Jack London - The Turtles of Tasman

J >> Jack London >> The Turtles of Tasman

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

THE TURTLES OF TASMAN

BY

JACK LONDON

AUTHOR OF THE CALL OF THE WILD, TERRY, ADVENTURE, ETC.

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

Published by Arrangement with The Macmillan Company

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1916. Reprinted October,
November, 1916; February, 1917, December, 1919.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

BY THE TURTLES OF TASMAN

THE ETERNITY OF FORMS

TOLD IN THE DROOLING WARD

THE HOBO AND THE FAIRY

THE PRODIGAL FATHER

THE FIRST POET

FINIS

THE END OF THE STORY

THE TURTLES OF TASMAN

BY THE TURTLES OF TASMAN

I

Law, order, and restraint had carved Frederick Travers' face. It was the
strong, firm face of one used to power and who had used power with
wisdom and discretion. Clean living had made the healthy skin, and the
lines graved in it were honest lines. Hard and devoted work had left its
wholesome handiwork, that was all. Every feature of the man told the
same story, from the clear blue of the eyes to the full head of hair,
light brown, touched with grey, and smoothly parted and drawn straight
across above the strong-domed forehead. He was a seriously groomed man,
and the light summer business suit no more than befitted his alert
years, while it did not shout aloud that its possessor was likewise the
possessor of numerous millions of dollars and property.

For Frederick Travers hated ostentation. The machine that waited outside
for him under the porte-cochere was sober black. It was the most
expensive machine in the county, yet he did not care to flaunt its price
or horse-power in a red flare across the landscape, which also was
mostly his, from the sand dunes and the everlasting beat of the Pacific
breakers, across the fat bottomlands and upland pastures, to the far
summits clad with redwood forest and wreathed in fog and cloud.

A rustle of skirts caused him to look over his shoulder. Just the
faintest hint of irritation showed in his manner. Not that his daughter
was the object, however. Whatever it was, it seemed to lie on the desk
before him.

"What is that outlandish name again?" she asked. "I know I shall never
remember it. See, I've brought a pad to write it down."

Her voice was low and cool, and she was a tall, well-formed,
clear-skinned young woman. In her voice and complacence she, too,
showed the drill-marks of order and restraint.

Frederick Travers scanned the signature of one of two letters on the
desk. "Bronislawa Plaskoweitzkaia Travers," he read; then spelled the
difficult first portion, letter by letter, while his daughter wrote it
down.

"Now, Mary," he added, "remember Tom was always harum scarum, and you
must make allowances for this daughter of his. Her very name
is--ah--disconcerting. I haven't seen him for years, and as for her...."
A shrug epitomised his apprehension. He smiled with an effort at wit.
"Just the same, they're as much your family as mine. If he _is_ my
brother, he is your uncle. And if she's my niece, you're both cousins."

Mary nodded. "Don't worry, father. I'll be nice to her, poor thing. What
nationality was her mother?--to get such an awful name."

"I don't know. Russian, or Polish, or Spanish, or something. It was just
like Tom. She was an actress or singer--I don't remember. They met in
Buenos Ayres. It was an elopement. Her husband--"

"Then she was already married!"

Mary's dismay was unfeigned and spontaneous, and her father's irritation
grew more pronounced. He had not meant that. It had slipped out.

"There was a divorce afterward, of course. I never knew the details. Her
mother died out in China--no; in Tasmania. It was in China that Tom--"
His lips shut with almost a snap. He was not going to make any more
slips. Mary waited, then turned to the door, where she paused.

"I've given her the rooms over the rose court," she said. "And I'm going
now to take a last look."

Frederick Travers turned back to the desk, as if to put the letters
away, changed his mind, and slowly and ponderingly reread them.

"Dear Fred:

"It's been a long time since I was so near to the old home,
and I'd like to take a run up. Unfortunately, I played ducks
and drakes with my Yucatan project--I think I wrote about
it--and I'm broke as usual. Could you advance me funds for
the run? I'd like to arrive first class. Polly is with me,
you know. I wonder how you two will get along.

"Tom.

"P.S. If it doesn't bother you too much, send it along
next mail."

_"Dear Uncle Fred":_

the other letter ran, in what seemed to him a strange, foreign-taught,
yet distinctly feminine hand.

