Part 21

Was it true that all that, for him, was already a thing of the past? Epes couldn’t believe it, and yet--what other conclusion was possible? Turning his thoughts to the past hour with Annice he tried, in her, to find a recompense for what he was losing, but without success. He was proud of her; in her way she was fine and beautiful. Perhaps what he understood love to be came later; it might be unreasonable to expect the whole measure of joy at once. Annice was cool enough; indeed they had acted as though they had been married for a year or more, as though they had been continuously together instead of having been so lately separated by the diameter of the world.

There was a light in the small room at the rear of the hall, used by his father as an office; and as he laid aside his wraps the elder appeared in the doorway, obviously desiring speech.

“I have seen Mr. Dove,” Ira Calef told his son; “and he corroborates your report, with some added praise. I am very well pleased, Epes. Your conduct this evening, too, was admirable. I did not quite expect, at once, such a full comprehension of my intentions. The fact is,” he proceeded in a general discursive manner, “that the country is changing very rapidly. A great many men are blind to this, and as a result they will have to suffer. It is not so with me. The days of the colony are at last definitely at an end; from now on not adventure but finance will be the ruling spirit. That is one of the reasons why I am withdrawing you from the sea. Let other paid men--good men, but essentially subordinate--undertake the gales and half gales; it is important for you, a Calef, to be at the center of affairs and safe.”

Epes’ expression was dull, unrevealing; everything that was being said contradicted and outraged his every fiber. Safe! Good men, but subordinate! He longed to shout--for all sailors, before and aft the mast--a contradiction of his father’s cold patronizing periods. He loathed the money sharks who on land, in houses, traded on the courage and endurance and fidelity of ships’ masters and crews. If Ira Calef was right, and they had grown unimportant, if their greatness was doomed to vanish--why, then he wanted to go too.

All this filled his brain and throat, clamored for expression; but not a word, not a protesting sound came from him. Suddenly he was tired; Epes felt as though the leaden weight of his future already rested on him. The other made an approving reference to Annice Balavan; and perversely, for no discoverable reason, in place of the golden vision of Annice he saw Sumatra, square, like a sampan--and defiant.

When, for the time, Ira Calef had quite finished the expression of his balanced judgments Epes rose with the shadow of an instinctive bow.

“Very good, sir.” The sea phrase was spoken in a voice without animation.

Above, close by his room, he was mildly surprised to find his mother. It was evident that she had been waiting for him, and followed, carefully closing the door behind them.

“How did you find Annice?” she asked.

But to his reply that Annice had seemed well enough she paid no attention. With a quick, nervous gesture she pressed her handkerchief against her eyes.

“And your father----”

Epes said nothing.

“Epes,” she cried, in a sudden realization of all that, it was now clear, she wanted to say to him, “no matter how hard and unreasonable he may seem, you mustn’t contradict him. It isn’t as though he were going to do you harm. What he plans is right; he can see so much farther than we can. And you will be very happy, I am sure, with Annice. You’ll forget the sea?” her voice rose in inquiry.

“Never,” Epes answered.

Clia Calef shivered momentarily. “I was afraid of something like that,” she admitted. “And that is why it is necessary for me to speak to you. You must do what your father wants.”

This was, he thought, in view of his restraint, all unnecessary. He regarded his mother, seated with her head blurred against the candlelight, with a mature, unsympathetic attention. Women--the characteristic feminine world--were very far outside the scope of his interests and being. Even to his mother he could not explain, seek to justify himself; his inner being had grown obdurate, solitary; life, which had once, in the form of blue water, everywhere surrounded and touched him, had retreated, flowed away, leaving him on that sandy, meaningless beach. Why did she talk and talk?

