Part 20

Instantly, from the floor above, his mother replied, but in a voice strangely, almost unrecognizably emotional, and he heard her equally disturbed and hurried approach. The darkly paneled and carved stairway, bending above his head at the tall window over the portico, hid her until she had almost reached him; and then with an involuntary painful contraction of his heart he saw that she was in deep mourning, and that her face was heavy, sodden with tears. Before he could question her, her arms were about his shoulders and she was sobbing again.

“Epes, Epes, I was afraid you weren’t coming back either.”

“What is it?” he stammered. “Is father----”

She drew slightly away from him, gazing with streaming eyes into his questioning face. “Why, haven’t you-- But that is incredible!” She was close to him again. “Bartlett is dead. It--it happened in New York, from a torn finger and blood poisoning. In two days, Epes; we hardly got there, saw him. Your father had to go to Boston, and is just back; but he’ll see you almost at once, in the music room, he said.”

How like his father that insistent formality was, Epes thought; nothing, it seemed, was to shake the dignity, the aloofness of Ira Calef. His manner positively carried with it a chill as palpable as that now in the streets. He was, of course, both to the world at large and to his family, the perfect shape of integrity; but that, with his rigidly correct deportment, appeared to be his only conception of what was owing, through him, to exterior circumstance and people. All people--Clia, his wife, his two sons--had been exterior to Ira Calef; it was always evident that he viewed, weighed every possible development of living solely in the light of his own unalterable convictions and wishes. They were, it was true, always carefully studied, logical; nor were his decisions quickly formed, in any heat, generous or bitter; it was the inflexible manner, the finality and detachment of their announcement which made them appear so unbearably arbitrary.

The music room, like the stair well, was entirely paneled, walls and ceiling in dark wood, and the mahogany in it, the waxed floor, even the windows with their multiplicity of small panes, held in replica the withdrawn, almost morose effect given by Ira Calef himself. He came presently, in a gait neither slow nor fast, into the music room, where, without his mother, Epes was waiting. The other’s show of welcome was, for him, unusual; he held Epes’ hand for more than the strictly necessary moment, and at once indicated a chair and the fact that Epes might sit. He was a big man, past sixty, handsomely proportioned, with a handsome face evenly pallid except for the discolorations hanging under eyes themselves almost without a perceptible shading. They were, of course, gray, yet they were so pale that but for their domineering focus they rather resembled clear water slightly crystallized with ice. He made an adequate but brief reference to Bartlett’s death, dwelling for a little on the collapse of the boy’s mother; and then leaning back and deliberately, for the time, shifting the conversation, asked Epes Calef for a detailed account of what on his voyage as supercargo he had accomplished.

This Epes, to his considerable relief of mind, was able to explain satisfactorily. The master of the _Triton_, Whalen Dove, had come on board the ship at Gravesend, twenty miles down river from London, and after they had been wind-bound for two weeks at Ramsgate they had proceeded to Madeira for wine, put into Colombo after twenty days, and had gone on almost immediately to the Coromandel Coast, Pondicherry and Madras, where the cargo had been disposed of through Lyss, Saturi & Demonte. Yes, the ship had come home by way of Rotterdam. Lost Teneriffe above the clouds five degrees west. They had made seventeen knots with the main skysail set, when a British ship was under double-reefed topsails. But in a three-quarters gale, west southwest, they carried away a mizzen topsail and the foresail burst.

Ira Calef listened to this in an admirable silence that at the same time conveyed the impression that he was exercising an unnecessary amount of patience in the waiting for details of more importance. Epes quickly recalled himself from his enthusiasm in the mere fact of seamanship. There were close to two hundred cases of indigo in the _Triton’s_ hold--186, to be precise; about a million pounds of Madras sugar; 460 pieces of redwood; 709 bags of ginger; 830 bags of pepper; 22 chests of tea-- The duty, the elder decided, would be over twenty thousand dollars.

“You didn’t like this,” he said unexpectedly to his son.

Epes met his cold gaze fairly. “No, sir,” he replied.

“Always the taste for mere ships.”

To this there was no permissible answer.

“I am sorry for that,” the other proceeded, “for, now that Bartlett is dead, it will be needful for you to give up the sea as a career; I shall require you to stay in Salem. There are plenty of good, even faithful masters of ships; but after me you are the only remaining Calef; and it won’t do for you to be knocking around the windy reaches of the globe.” He stopped, entirely inattentive of Epes’ strained lips, his half-lifted hand.

