A Prologue To Love (17 page)

John Ames stood near the victoria, elegant and as watchful as the private police he employed. His right hand idly swung his cane. His black bowler glittered in the sun. For all his fine clothing, his distinguished air, he was part of this scene. He was at one with his employees. The latter were not furtive; they had a look of savage arrogance, which was reflected in John himself in a more polished fashion. The men saw him, and the quiet muttering stopped at once, and a single bell sounded over the uneasy hissing of the water. Police and seamen came to attention, and even the wagons and the drays halted.

“Papa,” Caroline murmured, feeling panic. John looked at her impatiently. “Well?” he said, and his voice was resonant in the quiet. “Why don’t you get down?”

The coachman sat on his seat like a stuffed image, blind and deaf. After one glance at this homely figure, which did not even get down to assist her, Caroline scrambled from the vehicle, her sturdy shoes thumping on the hot wood of the dock. She rushed to her father’s side, instinctively clutching her purse, her shut parasol dangling from her wrist, her tired and reddened eyes blinking, baffled, in the dazzling sun. A freighter belched smoke and steam and cinders, and Caroline flinched. It was like a huge, ugly, derisive voice raised against her, calling attention to her unlikely presence in this place, demanding action and ridicule against her. John looked down at her, amused.

“Well?” he said again. “What’s the matter, Caroline? Don’t you like all this? You should. It belongs to me. It will belong to you. It is all mine — the warehouses, the docks, the ships.”

“Yours, Papa?” asked Caroline.

“Mine. All mine.” Several of the private dock police were now approaching the two on cat feet, and Caroline moved closer to her father. They were all Aleck of Fern and Son. Caroline’s mouth became as dry as paper; she could not take her eyes from the clutched clubs. But the men were smiling obsequiously; they were removing their battered hats; they were touching their red foreheads; their feet were scraping now as they stood before their employer. They bowed to Caroline. The men on the ships stood as rigid as carved wood, their sea-and-sun-darkened faces expressionless, their ferocious eyes remote.

Then Caroline, with one of her blinding flashes of intuition, understood. Money was not only a defense against the world, the strong Chinese Wall that kept out the barbarians who lusted and destroyed. It was power over the barbarians, over all the world. It was the invisible but mighty club over all the Alecks, over every man. It made humankind grovel and smile with servility as these brutes were smiling. It was power. Her eyes still shrank from the Alecks, but she did not fear them any longer. Her father owned them. In time, she would own them also. For the first time in her life she felt a hating exultation, born of her old fear.

“Yes sir, Mr. Ames, yes sir!” one of the Alecks was exclaiming with the fervor of an abased slave. The other Alecks joined in, in a chorus of servility. Everything was in order. Captain Allstyn was on the
Queen Ann
. No, there had been no trouble. The Alecks snickered and scraped. Everything had been taken care of; not a single boat of the harbor police had even been sighted. No government official had appeared within a mile. Everything was taken care of, sir, if you please.

John Ames put his long hand in his pocket and drew out a handful of glittering gold pieces. The police stretched out their hands eagerly, wetting their brutal mouths. They bowed; they scraped over and over. They bowed very deeply to Miss Ames and hoped she was well.

“Can’t you say something to these men?” asked John with irritation.

Caroline stared at them. They lifted their eyes reverently only to her chin. She wet her dry lips. “How do you do?” she murmured in the best Miss Stockington manner.

The brutes became ecstatic. They bowed almost to her knees, their coarse hair tawny or black in the sunlight, their hats held against their thighs, their clubs dangling impotently from their thick wrists. It was one of these who had threatened to crush her skull in the shop of Fern and Son. She said to herself that if she struck one of these bobbing heads with her parasol the victim would chortle with delight and be happy to have been singled out from his fellows by the ‘little lady’.

A piping sounded from somewhere in this sinister but urgent quiet. A man in a kind of disorderly uniform was bounding down a gangplank from the nearest freighter, which was also the largest and the blackest. The man had a huge bald head, like a ball, that glittered in the sun, and a huge red face like a baboon’s, and eyes like blue fire. He was short and immensely broad. His uniform, of a dark gray with brass buttons and braid, wrinkled about his body. As he ran, clumping, on the dock toward John Ames and Caroline, his cap in his hand, he fastened the last of his buttons. Caroline, accustomed to the military neatness of the captains of Boston Harbor far to the left, could not believe this man to be a captain, for he lacked compactness, tidiness, and stern precision. The Alecks fell away meekly. He grinned at John Ames, and his teeth were like the teeth of a shark, and his gums were red as the gums of a dog are red. He saluted casually, and John Ames, smiling, gave him a negligent salute in return.

