Java Head by Joseph Hergesheimer

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JAVA HEAD

By Joseph Hergesheimer

1918

It is only the path of pure simplicity which guards and preserves the
spirit. _CHWANG-TZE_

TO HAZLETON MIRKIL, JR.

_from Dorothy and Joseph Hergesheimer_

I

Very late indeed in May, but early in the morning, Laurel Ammidon lay in
bed considering two widely different aspects of chairs. The day before
she had been eleven, and the comparative maturity of that age had filled
her with a moving disdain for certain fanciful thoughts which had given
her extreme youth a decidedly novel if not an actually adventurous
setting. Until yesterday, almost, she had regarded the various chairs of
the house as beings endowed with life and character; she had held
conversations with some, and, with a careless exterior not warranted by
an inner dread, avoided others in gloomy dusks. All this, now, she
contemptuously discarded. Chairs were--chairs, things to sit on, wood and
stuffed cushions.

Yet she was slightly melancholy at losing such a satisfactory lot of
reliable familiars: unlike older people, victims of the most
disconcerting moods and mysterious changes, chairs could always be
counted on to remain secure in their individual peculiarities.

She could see by her fireplace the elaborately carved teakwood chair
that her grandfather had brought home from China, which had never varied
from the state of a brown and rather benevolent dragon; its claws were
always claws, the grinning fretted mouth was perpetually fixed for a
cloud of smoke and a mild rumble of complaint. The severe waxed hickory
beyond with the broad arm for writing, a source of special pride, had
been an accommodating and precise old gentleman. The spindling gold
chairs in the drawingroom were supercilious creatures at a king's ball;
the graceful impressive formality of the Heppelwhites in the dining room
belonged to the loveliest of Boston ladies. Those with difficult
haircloth seats in the parlor were deacons; others in the breakfast room
talkative and unpretentious; while the deep easy-chair before the library
fire was a ship. There were mahogany stools, dwarfs of dark tricks; angry
high-backed things in the hall below; and a terrifying shape of gleaming
red that, without question, stirred hatefully and reached out curved and
dripping hands.

Anyhow, such they had all seemed. But lately she had felt a growing
secrecy about it, an increasing dread of being laughed at; and now,
definitely eleven, she recognized the necessity of dropping such pretense
even with herself. They were just chairs, she rerepeated; there was an
end of that.

The tall clock with the brass face outside her door, after a
premonitory whirring, loudly and firmly struck seven, and Laurel
wondered whether her sisters, in the room open from hers, were awake.
She listened attentively but there was no sound of movement. She made a
noise in her throat, that might at once have appeared accidental and
been successful in its purpose of arousing them; but there was no
response. She would have gone in and frankly waked Janet, who was not
yet thirteen and reasonable; but experience had shown her that Camilla,
reposing in the eminence and security of two years more, would permit no
such light freedom with her slumbers.

Sidsall, who had been given a big room for herself on the other side of
their parents, would greet anyone cheerfully no matter how tightly she
might have been asleep. And Sidsall, the oldest of them all, was nearly
sixteen and had stayed for part of their cousin Lucy Saltonstone's dance,
where no less a person than Roger Brevard had asked her for a quadrille.

Laurel's thoughts grew so active that she was unable to remain any
longer in bed; she freed herself from the enveloping linen and crossed
the room to a window through which the sun was pouring in a sharp bright
angle. She had never known the world to smell so delightful--it was one
of the notable Mays in which the lilacs blossomed--and she stood
responding with a sparkling life to the brilliant scented morning, the
honey-sweet perfume of the lilacs mingled with the faintly pungent odor
of box wet with dew.

She could see, looking back across a smooth green corner of the Wibirds'
lawn next door, the enclosure of their own back yard, divided from the
garden by a white lattice fence and row of prim grayish poplars. At the
farther wall her grandfather, in a wide palm leaf hat, was stirring about
his pear trees, tapping the ground and poking among the branches with his
ivory headed cane.

Laurel exuberantly performed her morning toilet, half careless, in her
soaring spirits, of the possible effect of numerous small ringings of
pitcher on basin, the clatter of drawers, upon Camilla. Yesterday she had
worn a dress of light wool delaine; but this morning, she decided
largely, summer had practically come; and, on her own authority, she got
an affair of thin pineapple cloth out of the yellow camphorwood chest.
She hurriedly finished weaving her heavy chestnut hair into two gleaming
plaits, fastened a muslin guimpe at the back, and slipped into her dress.
Here, however, she twisted her face into an expression of annoyance--her
years were affronted by the length of pantalets that hung below her
skirt. Such a show of their narrow ruffles might do for a very small
girl, but not for one of eleven; and she caught them up until only the
merest fulled edge was visible. Then she made a buoyant descent to the
lower hall, left the house by a side door to the bricked walk and an
arched gate into the yard, and joined her grandfather.