A choking emotion, partly made up of incredulity and in part a burning resentment, fast-rising rebellion, filled Epes Calef. This--this wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t possible. They couldn’t take and, for all his past life, fix his every ambition and hope and standard on the sea, and then in a sentence or two destroy him, ruin everything he was and might be; for what his father had just said amounted to no less. It was inhuman. It couldn’t be! Evidently Ira Calef expected him to speak, to acquiesce, for his regular eyebrows mounted ever so slightly. But the thing, the only safety, for Epes now was to remain silent.

“I am not even, completely, certain of Salem,” the elder went on in his level voice, after what had almost become an unbearable pause. “I personally shall never live anywhere else; but it may be necessary for you to move into Boston--for a number of years anyhow. I am getting more and more absorbed in marine insurance; and the opportunities for the study of that are moving away from us here. I have spoken to Annice about all this, and since she is a sensible girl with no fancy for a husband eternally below the horizon she is delighted.”

“I see,” Epes said uncertainly.

Annice Balavan would be delighted with all that his father had just said, especially with the Boston part, the larger society there. She was a natural part of this new, incredibly horrible plan; instantly he identified her with it, saw her moving radiant and content over its monotonous bricks and floors and earth. Something within him, automatic, brought him to his feet. The other glanced up, once.

“You are, of course, upset by the suddenness of the news of your brother’s death,” he conceded. “If you like you may go to your room with no further discussion at present. There isn’t a great deal left to be said--more movements than words. The most advantageous arrangements will be made for Annice and you; her mother has already promised to furnish a Boston house for her in the new style. I am pleased with the manner in which you appear to have accomplished your duties on the _Triton_.”

In his room a fire of coals was burning in the grate, with a faintly audible splitting and small rushes of gaseous flame. It cast a perceptible ruddiness on the immediate oak flooring, while the rest of the room was rapidly dimming; the windows, beyond which the familiar limbs of the elms on the street were sharp and black, showed only rectangles of cold gray; the yellow light had faded from the sky. Epes stood irresolutely, with his gaze lowered, his brow drawn with lines. He could just see his blue sea chest, sent up from the ship earlier in the afternoon; and the brass disks of a nocturnal, his chiefest treasure, hung, he knew, above the chest on the wall. That old instrument of navigation, for finding at night, through the North Star, the hour, seemed to challenge and mock his wretchedness and impotence. That latter word most perfectly held the essence of his tragic situation.

He could do nothing!

Epes slipped into a chair and attempted to combat this. A daring resolution hovered about him, reckless, and yet, he told himself fiercely, entirely justified; he might run away to sea; the sea, the service, he loved. He could ship any day, from any port, as third, probably second mate, and after a single voyage become first officer. That was the reasonable thing to do. He understood that an appeal to his father was worse than useless; the opening of any protest, a difference of opinion, determination, would close Ira Calef to both sympathy and attention. He would be simply, remotely unbending--the eyebrows would climb, his mouth harden, a cutting phrase end the conversation. His father, Epes had realized, was different from the other pleasant fathers he knew; he had always been, well--inhuman. That term in such a connection was new, presumptuous, but Epes in his present mood defiantly allowed it. However, not until now had he acutely suffered from the elder Calef’s disposition. Outside he had heard the words “an India liver” applied to his father; yet even Salem was cautious, deferential in its attitude there; Epes could never remember an occasion when his father had been balked in a decision, or even seriously contradicted.

He felt actually as though he hated that frozen parental figure; and he almost blamed Bartlett for dying. That recalled the fact that his brother was dead, that his emotion was neither appropriate nor decent; but the threatened, overpowering wrong to him persisted in dominating every other response. Yes, Epes repeated, he would run away; that--very successfully--had been done before. He’d leave everything, go with only the clothes in which he stood, leaving, out of the sum due him from the _Triton_, payment for them. That act, he recognized, must take him forever from his family, from, as long as Ira Calef lived, his home, Salem. The other would never relent. He thought for a moment of his mother’s helpless position; never had he heard her raise her voice, oppose in any particular her husband. He was not, it was true, unkind or discourteous to her, he merely ignored the possibility of her having a single independent desire, a fraction of personality or will. And during Epes’ life she had shown no indication that he was wrong. What, Epes now wondered, was the actuality beneath her calm demeanor; maybe she hated, detested Ira Calef. This amazing speculation redirected his thoughts to Annice Balavan.

Or rather, it drew his mind back to the token, the gage of the Calef men. Its reputed, its proved force exerted a species of numbing magic on him; his superstitious regard for it held his imagination as though in chains. Epes had given the obang to Annice, and therefore he was going to marry her; there was no escape from the girl who possessed it. This instinct was so strong that it struck at all his vague planning--Annice, if he knew her, would never consent to marry a runaway sailor, third mate or first or master. No matter what he might project, an unforeseen circumstance, accident, would betray him and marry him to Annice Balavan.