“You have been wonderfully quiet,” she still went emotionally on; “I could tell that from Ira’s manner. But I wasn’t sure. I’m not yet; and for that reason, to save hideous trouble, I made up my mind to tell you. There is a little strangeness about your father, and it comes out when he is contradicted. Except for that he is splendid. I don’t just know what it is, but contradiction makes him wretched; he--he loses control of himself.” She was speaking faster, with an obvious increasing difficulty. “I did it, once. We hadn’t been married long, and it was in the garden. He had just come back from the counting-house, and he was carrying a light cane, a wanghee. And, Epes, he struck me with it. Oh, not very hard; not, really, too hard. I didn’t say a word. I stood for a second, quite frozen, and then I turned to walk out of the garden, to leave him, forever. I intended to go, but it did hurt. I was confused, and instead of finding the gate I walked into the geraniums and fainted. So, you see, I stayed.”

Epes Calef drew in an audible harsh breath.

“You mustn’t judge him!” she exclaimed eagerly. “I am sure it spoiled a large part of his life. He carried me into the house, and neither of us have referred to it since. Yes, it hurt him beyond speech; for weeks he slept hardly at all. Epes, Epes, I can’t have it happen to him again. He is your father and you must help. You love him, too, I am certain; and what he arranges is always, always best.”

She was so tremulous, so self-effacing, that he felt he couldn’t bear to hear another word. It was terrible, and as wrong as possible.

“He ought to be denied,” Epes said in a strong voice. “Now that you have told me this I think it might be what he, what we all need; perhaps I shall have to.”

“That is not for you to judge,” Clia Calef told him with a resumption of dignity. “You would be very wicked indeed; and not only, perhaps, harm Ira permanently, but me as well. I have to live with him, and not you. Epes, you have the ignorance of youth; but if I can help it I won’t have you upsetting our life.”

He was, he saw, literally nothing before her love for the man who had struck her with his wanghee.

“It would spoil everything,” she half whispered to herself. “I have tried hard, so long.”

Epes rose sharply. “You must go to bed,” he directed. “If you are not careful you will be sick.” He was deathly sick. She clung to him.

“Promise me, promise you will do as he says.”

“I have already decided that,” he answered in his weary, dead voice.

Epes, with his hand under her arm, conducted her to her room. A wave of warmth flowed into the hall as the door opened and shut, like the soiled enervating breath of a hidden corruption.

It was a physical impossibility, in the temporarily empty days following immediately Epes’ arrival home, for his spiritual darkness to stay at its intensest; at least his state of mourning made it unnecessary for him to go to the meaningless parties being then crowded into the heart of the winter season. It was uncomfortable for him at home, and he fell into the habit of lounging through the afternoons in the more informal of the Balavans’ drawing-rooms. There, in his special position and license, he was permitted to smoke his cheroots and listen to the light easy run of Annice’s voice, so much like the easy light tripping of her fingers over the keyboard of the spinet. He was engaged in exactly this manner an hour or so before Annice’s departure for one of the principal cotillons of the year, at Hamilton Hall; and Annice, who had dressed early so that she could be with him, was sitting erectly by an opposite wall. Sumatra was present, too; a fact to which her elder sister repeatedly called attention by urging the necessity of Sumatra’s changing for the ball. Sumatra, Epes had learned, had been half permitted and half coerced into going.

“I can get ready in twelve minutes,” she announced.

“I don’t doubt that,” Annice retorted; “but what will you look like when it is done? In the first place your hair is like wire and takes the longest while to be really possible----”

“It won’t matter,” said Sumatra; “Epes told me I couldn’t make myself attractive, no matter how much we all tried.”

“Did you say that, Epes?” Annice asked. “It was rather tactless of you, because, though you’d never guess it, Sumatra is crazy about you. It might even be more than I am.”

Epes Calef gazed at Sumatra with a brutal indifference. She met his eyes courageously, and in an even voice replied to her sister.

“I was once,” she corrected the other, “when I thought that Epes belonged to the sea. But now he’s on land--” She made a gesture of dismissal. “Epes, while I suspect he’s very good, is my great disappointment. I don’t like good people.”

“What experience have you had with bad?” he asked cuttingly. “As usual, you are just talking words. You are a regular sea lawyer.”

