Java Head Part 7

They turned inside, William was in the library, and Gerrit instinctively followed his father into the room. William surveyed him with a moody discontent. "What I can't understand," he proceeded; "is why you call it a marriage, why you brought your woman here to us, to Rhoda and the children."

"It's simple enough," Gerrit replied; "Taou Yuen is my wife, we are married exactly as Rhoda and you are. She is not my woman in the sense you mean. I won't allow that, William."

"How can it matter what you will or will not allow when everyone'll think the other? Shipmasters have had Chinese mistresses before, yes, and smuggled them into Salem; but this conduct of yours is beyond speech."

Gerrit Ammidon said:

"Don't carry this too far." Anger like a hot cloud oppressed him. "I am married legally and, if anything, by a ceremony less preposterous than your own. Taou Yuen is not open to any man or woman's suspicions. I am overwhelmingly indebted to her."

"But she's not your race," William Ammidon muttered; "she is a Confucian or Taoist, or some such thing."

"You're Unitarian one day a week, and father is Congregational, Hodie's a Methodist, and no one knows what I am," Gerrit cried. "Good G.o.d, what does all that matter! Isn't a religion a religion? Do you suppose a Lord worth the name would be anything but entertained by such spiteful little dogmas. A sincere greased n.i.g.g.e.r with his voodoo must be as good as any of us."

"That is too strong, Gerrit," Jeremy objected. "You'll get nowhere crying down Christianity."

"If I could find it," the younger declared bitterly, "I'd feel differently. It's right enough in the Bible. ...Well, we'll go on to Boston to-morrow."

"This is your home," his father repeated. "Naturally William, all of us have been disturbed; but nothing beyond that. I trust we are a loyal family. What you've done can't be mended with hard words."

"She may become very fashionable," Gerrit mockingly told his brother. "It'll be a blow to Camilla," Jeremy chuckled. "Some rice must be cooked."

"Manchus don't live on rice," Gerrit replied. "They don't bind the feet either nor wear the common Chinese clothes. Rhoda will understand better."

Again in his room he found his wife bending over a gorgeous heap of satins, bright mazarines and ornaments. "We'll go down to supper soon,"

he told her. Already there were signs of her presence about the room: the chest of drawers was covered with gold and jade and green amber, painted paper fans set on ivory and tortoise sh.e.l.l, and lacquer fan boxes; coral hairpins, sandalwood combs, silver rouge pots and rose quartz perfume bottles with canary silk cords and ta.s.sels. On a familiar table was her pipe, wound in gilt wire, and the flowered satin tobacco case. An old coin was hanging at the head of the bed, a charm against evil spirits; and on a stand was the amethyst image of Kuan-Yin _pu tze_, the G.o.ddess of Mercy.

Taou Yuen sank on the floor with a little embarra.s.sed laugh at the confusion in which he had surprised her. "Let your att.i.tude be grave," he quoted from the Book of Rites with a pretended severity. Her amus.e.m.e.nt rose in a ripple of mirth. He opened his desk, rearranging the disorder brought about by its transportation; and, when he turned, she was prostrate in the last rays of the sun. "_O-me-to-Fuh_," she breathed; "_O-me-to-Fuh_," the invocation to Buddha. This at an end she announced, "Now I am grave and respectful for your family."

Supper, Gerrit admitted to himself, promised to be a painful occasion; conversation rose sporadically and quickly died in glances of irrepressible curiosity directed at his wife. She, on the contrary, showed no pointed interest in her surroundings; and, in her hesitating slurred English, answered Rhoda's few questions without putting any in return. Camilla preserved a frozen silence; Sidsall was pleasantly conciliating in her att.i.tude toward the novel situation; Janet, her lips moving noiselessly, was rapt in amazement; and Laurel smiled, abashed at meeting Taou Yuen's eyes.

The recounting of his delayed return offered Gerrit a welcome relief from the pervading strain: "There's no tea to speak of at Shanghai, and I took on a mixed cargo--pongees and porcelain and matting. I got camphor and ca.s.sia and seven hundred peculs of ginger; then I decided to lay a course to Manilla for some of the cheroots father likes. The weather was fine, I had a good cargo, and, well--we pleasured out to Honolulu. I was riding the island horses and shipping oil when the schooner _Kahemameha_ arrived from the coast with the news of the gold discovery in California. Every boat in the harbor was loaded to the trucks, crowded with pa.s.sengers at their weight in ginseng, and laid for San Francisco.... Well, I was caught with the rest.

"Five thousand dollars was offered me to carry a gentleman and his attendant. Two others would pay three for the same purpose. Stowage was worth what you asked.... The _Nautilus_ made a good run; then, about a day from land, Mr. Broadrick told me that there wouldn't be a seaman on the ship an hour after we anch.o.r.ed. They were all crazy with gold fever, he said. I could see, too, that they were excited; the watch hung under the weather rail jabbering like parrots; an uglier crew of sea lawyers never developed.

