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 shore 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 passage across the room. In the lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling unnatural patches of—paint. The reflections slid over the liquid black mass of her hair, died in the lustrous 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 analyze 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 passion 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."
"If you come to that," his father asserted; "nothing handsomer will ever be seen than an East India-man in the northeast trades with the captain on the quarter-deck in a cocked hat and sword, the shoals of flying fish and albacore skittering about a transom as high and carved and gilded as a church, the royal pennant at the mainmast head. Maybe it would be the Earl of Balcarras with her cannons shining and the midshipmen running about."
"Yes," the younger man returned, "and taking in her light sails at sunset, dropping astern like an island. The John Company's ruining British shipping."