"Six bells in the morning watch," he announced, consulting a thick gold
timepiece. "Head pump rigged and deck swabbed down?" Secure in her
knowledge of the correct answers for these sudden interrogations Laurel
impatiently replied, "Yes, sir."

"Scuttle butt filled?"

"Yes, sir." She frowned and dug a heel in the soft ground.

"Then splice the keel and heave the galley overboard."

This last she recognized as a sally of humor, and contrived a fleeting
perfunctory smile. Her grandfather turned once more to the pears. "See
the buds on those Ashton Towns," he commented. Laurel gazed critically:
the varnished red buds were bursting with white blossom, the new leaves
unrolling, tender green and sticky. "But the jargonelles--" he drew in
his lips doubtfully. She studied him with the profound interest his sheer
being always invoked: she was absorbed in his surprising large roundness
of body, like an enormous pudding; in the deliberate care with which he
moved and planted his feet; but most of all by the fact that when he was
angry his face got quite purple, the color of her mother's paletot or a
Hamburg grape.

They crossed the yard to where the vines of the latter, and of white
Chasselas--Laurel was familiar with these names from frequent
horticultural questionings--had been laid down in cold frames for later
transplanting; and from them the old man, her palm tightly held in his,
trod ponderously to the currant bushes massed against the closed arcade
of the stables, the wood and coal and store houses, across the rear of
the place.

At last, with frequent disconcerting mutterings and explosive breaths,
he finished his inspection and turned toward the house. Laurel,
conscious of her own superiority of apparel, surveyed her companion in a
frowning attitude exactly caught from her mother. He had on that mussy
suit of yellow Chinese silk, and there was a spot on the waistcoat
straining at its pearl buttons. She wondered, maintaining the silent
mimicry of elder remonstrance, why he would wear those untidy old things
when his chests were heaped with snowy white linen and English
broadcloths. It was very improper in an Ammidon, particularly in one who
had been captain of so many big ships, and in court dress with a cocked
hat met the Emperor of Russia.

They did not retrace Laurel's steps, but passed through a narrow wicket
to the garden that lay directly behind the house. The enclosure was full
of robin-song and pouring sunlight; the lilac trees on either side of the
summer-house against the gallery of the stable were blurred with their
new lavender flowering; the thorned glossy foliage of the hedge of June
roses on Briggs Street glittered with diamonds of water; and the rockery
in the far corner showed a quiver of arbutus among its strange and lacy
ferns and mosses.

Laurel sniffed the fragrant air, filled with a tumult of energy; every
instinct longed to skip; she thought of jouncing as high as the poplars,
right over the house and into Washington Square beyond. "Miss Fidget!"
her grandfather exclaimed, exasperated, releasing her hand. "You're like
holding on to a stormy petrel."

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

"God bless me," he said, turning upon her his steady blue gaze; "what
have we got here, all dressed up to go ashore?" She sharply elevated a
shoulder and retorted, "Well, I'm eleven." His look, which had seemed
quite fierce, grew kindly again. "Eleven," he echoed with a satisfactory
amazement; "that will need some cumshaws and kisses." The first, she
knew, was a word of pleasant import, brought from the East, and meant
gifts; and, realizing that the second was unavoidably connected with it,
she philosophically held up her face. Lifting her over his expanse of
stomach he kissed her loudly. She didn't object, really, or rather she
wouldn't at all but for a strong odor of Manilla cheroots and the Medford
rum he took at stated periods.

After this they moved on, through the bay window of the drawing-room that
opened on the garden, where a woman was brushing with a nodding feather
duster, under the white arch that framed the main stairway, and turned
aside to where breakfast was being laid. Laurel saw that her father was
already seated at the table, intent upon the tall, thickly printed sheet
of the Salem _Register_. He paused to meet her dutiful lips; then with a
"Good morning, father," returned to his reading. Camilla entered at
Laurel's heels; and the latter, in a delight slightly tempered by doubt,
saw that she had been before her sister in a suitable dress for such a
warm day. Camilla still wore her dark merino; and she gazed with mingled
surprise and annoyance at Laurel's airy garb.