“Do get dressed, Sumatra,” Annice said.

“Something light and feminine,” Epes added; “with wreaths of flowers for you to put your feet through.”

He couldn’t understand why, whenever he talked to Sumatra, he became so vindictive. He had no particular desire to be nasty; it came up in spite of him.

“Perhaps no one will ask me to dance.”

“If they do,” he advised her, “and it is near supper, don’t let go or you’ll get no oysters.”

“Sumatra, get dressed,” Annice commanded.

“Maybe I won’t at all.”

“Do you mean you’ll go like you are?”

“It wouldn’t kill anyone, would it? I shouldn’t come home and cry if I didn’t get an armful of favors; I can get along, for a few minutes anyhow, by myself.”

This, Epes thought, promised to be amusing. Peppery Sumatra! Annice glanced at him hastily.

“Please, Sumatra,” she entreated; “we simply can’t be late. I’ll give you my white-ribbed Spanish stockings.”

The other serenely answered, “The feet would be too big.”

He had never noticed her feet, and to his considerable surprise they were smaller, narrower than Annice’s.

“You are a lumpish, impossible child,” the elder said acrimoniously. “Why I begged mother to let you start the cotillons I can’t imagine. And when we get there you are not to hang about me.”

“I won’t; you’re not seaworthy. You are cut away too much through the middle; you would go over in a good blow.”

Epes incautiously laughed.

“Be still,” Annice directed him; “she must not be encouraged in such conduct.”

“Well,” he said pacifically, “you wouldn’t, Trinidad.” He often substituted the West India island for that from which she was named, reminding her of his matrimonial prediction.

“Yes, sampan,” Annice echoed him. “Will you or will you not get dressed?”

“I will, when I have twelve minutes. It doesn’t, you know, take me three hours.” Nevertheless, she rose. “You haven’t been specially nice to me, have you?” she said slowly, carefully avoiding Epes Calef. “You made pretty clear all you thought. I don’t believe I could be like that.”

Suddenly she gazed full at Epes. “It might be your father in you,” she concluded; “if I were you I shouldn’t encourage that--for Annice’s sake. It would be so hard on her.”

“Thank you, but I can take care of myself,” Annice assured her brightly; “and it would be nicer to omit the personal history.”

“All I say is wrong!” Sumatra declared.

“All,” Epes echoed her.

“I must be a sampan.”

“Must.”

“Square bowed, and only fit for rivers.”

“For rivers.”

“But even that is better than a desk,” she reminded him. She was beside the door, and paused with a hand upon the frame, looking over her shoulder. “What Annice told you was true,” she reiterated. “I had a little picture hidden in a drawer, which I am now going up to tear into bits.”

When she had gone Annice turned to him in a conciliatory manner.

“There is something I meant to tell you at once, this afternoon, but it slipped from my mind. I hope you won’t be angry and I can’t imagine how it happened. But the whole thing, of course, is exaggerated; it must be all nonsense at bottom. Still I am sorrier than words can say. Epes, somehow I’ve lost the token.”

He gazed, startled at her, with a stirring of the old Calef superstition within him. However, he concealed it.

“That is too bad. We think it’s rather valuable, you know. Perhaps it will turn up; there are so many places you might have left it.”

No, she replied; she knew how they felt about it, and she had left it, she was certain, in the lacquer box on her dressing-case. It was very mysterious and uncertain.

“Now,” she said with a smile, “you won’t have to marry me. The spell, the charm is broken.”

This he repudiated in a form correct and stiff. The influence that absurd East Indian coin exerted upon his thoughts was amazing. He repeated, silently, her words--“Now you won’t have to marry me.” But certainly they had no force, no reality. He was bound to her not by an obang, but by honor. At the same time his feeling was undeniably different; he regarded her from a more detached position. What was that Sumatra had hinted--about crying over a scarcity of favors, and taking three hours to dress? It didn’t matter to him, nothing did; it only added to the general weariness, waste of existence. Epes recalled the promised French boudoir in the threatened Boston house. That was it--his life hereafter was to be passed in a little scented room choked with brocade and hangings.