“Caroline,” he said, “this is my best captain, Captain Allstyn. An Englishman, and a veritable Union Jack.”

Caroline had no way of knowing that Captain Allstyn was an illegal captain, that he had been permanently barred from all employment in the legitimate lines for murderous brutality to his crews and drunkenness and smuggling and general larceny. She had no way of knowing that her astute father had picked up this man in a state of poverty and sullen despair in a Liverpool public house, and that John Ames, having rescued this man from starvation and having restored him to the sea with an immense salary, had bound Captain Allstyn in gratitude to him forever. Moreover, Captain Allstyn shared in the spoils, for John knew that one might bind a man briefly to one by saving his life, but one bound him for all time with money and opportunities for loot.

“You are very kind, sir,” said Captain Allstyn, and Caroline was startled at the man’s pure well-bred English accent, so strange in comparison with his lumbering appearance, his gross red face, his Vandal’s eyes, his stained uniform. She was also impressed by the fact that he did not bow or scrape to either her father or herself.

Captain Allstyn turned to Caroline. “I trust,” he said in that patrician accent, “that Miss Ames’ first visit will be pleasant for her.”

Caroline could only stare at him mutely. He was deferential, as all gentlemen were deferential toward ladies. He stood with his hands at his sides in the exact posture of the young men at the dancing school, waiting for any remark she might care to make, his head inclined slightly and attentively.

“Oh — yes,” stuttered Caroline. Captain Allstyn considered her. A lump of a girl, a frightened girl, but a girl of family and breeding. An innocent young thing, like the horsy girls in Sussex who prattled and blushed and stammered and loved dogs and the paddock and trembled when they were presented at Court and rushed home at once thereafter and married bumbling young men like themselves. Captain Allstyn had once been one of those bumbling young men after his short career in Her Majesty’s Navy. He had even married a girl like Caroline. But the sea had called him back, back from the hunts and the horses and the dogs and the awkward young girls and the sunny quiet fields and the rosy brick houses and teatime.

He often heard it remarked that John Ames was a ‘nobody’. But Captain Allstyn felt this to be untrue. Those ostensibly aristocratic were too frequently plebeian; the true aristocrat cared nothing for the opinions of others nor for any impression he might make. He lived, an individualist, for himself. Even if the aristocrat engaged in nefarious activities, he did so without pretense to virtue and with no anxiety to hide what he was. Quite often he was an adventurer, but he always led and never followed. John Ames was an aristocrat, as was his captain, and that was the secret they both recognized in each other. For this reason Captain Allstyn was not only commander of the Queen Ann but the captain of John Ames’ mighty fleet of ambiguous ships.

The captain looked curiously and openly into Caroline’s face. He saw the intelligent eyes, the glint of shy fear, and behind them both he saw the shine of young power and dignity. He had expected a pretty girl, for John was handsome. But prettiness did not particularly affect Captain Allstyn, who preferred it in the better bordellos, where it could be sampled in variety. No one would dominate this girl who had no charm but her uncertain smile. Captain Allstyn was relieved. He expected to be with the Ames Line for many, many years, and it was excellent to know that his next employer would be this sturdy girl grown to womanhood and to impressiveness.

Caroline was confused. It had overwhelmed her to know that her father owned all this; she needed concrete evidence, such as the money in her purse, to reassure her that she was not vulnerable and that never again would she be exposed to what the world could and did do to the helpless. She liked Captain Allstyn immediately, and this also startled her. She was not accustomed to liking people. Totally inexperienced though she was, her intuition enlightened her considerably concerning the captain.

“Are you coming aboard, Mr. Ames?” asked the captain.

“Yes. Of course. That is why I brought Caroline,” said John. He looked at the captain intently. “I thought there were things she should know.”

The captain smiled briefly. Caroline stared at the freighter. “We are boarding that, Papa?” The freighter appeared formidable to her, like a long black shark, filthy and weather-beaten. John took her arm. “Certainly.”

Caroline had never been aboard any ship in her life. She hesitated, fearful again of the brutish police, the ominous dark faces of the men on the ships. But she saw no derision, no ridicule, no slyly exchanged glances of amusement. She went on with her father, the captain following just behind her left elbow. She could hear their footsteps, loud against the uneasy whispering of the sea, sharp against the sinister quiet. They might have been proceeding against an immense stage-set of painted ships, painted sky, and painted men, with only the ocean to relieve the silence.

Sturdily she climbed the gangplank, lifting her unbecoming dress, the sun hot on her face. All the air was filled with strong smells steeping in the heat. She looked about her when she reached the deck; it heaved a little; the wood was dark with water and stained. She was disappointed. The beautiful clippers she had seen against the sky in the main harbor had enthralled her, their sails white and lofty in the sun, like pulsing and gigantic birds. While the other girls exclaimed about their ‘prettiness’ she had felt their wild grandeur, their solitude, their air of leaving the world and rising into light.