He tried to throw this conviction off, to laugh it away for nonsense; he derided himself unsparingly; rising, he told himself that he would tramp down through the house and out at once; but instead he sank back into his chair. Yet it might be that he could get away, come back successful, rich, in a very few years--one good voyage would secure that--and find Annice waiting for him. This seemed to him an inspiration, and a hard, active spirit welled up within him. After no more than one voyage to China. But again a disability, as gray as the dusk without, flooded him; he couldn’t, when the moment came, walk away in that manner from responsibility. No matter what his father was like, he was incontrovertibly his father; already Epes Calef saw his world as the deck of a ship, and the high order, the discipline of that plane was the base of his being. There was, of course, injustice on the sea; tyrannical captains; but the injustice and tyranny could not be met with mutiny. For example, if as a subordinate he were directed to take his ship onto rocks that he could clearly see, what was there for him to do but that? How could he question or penetrate the superior, the totally responsible position?

There had been cases when a master, obviously insane or incapacitated, had been restrained, held in his cabin against the next port inquiry, by his principal officers; but even at the height of his desire Epes couldn’t call his father insane. Still seeing his fate as a part of the obsessing sea he told himself that figuratively he had been set ashore on a sterile and deserted beach while his ship, having swung about with her sails filling gloriously, left him for the rush of free water. Accustomed to the open, to hour after hour, day after day, month on month, on deck, he felt all at once that he couldn’t breathe in his closed room the confined heat of the coals. Epes, for a little, suffered acutely, in a constriction of nerves. His whole life was to be like this!

A knock sounded at the door, and a servant entered with fresh candles, which he proceeded to fix on the dressing stand, the overmantel, and light. The illumination, at first uncertain, wan, gained in steady brightness. It was time to dress for dinner. There had been no opportunity for him to procure mourning, but he put on his darkest, most formal clothes, and tied a severe black neckcloth.

The candelabra on the dining table showed his mother’s place to be empty--she was not yet able to manage the casual--and the chair that had been Bartlett’s was pushed against the wall. Ira Calef, seen to extreme advantage at the ceremony of dinner, hardly spoke; he was intent upon his codfish, with a green sauce; and he tasted critically the brown sherry before him in a large goblet of fragile glass flecked with gold. With this, it developed, he was dissatisfied; the wine had, he said curtly, withered; sherry, upon opening, could not withstand delay. He sent out the entire decanter with the order to replace it with another bottling--the Tio Pepe of the _Saragon_. He listed his cellar by the names of the vessels in which the various importations had been made. During this process he maintained an inflexible silence colored with his familiar suggestion of a restraint that no immoderate cause could break. To Epes the sherry, when it arrived, had no more warmth or flavor than was probable in the celebrated muddiness of the Hugli River.

Selecting a cheroot blindly from the box held at his elbow, and lighting it at the tendered spill, he retired mentally in the thin veil of smoke that rose across his face.

“You will, of course, stop in at the Balavans’ this evening,” his father said presently. Everything he uttered, Epes thought, took subconsciously the form of a direction. Still he must, he supposed, see Annice, if only for the announcement of his return.

The Balavans lived on the north edge of town, their terraced lawn descended to navigable water--to the anchorage, in fact, of the now vanished Balavan merchant fleet, and a deserted warehouse. And, shown through the hall to a drawing-room against the dark, bare garden, Epes found not Annice, as he had expected, but Sumatra. She was glad to see him. She was an indifferent girl, and this was specially noticeable; but he returned, inwardly and visibly, little if any of her pleasure.

“Tell me every shift of the wheel,” she demanded, facing him from the long stool of the spinet. “Be a human log.”

“I thought Annice was here,” he replied.

“She will be soon enough. Did the _Triton_ do anything really stirring, outsail seven ships or part both chains in Table Bay? I hope you came into Derby Wharf with the sheer poles coach-whipped and cross-pointed Turks’-heads with double-rose props.”

“I assure you, Sumatra,” he told her stiffly, “that I haven’t any idea of what you are talking about. And, what is more, I don’t think you have.” With this he half turned from her.

He could still see her, though, a thickly set girl--was she sixteen yet?--with a rosy, impertinent face and hair loosely confined in a ribbon. Her name had been given her from the fact that a Balavan, a master of ships, had in the eighteenth century discovered pepper growing wild on the coast of Sumatra. But there was now, Epes told himself, a far better reason--heaven knew she was peppery. Rather a detestable child.

Far from being disconcerted by the brevity of his retort she replied that she had heard it didn’t matter what he understood or didn’t understand about the sea--“Now that you are to be a clerk.”

After the stress, the difficulty of his homecoming, and from Sumatra, this was positively too much; and all the bitterness banked up by his father’s unassailable situation fell upon her.