A maid appeared, enveloped Annice in a long cloak luxuriously lined with sables, twisted a silvery veiling over her netted hair, over her lovely regular features, her face with its indefinite suggestion of golden oranges.

“I thought Sumatra would be late,” she declared in an abstracted exasperation. Then through the veiling she gave him a metallic and masked kiss. From the hall her voice sounded, fretful about her carriage boots.

The carriage with Annice and Sumatra departed; he must go, too; where, he didn’t know, it no longer mattered; home, he supposed. There was a second stamping of hoofs before the Balavan dwelling, and Mrs. Balavan, in street wraps, passed the drawing-room door. Epes remembered that he had heard his mother speak of going to a ballad soirée with her. Still he remained seated, after the hour of dinner, and it was nearly nine before he left.

The light in his father’s office was, as usual, turned up, a thin haze of tobacco smoke perceptible. Without the desire to go up to his room Epes sat in a lower chamber. Snatches of the conversation--the quarrel, really--between Sumatra and Annice returned to him. How essentially different they were. Annice was far, far the lovelier. She made a business of being beautiful. But at least that, in a wife, was something; the majority of wives had far less. What a curious double life it would be--two separate people with one name, in one house. She could never, he was sure, mean more to him than she did now. And it was clear that for her part her demand was no greater.

Sumatra would be the opposite--there was no end to what she expected, fought for, insisted upon. Strangely enough, he couldn’t see her as a wife--even for that coast-wise figure he had so often pictured--at all. He was unable to discover what sort of man would suit her, but certainly one armed with a belaying pin. He became conscious of a clamor faintly heard from another part of Salem; it grew more distinct, and he recognized that it was the confused alarms and uproar of a fire. The fire evidently lay in the direction of Marlboro Street; the noise increased rather than subsided; but even this didn’t stir him until his father appeared.

“I shall have to neglect my duty this evening,” he explained; “there are some questions of foreign exchange. But perhaps you will take my place.”

Epes went silently out to the hall, where two leather buckets, painted with the name Active Fire Club, were hanging. He secured them, and a wool scarf, and went unexcitedly in search of the fire. It was, as he had thought, in the vicinity of Marlboro Street, the Baptist Church. The Fire Engine Exchange, he saw, to which generally the men of the Calef family belonged, had secured the place of honor, directly at the conflagration. Its reservoir was connected by hose to another engine, and that latter to a third, which drew from the source of their water. A pandemonium rose about Epes--the hoarse, jeering shouts of the competing companies, authoritative voices magnified by trumpets, the clatter of the hand pump, and the dull roar of the unconquerable flames. A curtain of black smoke, ruddy at its base and, above, poured with live cinders, rolled up across the immaculate green sky and frosty stars.

The members of the Active Fire Club had formed their line for the rapid orderly passing of buckets, and Epes had taken his place at the end, when he saw a short, familiar feminine shape standing alone. It was Sumatra, and it was extremely wrong of her to be there, like that, so late.

He left his position hurriedly and laid a hand on her arm. How, he demanded, had she got there, and why was she by herself?

“Oh, Epes!” she exclaimed with pleasure. “The cotillon nearly killed me, it was so stupid; and then I heard the alarms, and James Saltonstall wanted to come; and so, you see, here we--here I am.”

“Where is he? Why did he leave you?”

Before she could answer there was a louder opposed shouting of voices:

“Suck him dry, Exchange!”

“Overwash them, Adams. Drown the damned silk stockings!”

Sumatra clutched his hand excitedly. “Don’t you see--they are trying to burst the Exchange engine; we haven’t enough men to pump, because some didn’t leave Hamilton Hall, and James is at the sweep. You must go, too, Epes. Quick, quick, or it will be too late!”