"There was one thing to do and I did it--called them aft and gave them some hot scouse. They'd shipped for Salem and there they must go. I didn't anchor, but stood off--the harbor was crowded with deserted vessels like some h.e.l.l for ships--and sent the jolly boat in with the pa.s.sengers and a couple of men. They didn't come back, you may be sure.

The consignment for San Francisco I carried out that evening, for I made sail at once."

"You had a pretty time getting a way on her," Jeremy Ammidon remarked.

"I did," Gerrit acknowledged shortly. "The second mate's ear was taken loose by a belaying pin that flew out of the dark like a gull. Mr.

Broadrick had a bad minute in the port forecastle after he had ordered all hands on deck a third time. The fine weather left us, though, and that kept the crew busy; we carried away the fore-royal mast and yard before we were within a thousand miles of the lat.i.tude of the Horn. That hit us like a cannon ball of ice. You know what it is at its worst," he told his father; "weeks of snow and hail and fog and gales; and not for anything can you keep an easting. G.o.d knows how a ship lives through the seas; but she does, she does, and you lose the Magellan clouds astern."

The old man nodded.

Gerrit was relieved, however, when supper ended and his wife formally departed for her room. Immediately slipping a hand inside Rhoda's arm he conducted her to the drawing-room. "I'd like you to know more about it,"

he said directly.

"It was very extraordinary. A Lu Kikw.a.n.g was a high official of the Canton Customs, and when Shanghai was declared an open port in forty-two they made him hoppo there. I remembered him at Canton, a dignified old duck with eighty or a hundred servants to keep anyone from possibly speaking to him of business, but there had been some trouble about foreign vessels selling saltpeter illegally and--he knew some English--we had quite a friendly little consultation. Yet it hadn't prepared me for his coming off to the _Nautilus_ at Shanghai with a linguist and an air of the greatest mystery. His manner was beautiful, of course, absolutely tranquil and that made what they said, what he hoped, seem even wilder than it was.

"His son, it appeared, had married and was accidentally drowned in the Great Ca.n.a.l hardly a month after the ceremony. His widow belonged, then, to the husband's family, and from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt--it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by the presence of Taou Yuen.

"This, you see, made the difficulty, as it's a frightful disgrace to return a married daughter to her own father's home, and Lu had grown very fond of her. She was extremely clever and virtuous, he said. The other thing was to kill her or force her to commit suicide. He told me very calmly that he would like to avoid this.

"Then, in the linguist's most flowery manner, they went on with what Lu Kikw.a.n.g proposed. He had recognized that I was a man of 'superior propriety' and he wondered if I would take Taou Yuen away to America with me. Very secretly though--there would be an uproar if it were known that a Manchu woman had been married to a foreigner. I could see her first in his garden without her knowing anything about it.

"It's needless to tell you that I went with them that afternoon. A meeting was arranged for the next day--" he broke off, sitting forward with elbows on knees, gazing fixedly at his clasped hands.

"You make that very clear, Gerrit," his sister-in-law replied; "I now understand the past almost as well as yourself; but it's the future I'm in doubt about. I saw immediately that your wife was not an ordinary woman; it would be much easier if she were. Certainly you don't intend to stay here, at Java Head; but that is immaterial. Wherever you go in America it will not be suitable for her. She'll be no more at home with your friends than you with hers. I feel terribly sad about it, Gerrit; you were as selfish as only a man can be."

"You are unjust, Rhoda," he protested. "Taou Yuen was willing to come.

She had read about other countries and saw a great deal of the English wife of a rich Dutch factor at Shanghai; as Lu Kikw.a.n.g said, she's wonderfully intelligent. I think she is happy, too."

"Rubbish! Of course she loves you; I am not talking about that. How will she get along while you are away on your long voyages? She couldn't possibly live in the cabin of a ship, and do you suppose she'd be contented in Salem with you absent for a year!"

"We have as many chances of success as any other marriage," he a.s.serted.

"The whole business is foolish enough."

"That opinion might do for a single shipmaster, with only a month or two out of the year on land. When you were free, Gerrit, your impatience with convention was refreshing and possible. But can't you see that you have given up your liberty! You have tied your hands. However loudly you may cry out against society now you are a part of us, foolish or not. You'll find that your wife has anch.o.r.ed you in Salem, Boston or Singapore, no matter where you go: people will reach and hurt you through her.

"She is very gorgeous and placid, superior on the surface; but the heart, Gerrit--that isn't made of jade and ivory and silk."

"I'll bring down your presents to-morrow," he told her, avoiding any further present discussion of his marriage. "Has father failed, do you think? His tempers are vigorous as ever."

"He seems baggier about the eyes and throat. He is just as quick, but it exhausts him more. Things would be much better if he were only content to let William manage at the countinghouse. Times are shifting so quickly with these new clipper ships and direct pa.s.sages and political changes."

