indies. Yet your precious lawmakers open our West India trade to Great Britain, but they wouldn't ask the privilege to carry a cargo from British India to Liverpool or Canada."

"Now, father," William put in, "you are getting excited again. It isn't good for you. We are not all such fools to-day as you make out."

"Look at the masters themselves," Jeremy continued explosively; "gentlemen like Gerrit, from Harvard University, and not lime-juicers beating their way aft with a belaying pin. They could sail a ship with two-thirds the crew of a Britisher with her clumsy yellow hemp sails and belly you could lose a dinghy in. Mind, I don't say the English aren't handy in a ship and that they wouldn't clew up a topsail clean at the edge of h.e.l.l. What we are on the seas came over from them. But we bettered it, William, and they knew it; and, naturally enough, laid out to sail around us. I don't blame England, but I do our G.o.d d.a.m.n--"

"Father," the other firmly interrupted, "you are shouting as if you were on the quarter-deck in a gale. I must insist on your quieting down; you'll burst a blood vessel."

"Maybe I am," Jeremy muttered; "and it wouldn't matter much if I did.

When I see a nation with shipmasters who would set their royals when others hove too, and get there, all snarled up with sh.o.r.e lines and political duffel, I'm nigh ready to burst something."

"Rhoda said that you were at the Dunsacks' this afternoon; I saw Edward in Boston yesterday."

"I don't care if you saw the Flying Dutchman," the other a.s.serted, breathing stormily.

"It's curious about the China service," William went on; "anyone out there for a number of years gets to look Chinese. Edward is as yellow as a lemon, but nothing like as pleasant a color. Thin, too, and nervous; hands crawling all over themselves, never still for a moment. He didn't say why he had left Heard and Company, and I didn't quite like to ask.

Edward came on from England in the _Queen of the West,_ the Swallow Tail Line. I did ask him if he were going to settle in Salem, but he couldn't say; there was something about a Boston house. It seems that Gerrit carried his chest and things from Canton in the _Nautilus_ as an accommodation."

Suddenly Jeremy felt very insecure, his body heavy and knees weak, failing. He stumbled back into the chair by the fireplace, William at his side. "You must pay some attention to what you're told, father," the latter said anxiously. "How are you now?"

"I'm all right," he declared testily, trying to brush away the dimness floating before his eyes.

"Shall I help you up to bed?"

"I'll go to bed when I've a mind to," Jeremy retorted. "I am not under cover yet by a long reach." To establish his well-being he rose and moved to the secretary, where he got a fresh cheroot, and lighted it with slightly trembling fingers. He grumbled inarticulately, remembering his own exploits in the carrying of sail and record runs under the bluff bows of the Honorable John Company itself. The ebb tide, he thought, returning to William's figure and its amplification by himself. So much that had been good sweeping out to sea never to return....Gerrit long overdue.

Once more he shook himself free of numbing dread; automatically he had fallen back into the pa.s.sage from the secretary to the hall door. He saw that he had worn threadbare a narrow strip where his feet had so often pressed. It would be necessary for him to see about a fresh case of cheroots soon, primes, too; they needn't try to put him off with the second quality. He was put off a great deal lately; people pretended to be listening to him, and all the time their thoughts were somewhere else, either that or they were merely politely concealing the opinion that he was out of date, of no importance.

His family were always providing against his fatigue or excitement; at the countinghouse the gravest problems, he was certain, were withheld from him. At the occurrence of this possibility a fresh indignation poured through his brain. Fuming and tramping up and down he determined that to-morrow he would show any of the clerks who didn't attend to his wishes or counsel that he was still senior partner of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone.

III

The evening was surprisingly warm and still, with an intermittent falling of rain, and the windows were open in the room where Rhoda Ammidon sat regarding half dismayed her reflection in the mirror of a dressing table. A few minutes before she had discovered her first gray hair. It was not only the mere a.s.sault upon her vanity, but, too, a realization far deeper--here was the stamp of time, the mark of a considerable progress toward the end itself. Her emotions were various; but, curiously enough, almost the first had been a wave of pa.s.sionate tenderness for William and her little girls. The shock of finding that arresting sign was now giving place to a purely feminine reaction. She considered for a moment the purchase of a bottle of hair coloring, then with a disdainful gesture dismissed such a temporary and troublesome measure.