"Did mother say you might put that on?" she demanded. "Because if she
didn't I expect you will have to go right up from breakfast and change.
It isn't a dress at all for so early in the morning. Why, I believe it's
one of your very best." The look of critical disapproval suddenly became
doubly accusing.

"Laurel Ammidon, wherever are your pantalets?"

"I'm too big to have pantalets hanging down over my shoetops," she
replied defiantly, "and so I just hitched them up. You can still see the
frill." Janet had come into the room, and stood behind her. "Don't you
notice Camilla," she advised; "she's not really grown up." They turned at
the appearance of their mother. "Dear me, Camilla," the latter observed,
"you are getting too particular for any comfort. What has upset you now?"

"Look at Laurel," Camilla replied; "that's all you need to do. You'd
think she went to dances instead of Sidsall"

Laurel painfully avoided her mother's comprehensive glance. "Very
beautiful," the elder said in a tone of palpable pleasure. Laurel
advanced her lower lip ever so slightly in the direction of Camilla.
"But you have taken a great deal into your own hands." She shifted
apparently to another topic. "There will be no lessons to-day for I
have to send Miss Gomes into Boston." At this announcement Laurel was
flooded with a joy that obviously belonged to her former, less
dignified state. "However," her mother continued addressing her, "since
you have dressed yourself like a lady I shall expect you to behave
appropriately; no soiled or torn skirts, and an hour at your piano
scales instead of a half."

Laurel's anticipation of pleasure ebbed as quickly as it had come--she
would have to move with the greatest caution all day, and spend a whole
hour at the piano. It was the room to which she objected rather than the
practicing; a depressing sort of place where she was careful not to move
anything out of the stiff and threatening order in which it belonged. The
chairdeacons in particular were severely watchful; but that, now, she had
determined to ignore.

She turned to johnnycakes, honey and milk, only half hearing, in her
preoccupation with the injustice that had overtaken her, the conversation
about the table. Her gaze strayed over the walls of the breakfast room,
where water color drawings of vessels, half models of ships on teakwood
or Spanish mahogany boards, filled every possible space. Some her
grandfather had sailed in as second and then first mate, of others he had
been master, and the rest, she knew, were owned by Ammidon, Ammidon and
Saltonstone, her grandfather, father and uncle.

Just opposite her was the _Two Capes_ at anchor in Table Bay, the sails
all furled except the fore-topsail which hung in the gear. A gig manned
by six sailors in tarpaulin hats with an officer in the stern sheets
swung with dripping oars across the dark water of the foreground; on the
left an inky ship was standing in close hauled on the port tack with all
her canvas set. It was lighter about the _Two Capes_, and at the back a
mountain with a flat top--showing at once why it was called Table
Bay--rose against an overcast sky. Laurel knew a great deal about the
_Two Capes_--for instance that she had been a barque of two hundred and
nine tons--because it had been her grandfather's first command, and he
never tired of narrating every detail of that memorable voyage.

Laurel could repeat most of these particulars: They sailed on the tenth
of April in 'ninety-three, and were four and a half months to the Cape of
Good Hope; twenty days later, on the rocky island of St. Paul,
grandfather had a fight with a monster seal; a sailor took the scurvy,
and, dosed with niter and vinegar, was stowed in the longboat, but he
died and was buried at sea in the Doldrums. Then, with a cargo of Sumatra
pepper, they made Corregidor Island and Manilla Bay where the old Spanish
fort stood at the mouth of the Pasig. The barque, the final cargo of hemp
and indigo and sugar in the hold, set sail again for the Cape of Good
Hope, and returned, by way of Falmouth in England and Rotterdam, home.

The other drawings were hardly less familiar; ships, barques, brigs and
topsail schooners, the skillful work of Salmon, Anton Roux and Chinnery.
There was the _Celestina_ becalmed off Marseilles, her sails hanging idly
from the yards and stays, her hull with painted ports and carved bow and
stern mirrored in the level sea. There was the _Albacore_ running through
the northeast trades with royals and all her weather studding sails set.
Farther along the _Pallas Athena_, in heavy weather off the Cape of Good
Hope, was being driven hard across the Agulhas Bank under double-reefed
topsails, reefed courses, the fore-topmast staysail and spanker, with the
westerly current breaking in an ugly cross sea, but, as her grandfather
always explained, setting the ship thirty or forty miles to windward in a
day. She lingered, finally, over the _Metacom_, running her easting down
far to the southward with square yards under a close-reefed maintop sail,
double-reefed foresail and forestaysail, dead before a gale and gigantic
long seas hurling the ship on in the bleak watery desolation.