"There's no longer any doubt about the clippers," Gerrit declared; "the California gold rush will attend to that."

In his room he found Taou Yuen, in soft white silk worked with bamboo leaves, on the day bed, smoking. She rose immediately as he entered; and, coming close to him, ran her cool fingers through his hair. He stood gazing out at the dim oil flares that marked the confines of Washington Square, considering all that Rhoda had said. Strangely enough it led his thoughts away from his wife; they reverted to Nettie Vollar.

He had been, he realized, very nearly in love with her: what he meant by that inaccurate term was that if the affair had continued a little longer he would have insisted on marrying her. Nettie was not indifferent to him. An impersonal feeling had attracted him to her--a resentment of her treatment by the larger part of Salem, particularly the oblique admiration of the men. His supersensitiveness to any form of injustice had driven him into the protest of calling and accompanying her, with an exaggerated politeness, about the streets. It had not been difficult; she was warm-blooded, luxurious, a very vivid woman. Gerrit, however, had made a point of repressing any response to that aspect of their intercourse--the sheerest necessity for the preservation of his disdain.

She had cried on his shoulder, in his arms, practically; he had acted in the purely fraternal manner. But the thing was reaching a natural conclusion when her grandfather, Barzil Dunsack, had interfered with his unsupportably frank accusations and command. The _Nautilus_ had been ready for sea, and his, Gerrit's, imperious resentment had carried him out of the Dunsacks' house--to Shanghai and Taou Yuen--without another word to Nettie.

How strangely life progressed, without chart or intelligent observations or papers! He heard the tap of his wife's pipe; there was a faint sweetish odor of drugged tobacco and the scent of cloves in which she saturated herself. Outside was Salem, dim and without perceptible movement; the clock in the hall struck ten. Taou Yuen didn't approach him again nor speak; her perceptions were wonderfully acute.

The sense of loneliness that sometimes overtook him on sh.o.r.e deepened, a feeling of impotence, as if he had suddenly waked, lost and helpless, in an unfamiliar planet. There was the soft whisper of his wife's pa.s.sage across the room. In the lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling unnatural patches of--paint. The reflections slid over the liquid black ma.s.s of her hair, died in the l.u.s.trous creamy folds of her garment. She was at once grotesque and impressive, like a figure in a Chinese pantomime watched from the western auditorium of his inheritance. His fondness for her, his admiration, had not lessened. He surveyed his position, the presence here, in his room at Java Head, of Taou Yuen, with amazement; all the small culminating episodes lost, the result was beyond credence. His thoughts returned to Rhoda's accusation of selfishness, the disaster implied in her pity for his wife. He tried again to a.n.a.lyze his marriage, discover whatever justification, security, it possessed. Was his admiration for Taou Yuen sufficient provision for his part of their future together? It was founded largely on her superiority to the world he had known; and here it was necessary for him to convince himself that his wedding had not been merely the result of romantic accident. He knew that the sensual had had almost no part in it, it had been mental; an act of pity crystallizing his revolt against what he felt to be the impotence of "Christian" ethics. Yet this was not sufficient; for he, like Rhoda, had found under his wife's immobility the flux of immemorial woman.

No, it wasn't enough; but more existed, he was certain of that. No one could expect him, now, to experience the thrill of idealized pa.s.sion that was the sole property of youth. What feeling he had had for Nettie--he was obliged to return to her from the fact that it was the only possible comparison--had come from very much the same source as the other. The old impersonal motives!

The danger, Rhoda pointed out, had been admitted when his marriage made impossible the continuation of that aloof position. He doubted that it could change him so utterly. The thought of the entertainment his wife would afford him in Salem expanded. He regretted that the best, the calling and comments of the women, was necessarily lost to him, but Taou Yuen would repeat a great deal: she, too, had a sly sense of the ridiculous. He hoped that his sister-in-law didn't suppose her helpless; the impenetrable Manchu control gave her a pitiless advantage over any less absolute civilization. In the darkness before sleep the heavy exotic scents in the room oppressed him strangely.

He rose early, and quietly dressing went out into the garden: buds on the June roses against the high blank fence on the street were swelling into visible crimson; there were the stamping of horses' feet on the cobbles of the stable inclosure, the heavy breathing and admonitions of the coachman wielding a currycomb. The sunlight streamed down through pale green willow and tall lilac bushes, through the octagonal latticed summerhouse and across the vivid sod to the drawing-room door. Gerrit turned, and entered the farther yard, where his father was inspecting the pear trees.

"The _Nautilus_ will need new copper sheathing," Gerrit said: "she's pretty well stripped forward."

"Take her around to the Salem Marine Railway at the foot of English Street. A fine ship, Gerrit, with a proper hull. I tell you they'll never improve on the French lines."

"She won't go into the wind with a clipper," he admitted; "but I'll sail her on a fair breeze with anything afloat."