A Woman's Reason. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
days. Eh, Harkness?"
"Yes, it had lost all attraction but profit."
"Were you ever down at India Wharf, Helen? "demanded the Captain. "I don't blame you; neither were my girls. But were you?"
"Of course," said Helen, scorning to lift her eyes from her work. "The Nahant boat starts from it."
"The Nahant boat!" repeated the Captain in a great rage. "In my day there was no Nahant boat about India Wharf, I can tell you, nor any other steamboat; nor any dirty shanties ashore. The place was sacred to the shipping of the grandest commerce in the world. There they lay, those beautiful ships, clean as silver, every one of them, and manned by honest Yankee crews." The Captain got upon his feet for the greater convenience of his eloquence. "Not by ruffians from every quarter of the globe. There were gentlemen's sons before the mast, with their share in the venture, going out for the excitement of the thing; boys from Harvard, fellows of education and spirit; and the forecastle was filled with good Toms and Jims and Joes from the Cape; chaps whose aunts you knew; good stock through and through, sound to the core. The supercargo was often his own captain, and he was often a Harvard man—you know what they are!"
"Nicest fellows in the world," consented Helen.
The Captain blew a shaft of white smoke into the air, and then cut it through with a stroke of his cigar. "We had on a mixed cargo, and we might be going to trade at eastern ports on the way out. Nobody knew what market we should find in Calcutta. It was pure adventure, and a calculation of chances, and. it was a great school of character. It was a trade that made men as well as fortunes; it took thought and forethought. The owners planned their ventures like generals planning a campaign. They were not going to see us again for a year; they were not going to hear of us till we were signaled outside on our return. When we sailed it was an event, a ceremony, a solemnity; and we celebrated it with song from all the tarry throats on board. Yes, the men used to sing as we dropped down the bay."
"Oh, Captain Butler, it was fine!" cried Helen, dropping her hands on her work, and looking up at the Captain in his smoke-cloud, with rapture. "Papa, why didn't you ever let me come down to see your ships sail?"
"It was all changed before you were born, Helen," began her father.
"O yes, all changed," cried the Captain, taking the word away from him. "The ships had begun, long before that, to stop at East Boston, and we sold their cargoes by sample, instead of handling them in our warehouses, and getting to feel some sort of human interest in them. When it came to that, a mere shopman's speculation, I didn't much care for the New-Yorkers getting it." The Captain sat down and smoked in silence.
"How did the New-Yorkers get it?" asked Helen, with some indignant stir in her local pride.
"In the natural course of things," said her father. "Just as we got it from Salem. By being bigger and richer."
"Oh, it was all changed anyway," broke in the Captain. "We used to import nearly all the cotton goods used in this country,—fabrics that the natives wove on their little looms at home, and that had the sentiment you girls pretend to find in hand-made things,—but before we stopped we got to sending our own cottons to India. And then came the telegraph, and put the finishing-stroke to romance in the trade. Your father loads now according to the latest dispatches from Calcutta. He knows just what his cargo will be worth when it gets there, and he telegraphs his people what to send back." The Captain ended in a very minor key: "I'm glad I went out of it when I did. You'd have done well to go out too, Harkness."
"I don't know, Jack. I had nothing else in view. You know I had become involved before the crash came; and I couldn't get out."
"I think you could," returned the Captain stubbornly, and he went on to show his old friend how; and the talk wandered back to the great days of the old trade, and to the merchants, the supercargoes, the captains, the mates of their youth. They talked of the historic names before their date, of Cleaveland and his voyages, of Handasyde Perkins, of Bromfield, of the great chiefs of a commerce which founded the city's prosperity, and which embraced all climes and regions. The Dutch colonies and coffee, the China trade and tea, the North-west coast and furs; the Cape, and its wines and oil; the pirates that used to harass the early adventurers; famous shipwrecks; great gains and magnificent losses; the splendor of the English nabobs and American residents at Calcutta; mutinies aboard ship; the idiosyncrasies of certain sailors; the professional merits of certain black cooks: these varied topics and interests conspired to lend a glamour to the India trade as it had been, that at last moved Captain Butler to argument in proof of the feasibility of its revival. It was the explanation of this scheme that wearied Helen. At the same time she saw that Captain Butler did not mean to go very soon, for he had already sunk the old comrade in the theorist so far as to be saying, "Well, sir," and "Why, sir," and "I tell you, sir." She got up—not without dropping her scissors from her lap, as is the custom of her sex—and gave him her hand, which he took in his left, without rising.
"Going to bed? That's right. I shall stay a bit, yet. I want to talk with your father."
"Talk him into taking a little rest," said Helen, looking at the Captain as she bent over her father to kiss him goodnight.
"I shall give him all sorts of good advice," returned the Captain cheerily.
Her father held her hand fondly till she drew an arm's-length away, and then relinquished it with a very tender "Goodnight, my dear."
Helen did not mean to go to bed, and when she reached her own room, she sat a long time there, working at Margaret's bonnet, and overhearing now and then some such words of the Captain's as "dyes," "muslins," "ice," "teak," "gunny-bags," "shellac," "Company's choppers,"—a name of fearful note descriptive of a kind of Calcutta handkerchief once much imported. She imagined that the Captain was still talking of the India trade. Her father spoke so low that she could not make out any words of his; the sound of his voice somehow deeply touched her, his affection appealed to hers in that unintelligible murmur, as the disembodied religion of a far-heard hymn appeals to the solemnity of the listener's soul. She began to make a fantastic comparison of the qualities of her father's voice and the Captain's, to the disadvantage of the Captain's other qualities; she found that her father was of finer spirit and of gentler nature, and by a natural transition she perceived that it was a grander thing to be sitting alone in one's room with one's heart-ache than to be perhaps foolishly walking the piazza with one's accepted commonplace destiny as Marian Butler was at that moment. At this point she laughed at herself, said "Poor Marian" aloud, and recognized that her vagaries were making Captain Butler an ill return for his kindness in dropping in to chat with her father; she hoped he would not chat too long, and tire him out; and so her thoughts ran upon Robert again, and she heard no more of the talk below, till after what seemed to her, starting from it, a prolonged reverie. Then she was aware of Captain Butler's boots chirping out of the library into the hall, toward the door, with several pauses, and she caught fragments of talk again: "I had no idea it was as bad as that, Harkness— bad business, must see what can be done, weather it a few weeks longer—confoundedly straitened myself—pull you through," and faintly, "Well, goodnight, Joshua; I'll see you in the morning." There was another pause, in which she fancied Captain Butler lighting his cigar at the chimney of the study-lamp with which her father would be following him to the door; the door closed and her father went slowly back to the library, where she felt rather than heard him walking up and down. She wanted to go to him, but she would not; she wanted to call to him, but she remained silent; when at last she heard his step upon the stairs, heavily ascending, and saw the play of his lamp-light on the walls without, she stealthily turned down the gas that he might not think her awake. Half an hour later, she crept to his door, which stood a little ajar, and whispered, "Papa!"
"What is it, Helen?" He was in bed, but his voice sounded very wakeful. "What is it, my dear!"
"Oh, I don't know!"—she flung herself on her knees beside his bed in the dark, and put her arms about his neck—" but I feel so unhappy!"
"About—" began her father, but she quickly interrupted.
"No, no! About you, papa! You seem so sad and careworn, and I'm nothing but a burden and a trouble to you."
"You