Laurel was closely concerned in all these. One cause for this was the
fact that her grandfather so often selected her as the audience for his
memories and stories, during which his manner was completely that of one
navigator to another; and a second flourished in the knowledge that
Camilla affected to disdain the sea and any of its connections.

Sidsall appeared and took her place with a collective greeting; while
Laurel, coming out of her abstraction, realized that they were discussing
the subject in which nearly every conversation now began or ended--the
solemn speculation of why her Uncle Gerrit Ammidon, master of the ship
_Nautilus_, was so long overdue from China. Laurel heard this from two
angles, or, otherwise, when her grandfather was or was not present, the
tone of the first far more encouraging than that of the latter. Her
father was speaking:

"My opinion is that he was unexpectedly held up at Shanghai. It's a new
port for us, and, Captain Verney tells me, very difficult to make: after
Woosung you have to get hold of two bamboo poles stuck up on the bank a
hundred feet apart as a leading mark, and, with these in range, steer for
the bar. The channel is very narrow, and he says the _Nautilus_ would
have to wait for high water, perhaps for the spring tide. She may have
got ashore, strained and sprung a leak, and had to discharge her cargo
for repairs."

"That's never Gerrit," the elder replied positively. "There isn't a
better master afloat. He can smell shoal water. I was certain we'd hear
from him when the _Sorsogon_ was back from Calcutta. Do you suppose,
William, that he took the _Nautilus_ about the Horn and--?" Laurel
wondered at the unmannerly way in which he gulped his coffee. "He might
have driven into the Antarctic winter," he proceeded. "My deck was swept
and all the boats stove off the Falklands in April."

"Gerrit's got a ship," the other asserted, "not a hermaphrodite brig
built like a butter box. You'll find that I am right and that he has been
tied up in port."

"I made eight hundred per cent on a first cargo for my owners," the elder
retorted. "Then there was trading, yes, and sailing, too. No chronometers
with confounded rates of variation and other fancy parlor instruments to
read your position from. When I first navigated it was with an astrolabe
and the moon. A master knew his lead, latitude and lookout then.

"Eight hundred barrels of flour and pine boards to Rio and back with
coffee and hides for Salem," he continued; "then out to Gibraltar and
Brazil with wine and on in ballast for Calcutta. Tahiti and Morea, the
Sandwich Islands and the Feejees. Sandalwood and tortoise shell and beche
de mer; sea horses' teeth, and saltpeter for the Chinese Government. I
don't want to hear about your bills of exchange and kegs of Spanish
dollars and solid cargoes of tea run back direct. Why, with your Canton
and India agents and sight drafts the China service is like dealing with
a Boston store."

Laurel saw that her father was assuming the expression of restrained
annoyance habitual when the elder contrasted old shipping ways with new.
"Unfortunately," he said, "the patient Chinaman will no longer exchange
silks and lacquer and teas for boiled sea slugs. He has learned to demand
something of value."

"Why, damn it, William," the other exploded, "nothing's more valuable to
a Chinese than his belly. They'll give eighteen hundred dollars a pecul
for birds' nests any day. As for your insinuation that we used to diddle
them--I never ran opium up from India to rot their souls. And when the
Chinese Government tried to stop it there's the British commercial
interests forcing it on them with cannon in 'forty-two.

"Look at the pepper we brought into Salem--" he was, Laurel realized with
intense interest, growing beautifully empurpled; "--lay right off the
beach at Mukka and did business with the Dato himself. We forded the bags
on the crew's backs across a river with muskets served in case the bloody
heathen drew their creeses. When we made sail everything was running over
with pepper--the boats and forecastle and cabins and between decks."

"Well, father, the heroic times are done, of course; I can't say that I'm
sorry. I shouldn't like to finance a voyage that reached out to three
years and depended on the captain's picking up six or seven cargoes."

The old man rose; and, muttering a plainly uncomplimentary period about
the resemblance of modern ship owners to clerks, walked with his heavy
careful tread from the room.

"You are so foolish to argue and excite him," William's wife told him.