She kept an undiminishing pride in her appearance and a relentless care and choice in the details of her dress, pleased by the knowledge that the attention men paid her showed no indication yet of growing perfunctory. She had been much admired both in Boston and London through her youth, and she recalled her early doubts at the prospect of life in Salem; but she realized now that, as her years and children multiplied, she was by imperceptible degrees returning to a traditional New England heritage.

She was glad, however, that William's wide connections lifted him above a purely local view; William was really a splendid husband. Rhoda was conscious of this together with a clear recognition of his faults, and quite aside from both existed her unreasoning affection. The latter vividly dominated her, shut out, on any occasion of stress, all else; but for the most part she held him in an att.i.tude of mildly amused comprehension.

Gerrit Ammidon she hadn't seen until after her engagement to William, and she sometimes thought of the former in connection with marriage. Gerrit, she admitted to herself, was a far more romantic figure than William; not handsomer--William Ammidon was very good looking--but more arresting, with his hair swinging about his ears and intense blue gaze. An exciting man, she decided again, for whom one would eternally put on the loveliest clothes possible; a man to make you almost as ravishingly happy as miserable, and, therefore, disturbing as a husband.

At this her mind returned to her gray hair and the fact that the metal backlog of the kitchen fire, which supplied the house with hot water, had been leaking over the hearth. A feeling of melancholy possessed her at the turning of younger visions into commonplace necessities, but she dismissed it with the shadow of a smile--it was absurd for a woman of her age to dwell on such frivolous things. Yet she still lingered to wonder if men too kept intact among their memories the radiant image of their youth, if they ever thought of it with tenderness and extenuation. She decided in the negative, convinced that men, even at the end of many years, never definitely lost connection with their early selves, there was always a trace of hopefulness, of jaunty vanity--sometimes winning and sometimes merely ridiculous--attached to their decline.

Rhoda stirred and moved to a window, gazing vaguely out into the moist blue obscurity. Sidsall, she realized, was maturing with a disconcerting rapidity. Depths were opening in the girl's being at which she, her mother, could only guess. It was exactly as if a crystal through and through which she had gazed had suddenly been veiled by rosy clouds.

Sidsall had a charming nature, direct and unsuspicious and generously courageous.

There was a sound at the door, and William entered, patently ruffled. It was clear that he had had another disagreement with his father. "It's shameful how you disturb him," she declared.

"Look here, Rhoda," he replied vigorously. "I won't continually be put in the wrong. It seems as if I had no affection for the old gentleman. I always have the difficult thing to do, and he has been slightly contemptuous ever since I was a boy because I didn't go to sea. The truth is--while I wouldn't think of letting him know--he's a tremendous nuisance pottering about the countingrooms with his stories of antediluvian trading voyages. And worse is to come--these new clipper ships and pa.s.sages have knocked the wind out of the old slow full-bottomed vessels. We have about determined to reorganize our fleet entirely, and are in treaty with Donald McKay for an extreme clipper type of twelve hundred tons.

"Of course, he's my parent; but I wonder at Saltonstone's patience.

Father won't hear of the opium trade and it's turning over thousand per cent profits. We are privately operating two fast topsail schooners in India now, but it's both inconvenient and a risk. They ought to be put right under our house flag for credit alone. It is all bound to come up, and then he'll go off like a cannon."

"Couldn't you wait till he's dead, William?" she asked. "It won't be a great while now. I can see that he has failed dreadfully from this worry about Gerrit."

"Five years will make all the difference. We are losing tea cargoes every month to these ships making sensational runs. I don't talk much, Rhoda, about, well--my family; but I am as upset over Gerrit as anyone else.

Except for a tendency to carry too much sail there's not a better shipmaster out of New England. Not only that ... he's my brother. It's easy to like Gerrit; his opinions are a little wild, and an exaggerated sense of justice gets him into absurd situations; yet his motives are the purest possible. Perhaps that word pure describes him better than any other, however people who didn't know might smile. As a man, Rhoda, I can a.s.sert that he is surprisingly clean-hearted."

"That's a wonderful quality," she agreed; "why anyone should smile is beyond me. William, would you know that my hair is turning gray, do I look a lot older than I did five years ago?"