“All your life,” he asserted, “you have been a joke, with your language like a crazy ship chandler. You have never been in the least feminine or attractive, and you never can be, not by the width of a finger nail. Part of it--being built like a sampan--you can’t help; but that won’t help you, will it? But you might, at least, get a vocabulary that ought to suit you better. All I say is, you’ll notice, that it ought to. What suits you I shouldn’t try to guess. That’s mostly what I think about you; but on this other subject, where my private affairs, perhaps sorrows, are concerned, shut up.”

This ill-tempered, rasped conclusion came so abruptly that it surprised even him. He glanced at her a shade regretfully, and saw with a feeling of satisfaction that once, anyhow, he had impressed, silenced her. Her head was bent, her face obscured by her forward-swung hair; her slippers were very rigidly together.

“I suppose you are right,” she admitted after a long breath. “Probably you won’t believe it, but I have never thought much about myself or how I affected people. Yes, a lot of them--and you, too--must think I am a joke. So few care for anything as I do for the sea. It used to seem to me that perhaps you did; I was wrong though.”

“Didn’t I tell you to let me alone?” he cried, again furious. “How do you know what I care for? What do you mean by daring to judge me, you--you----”

“Aren’t you leaving the sea for your father’s counting-house?” Sumatra calmly demanded of him.

“If I am it’s because my duty is there,” he replied miserably.

“You are the hell of a sailor,” she commented.

Ever since she could walk Sumatra had, on occasion, sworn; at times it had amused Epes Calef, but now it only added to his dislike, his condemnation of her. She should not, he told her severely, have been encouraged to continue it. Her answer was the expressed reflection that he might do better on shore; his delicacy was much too great for salt water.

“Do you honestly hate me?” she asked unaccountably. “I mean, when you are not in a rage.”

“No, I don’t hate you, in a rage or out of it,” he said coldly. “Often you go beyond your years, and you presume a good deal; but after a while you’ll make a good wife for the captain of a West India lugger or some fellow trading with Bermuda Hundred.”

This was an adroit insult, and pleasurably he watched her flush. She became so unhappy that he was magnanimously touched with remorse, and said with a kindly condescension that it was too bad she hadn’t been born a boy.

At that he had it swiftly proven to him that attitudes, interests, vocabularies were misleading, for logical and wholly feminine tears actually streamed over her healthy cheeks. It grew worse, for she rose and came close to him, with clasped desperate hands.

“Don’t listen to him!” she begged. “He’s a horrid man of snow, even if he is your father; and if you let him he’ll spoil your life. Tell him that you have made up your mind to go to sea, and that nothing can change it. You won’t be struck dead. He isn’t God with a stick of lightning.”

“You don’t understand,” he stammered, backing away from her, intolerably embarrassed. “I am not, as you seem to think, afraid of my father. I have been over and over it all in my head. No, it’s something different. You couldn’t understand,” he repeated. “No girl could.”

“You are wrong,” she replied slowly. “I see all that you mean, and--yes--I suppose I admire you for it. You can’t mutiny”--she echoed his own phrase--“others could, but not a Calef. Yet you make me furious, you are so helpless, so stupid. You will marry Annice and grow fat and near-sighted, that’s what’ll happen to you.”

Annice, in the doorway, asked: “Well, why not?”

Disregarding Sumatra, Epes went forward to meet the girl who possessed the Calef token. He had, in spite of his assertions, forgotten how lovely she was, slender and palely gold; her gray-gold hair was like a cloud in sifted sunlight, her skin had an even, warm pallor that remotely suggested oranges, and her eyes were a cool autumnal brown.

“Epes,” she continued, “how burned and well you look.”

She took his vigorous hands in hers, held them lightly for a second, and then relinquished him.

“There is an ocean of things for us to talk about and arrange,” she proceeded, from a divan; and her glance at Sumatra was a dismissal.

The younger girl made a profound curtsy to them both, surprisingly graceful for her solidity of waist, and disappeared. Epes realized that he ought to kiss Annice, but he felt awkward in the extreme. She held her face delicately to him; it was like a tea rose. He was, he supposed, fortunate; but no sensation of gladness accompanied that supposition. It was so sad about Bartlett, she went on; and how enormously his death had affected them. Wasn’t it unexpectedly sweet of her mother to furnish their house--“in miraculous brocades and hangings, with a French boudoir”?

Walking slowly home, the stars, very high above him, were like a powdering of dry, luminous snow on the polished night. The cold was so intense that his exposed face ached. What an odorous heat there would be over the mooring at the Prince’s Ghat in Calcutta! He remembered the firm, light pressure of the northeast trades, the perpetual fleecy trades clouds about the horizon, the bonitos and albacore in the deeply blue, sunny water. Lovely sailing.