Laurel regarded her with a passionate admiration for the shining hair
turning smoothly about her brow and drawn over her ears to the low coil
in the back, for her brown barege dress with velvet leaves and blue
forget-me-nots and tightest of long sleeves and high collar, and because
generally she was a mother to be owned and viewed with pride. She met
Laurel's gaze with a little friendly nod and said:

"Don't forget about your clothes, and I think you ought to finish the
practicing before dinner, so you'll be free for a walk with your
grandfather in the afternoon."

Soon after, Laurel stood in the hall viewing with disfavor the light
dress she had put on so gayly at rising. In spite of her sense of
increasing age she had a strong desire to play in the yard and climb
about in the woodhouse. Already the business of being grown up began to
pall upon her, the outlook dreary that included nothing but a whole hour
at the piano, an endless care of her skirts, and the slowest kind of walk
through Washington Square and down to Derby Wharf, where--no matter in
which direction and for what purpose they started forth--her
grandfather's way invariably led.

Janet joined her, and they stood irresolutely balancing on alternate
slippers. "Did you notice," the former volunteered, "mother is letting
Camilla have lots of starch in her petticoats, so that they stand right
out like crinoline? Wasn't she hateful this morning!" Laurel heard a
slight sound at her back, and, wheeling, saw her grandfather looking out
from the library door. A swift premonition of possible additional
misfortune seized her. Moving toward the side entrance she said to Janet,
"We'd better be going right away."

It was, however, too late. "Well, little girls," he remarked
benevolently, "since Miss Gomes has left for the day it would be as well
if I heard your geography lesson."

"I don't think mother intended for us to study today," Laurel replied,
making a face of appeal for Janet's support. But the latter remained
solidly and silently neutral.

"What, what," the elder mildly exploded; "mutiny in the forecastle! Get
right up here in the break of the quarter-deck or I'll harry you." He
stood aside while Laurel and Janet filed into the library. Geography was
the only subject their grandfather proposed for his instruction, and the
lesson, she knew, might take any one of several directions. He sometimes
heard it with the precision of Miss Gomes herself; he might substitute
for the regular questions such queries, drawn from his wide voyages, as
he thought to be of infinitely greater use and interest; or, better
still, he frequently gave them the benefit of long reminiscences,
through which they sat blinking in a mechanical attention or slightly
wriggling with minds far away from the old man's periods, full of
outlandish names and places, and, when he got excited, shocking swears.

He turned the easy-chair--the one which Laurel had thought of as a
ship--away from the fireplace, now covered with a green slatted blind for
the summer; and they drew forward two of the heavy chairs with shining
claw feet that stood against the wall. Smiley's Geography, a book no
larger than the shipmaster's hand, was found and opened to Hindoostan, or
India within the Ganges. There was a dark surprising picture of Hindoos
doing Penance under the Banyan tree, and a confusing view of the Himaleh
Mountains.

"Stuff," he proceeded, gazing with disfavor at the illustrations. "This
ought to be written by men who have seen the world and know its tides and
landmarks. Do you suppose," he demanded heatedly of Janet, "that the
fellow who put this together ever took a ship through the Formosa Channel
against the northeast monsoon?"

"No, sir," Janet replied hastily.

"Here are Climate and Face of the country and Religion," he located these
items with a blunt finger, "but I can't find exports. I'll lay he won't
know a Bengal chintz from a bundle handkerchief."

"I don't think it says anything about exports," Laurel volunteered. "We
have the boundaries and--"

"Bilge," he interrupted sharply. "I didn't fetch boundaries back in the
_Two Capes_, did I?" He thrust the offending volume into a crevice of his
chair. "Laurel," he added, "what is the outport of St. Petersburg?"

"Cronstadt," she answered, after a violent searching of her memory.

"And for Manilla?" he turned to Janet.

"I can't think," she admitted.

"Laurel?"

"Cavite," the latter pronounced out of a racking mental effort.

"Just so, and--" he looked up at the ceiling, "the port for Boston?"

"I don't believe we've had that," she said firmly. His gaze fastened on
her so intently that she blushed into her lap. "Don't believe we've had
it," he echoed.

"Why, confound it--" he paused and regarded her with a new doubt.
"Laurel," he demanded, "what is an outport?"

She had a distinct feeling of justifiable injury. A recognized part of
the present system of examination was its strict limitation to questions
made familiar by constant repetition; and this last was entirely new.
She was sure of several kinds of ports--one they had after dinner,
another indicated a certain side of a vessel, and still a third was
Salem. But an outport--Cronstadt, Cavite, what it really meant, what they
were, had escaped her. She decided to risk an opinion.

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