His negative attitude settled into an active perversity; Epes Calef made up his mind that he wouldn’t pump; they could knock the silly engines into painted fragments for all him. Sumatra gave him a strong impatient shove forward, but he resisted her.

“The fire will be over in a few more minutes,” he observed.

She damned the fire excitedly; it was the engine she cared about. “I’ll pump, myself!” Sumatra cried.

He turned to her with a smile, but that was immediately lost as he saw that she had every intention of fulfilling her threat. Sumatra had started toward the profane companies of men when he caught her by the shoulder.

He said coldly, “You’re crazy. Nobody ever heard of such a thing--a girl pumping at a fire! You’d be talked about, insulted in songs all over the country. Come home at once.”

She wrenched herself from his hold, and Epes was obliged to stand in front of her with his arms outspread. Sumatra’s face grew crimson with rage.

“Get out of my way!” she commanded him. “Do you think everyone is a coward and a ninny like you? I’ll pump if I want to, and it doesn’t matter who sings about it. I don’t care what the other fools of women do.”

“No, you won’t,” he told her grimly.

She gave him a shove, and she was so strong that, unprepared, he staggered. She nearly succeeded in evading him, but he caught her with an arm around her vigorous waist. In an instant they were fighting. Braced, with her hand crushing into his face, she tried to break his hold; then Sumatra struck him in the eye. Infuriated, he wanted to knock her head off, but he had to restrain himself to a negative attack.

“I’ll throw you down and sit on you,” he gasped; “here, on the street.”

By way of reply she kicked his shins until, through the hurt, he could feel the blood sliding into his shoes. Shouts, which now, in his rage, he heard but dimly, derisive and encouraging calls, surrounded him. The girl, the little Amazon, was implored to crack his coco; there were protesting cries of shame, but these were lost in the larger approval and entertainment. By Jupiter, but she was finishing him! This, Epes desperately told himself, was horrible beyond words.

“Stop it!” he said savagely, again and again.

But through set teeth Sumatra replied that she’d pump if she chose, and no--no l-l-land shark could stop her. At this there was a hurrah. Her strength was amazing, and entirely wrong; she was like a maniac. Then with a free arm he punched her directly and rudely in the stomach. Sumatra settled against him limply; and holding her up, dragging her with him past threatening faces wavering in the dark, he succeeded in getting her around a corner to a deserted street.

She was still limp, struggling for breath; her face was pale and her hair in torn disorder. Sumatra slowly recovered, and--amazingly--she smiled. Epes’ anger, too, fled; he gazed at her, examining in dismay her clothes with a feeling which might almost have been called admiration. Yet he spoke severely.

“You ought to be in a cage,” he told her; “you’re just wild.”

However was she to fix her clothes, she replied; where could she go? “I ought to go back to Hamilton Hall.”

To this he agreed, the Balavan house was far, inconveniently situated; and they decided, since the Calefs and Balavans were now practically one family, to stop at his dwelling for the repairing of her clothes and spirit. He secured his buckets and they hurried back, through a serene air like liquid ice, over Summer Street to Chestnut. The light was still burning in Ira Calef’s office, and noiselessly they turned into an opposite room.

Epes went on into the dining room, opening darkly beyond, leaving Sumatra with candles on the floor before a tall mirror. There, bearing a high silver candlestick and a following indeterminate illumination, he discovered a bottle of champagne, tagged the ship _Nautilus_ and the year, and gathered two high glasses and some ice. He was tingling with excitement, a disturbance deeper than physical. He felt oddly detached from his late life, the commonplace and irresponsible; his mind was without images, thought--it was like a whirling of crackling colored lights. He found his situation--the uncorked champagne, the two glasses, the unsuspecting near presence of his father, Sumatra, rearranged, entering the dining room--extraordinary and invigorating. The wine foamed whitely through the ice, turning into a silky clear amber that stung his lips. Sumatra observed, sitting down, that she ought to go on to the cotillon at once.