The
Queen Ann
had masts for sails, as well as smokestacks. The sails were down. The ship was ugly and even repellent. The deck was slippery. The whole vessel had a look of decrepitude, and one thought of derelicts. The hatches were open and the cranes in place. It smelled of oil and tar and leather and bananas and wet wood and fish. It was very large; the men in the bow appeared diminished. Caroline wanted to please her father. “It’s big, isn’t it?” she murmured.

Captain Allstyn answered her in his gentle and cultured voice. “It is one of the biggest on the seven seas, and about the fastest, Miss Ames. It is your father’s flagship.”

“Come, Caroline,” said John, and took her arm again. He led his daughter down a flight of narrow stairs to the deck below, where lanterns were hanging from walls to give light. Here the smells were intensified, the floor only slightly cleaner than the deck. A feeling of secrecy came to Caroline; she saw that the passageway ended very close at hand, and a big locked door, braced with iron, faced her. John took out a bunch of keys and fitted one in the lock and opened the door.

The long passageway beyond was still closed and without portholes, but the lanterns were now fixed lamps on the walls, the oil burning behind glass shades of many colors ornamented with gilt. The walls themselves, smooth as brown satin, were hung with fine engravings and paintings set in gold frames, and the floors had been covered with rich oriental carpets, narrow and brilliant as woven jewels. A fragrance hung here of perfume and spice and rich food and wine. Along the inner wall stood many carved doors, polished and urbane, with gold-plated handles. The farther door, similar to the one they had opened, now swung back, and two young men in gold and brown livery appeared. They hurried toward John and his amazed daughter, bowing neatly at almost every step.

“No, no,” said John. “We need nothing. Except, perhaps, in about half an hour, you may bring us some brandy and a little Madeira, and wafers.”

The young men halted immediately but continued to bow. John opened one of the doors to the left and motioned Caroline to go through it.

She had often heard some of the girls in school rapturously describe their staterooms after their parents had taken them to Europe, so Caroline had some slight idea of what staterooms were. But she doubted, as she looked at the sudden splendor of the room beyond the door and as her feet sank into deep, colored carpets, that any stateroom ever resembled this for luxury. It was large; it had three square portholes across which had been drawn thin, glittering golden tissue. It was a room for a potentate, for a prince, with its gilded lamps, its small marble tables, its crystals, its gold-painted carved furniture upholstered in satins and velvets and damask, its carved pale ceilings and walls touched with gilt, its divans and love seats, its little marble fireplace, its small buhl cabinets filled with
objets d’art
. She had a glimpse of a room adjoining, a bedroom with a swan bed, with furnishings to match.

The outside light, drifting through the golden tissue at the windows, filled the room with a warm yellow glow. Caroline looked mutely at her father. He smiled a little, unpleasantly. “Sit down, Caroline,” he said. She obediently perched on a French settee, her feet and knees pressed together, her clutching hands tightening about her purse. Her father sat opposite, near the windows, and the yellow light rippled over him and heightened the bitter blue of the eyes that fixed themselves upon her.

“There are several rooms like this on this deck,” he said. “You see, it is not only a freighter, Caroline.”

“It is locked,” she murmured. “To protect — all this,” and she made a clumsy gesture with her gloved hands.

“To protect more than this,” said John. He looked down at his right hand, which lay on the arm of his chair. Damn it, the girl had to know, if she was to act intelligently in the future. But he evaded her eyes and frowned.

“These are your quarters, Papa?” she asked, and smiled, thinking of her handsome father in this room when at sea.

“No,” said John. “I never travel on my own ships, and particularly not this.”

“Why?” she asked in astonishment.

He turned a large signet ring, very old and very precious, on his finger. Some of his friends in Boston smiled at that ring and talked about it when he was not present. It was an heirloom, they said, which he had bought somewhere and to which he was not entitled. John never enlightened them that the signet ring had belonged to many generations of his mother’s family and had been given to the first notable Hollingshead by George II.

“Caroline,” he said at last, “I want you to listen to me carefully. The docks outside are mine; the freighters and the ships are mine. This is mine. I have many other enterprises; I keep them only as long as they pay me a profit. This fleet of ships is paying me larger profits every year.” He paused and frowned again. Caroline listened attentively. “I never travel on any of my own ships, particularly not this, as I’ve told you, because in the event of any trouble it would be best that I not be here. The ships are registered, yes, in the Ames name, but that is all. My captains, and especially Captain Allstyn, are responsible for the cargoes. I have nothing to do with the cargoes; they are the responsibilities of others. There is not a port in the world which they do not touch regularly.”