VIII
The dejection, the sense of a difference that held from him any comprehension of the vast maze of shore life, persisted as Gerrit Ammidon walked toward home. It was such an unusual feeling that he was conscious of it; he examined and speculated upon his despondency as if it had been something actually before him. The result of this was a still increased disturbance. He didn't like such strange qualities arbitrarily forcing their way into his being—he had the navigator's necessity for a clear understanding of the combined elements within and without which resulted in a harmonious, or at least predictable, movement. He distrusted all fogs. In a manner the course before him was plain—married to Taou Yuen, shipmaster in his family's firm, he had simple duties to perform, no part of which included sailing in strange or dangerous waters; yet though this was beyond argument he was still troubled by a great number of unpleasant conditions of mind and obscure pressures.
Gradually, however, his normal indignation returned, the contempt for a society without perceptible justice, centered principally in what Nettie Vollar had had from life. This, he assured himself, wasn't because he was in any way involved with her; but because it was such a flagrant case. She was a very nice girl. It was entirely allowable that he should admit that. As a fact, he warmly felt that he was her friend; the past justified, no, insisted on, that at least. He wondered exactly how fond he had been of her—in other words, how near he had come to marrying her. It had been an obvious possibility, decidedly; but the desire had never become actual. No, his feeling for her had never broken the bounds of a natural liking and a desire to secure decent treatment for her. The last had been vain.
If his mental searching had ended there it would have presented no difficulties, created no fog; but, unfortunately, there was another element which he admitted with great reluctance, an inborn discomfort. Although he had been clear about what had actually happened with Nettie there was reasonable doubt that the same limitations had operated with her. Briefly she had missed him more than he had realized. He explained this to his sense of innate masculine diffidence by the loneliness of her days. She had missed him….something within whispered that she still did. Women, he remembered hearing, were like that.
In the light, the possibility, of this he saw that he had done her a great wrong.
It had been his damned headlong ignorance of the dangerous quality of life, the irresponsibility of a child with gunpowder. With all this in his mind it seemed doubly imperative that he should do something for her; he owed her, he was forced to admit, more than a mere impersonal consideration. His thoughts returned unbidden to the fact that she—she had liked him. He insisted almost angrily on the past tense, but it surprised him and gave him a perceptible warm glow. Nettie was very pleasing: he inferred that she was a creature of deep emotions, affections.
At this he shook himself abruptly—such things were not permissible. Gerrit felt a swift sense of shame; they injured Nettie. His mind shifted to Taou Yuen. He found her asleep on the day bed she preferred, her elaborate headdress resting above the narrow pillow of black wicker. He could distinguish her face, pallid in the blue gloom, and a delicate, half-shut hand. He was flooded with the intense admiration which increasingly formed his chief thought of her; this, with the obvious racial difference, put her, as it were, on an elevation—a beautifully lacquered vase above his own blundering person. She was calm, serious and good, in the absolute Western definitions of those terms; she had her emotions under faultless control. Taou Yuen should be an ideal wife for any man; she was, he corrected the form sharply. All that he knew of her was admirable; the part which constantly baffled him didn't touch their relationship.
It was reasonable to expect small differences between her and Salem: at times her calm chilled him by a swift glimpse of utter coldness, at times he would have liked her gravity to melt into something less than ivory perfection; even her goodness had oppressed him. The last hadn't the human quality of, for example, Nettie Vollar's goodness, colored by rebellion, torn by doubt, and yet triumphing.
If he only understood the three religions of China, if he were an intellectual man, Gerrit realized, he could have grasped his wife more fully. He was completely ignorant of Chinese history, of all the forces that had united to form Taou Yuen. For instance: he was unable to reconcile her elevated spirit with the "absurd superstitions" that influenced almost her every act—the enormous number of lucky and unlucky days, the coin hung on his bed, the yellow charm against sickness and red against evil spirits; only yesterday she had burnt a paper form representing thunder and drunk its ashes in a cup of tea. She was tremendously in earnest about the evil spirits—they were, she maintained, lurking everywhere, in all shapes and degrees of harm. Edward Dunsack was possessed, she declared; but he had pointed out that opium was a sufficient explanation of anything evil in him, and that it was unnecessary to look for a more fantastic reason.
He lay awake for a comparatively long while, as he had several times lately, divided between his consciousness and the regular breathing of his wife. If the past had brought Nettie Vollar to depend on him in some slight degree Taou Yuen did so absolutely: except for him she was lost in a strange world. Yet Taou Yuen didn't seem helpless in the manner of Nettie. He had once before thought of the former as finely tempered metal. Her transcendent resignation, with its consequent lack of sympathetic contact with the imperfect humanity of—well, Nettie, gave Taou Yuen a dangerous freedom from all that bound Salem in comparative safety.