"Dad doesn't know I am writing this. He told me what he said
to you. It is not true. He is coming home to die. He doesn't
know it, but I've talked with the doctors. And he'll have to
come home, for we have no money. We're in a stuffy little
boarding house, and it is not the place for Dad. He's helped
other persons all his life, and now is the time to help him.
He didn't play ducks and drakes in Yucatan. I was with him,
and I know. He dropped all he had there, and he was robbed.
He can't play the business game against New Yorkers. That
explains it all, and I am proud he can't.

"He always laughs and says I'll never be able to get along
with you. But I don't agree with him. Besides, I've never seen
a really, truly blood relative in my life, and there's your
daughter. Think of it!--a real live cousin!

"In anticipation,
"Your niece,
"BRONISLAWA PLASKOWEITZKAIA TRAVERS.

"P.S. You'd better telegraph the money, or you won't see Dad
at all. He doesn't know how sick he is, and if he meets any
of his old friends he'll be off and away on some wild goose
chase. He's beginning to talk Alaska. Says it will get the
fever out of his bones. Please know that we must pay the
boarding house, or else we'll arrive without luggage.

"B.P.T."

Frederick Travers opened the door of a large, built-in safe and
methodically put the letters away in a compartment labelled "Thomas
Travers."

"Poor Tom! Poor Tom!" he sighed aloud.

II

The big motor car waited at the station, and Frederick Travers thrilled
as he always thrilled to the distant locomotive whistle of the train
plunging down the valley of Isaac Travers River. First of all westering
white-men, had Isaac Travers gazed on that splendid valley, its
salmon-laden waters, its rich bottoms, and its virgin forest slopes.
Having seen, he had grasped and never let go. "Land-poor," they had
called him in the mid-settler period. But that had been in the days when
the placers petered out, when there were no wagon roads nor tugs to draw
in sailing vessels across the perilous bar, and when his lonely grist
mill had been run under armed guards to keep the marauding Klamaths off
while wheat was ground. Like father, like son, and what Isaac Travers
had grasped, Frederick Travers had held. It had been the same tenacity
of hold. Both had been far-visioned. Both had foreseen the
transformation of the utter West, the coming of the railroad, and the
building of the new empire on the Pacific shore.

Frederick Travers thrilled, too, at the locomotive whistle, because,
more than any man's, it was his railroad. His father had died still
striving to bring the railroad in across the mountains that averaged a
hundred thousand dollars to the mile. He, Frederick, had brought it in.
He had sat up nights over that railroad; bought newspapers, entered
politics, and subsidised party machines; and he had made pilgrimages,
more than once, at his own expense, to the railroad chiefs of the East.
While all the county knew how many miles of his land were crossed by the
right of way, none of the county guessed nor dreamed the number of his
dollars which had gone into guaranties and railroad bonds. He had done
much for his county, and the railroad was his last and greatest
achievement, the capstone of the Travers' effort, the momentous and
marvellous thing that had been brought about just yesterday. It had
been running two years, and, highest proof of all of his judgment,
dividends were in sight. And farther reaching reward was in sight. It
was written in the books that the next Governor of California was to be
spelled, Frederick A. Travers.

Twenty years had passed since he had seen his elder brother, and then it
had been after a gap of ten years. He remembered that night well. Tom
was the only man who dared run the bar in the dark, and that last time,
between nightfall and the dawn, with a southeaster breezing up, he had
sailed his schooner in and out again. There had been no warning of his
coming--a clatter of hoofs at midnight, a lathered horse in the stable,
and Tom had appeared, the salt of the sea on his face as his mother
attested. An hour only he remained, and on a fresh horse was gone, while
rain squalls rattled upon the windows and the rising wind moaned through
the redwoods, the memory of his visit a whiff, sharp and strong, from
the wild outer world. A week later, sea-hammered and bar-bound for that
time, had arrived the revenue cutter _Bear_, and there had been a
column of conjecture in the local paper, hints of a heavy landing of
opium and of a vain quest for the mysterious schooner _Halcyon_. Only
Fred and his mother, and the several house Indians, knew of the
stiffened horse in the barn and of the devious way it was afterward
smuggled back to the fishing village on the beach.

Despite those twenty years, it was the same old Tom Travers that
alighted from the Pullman. To his brother's eyes, he did not look sick.
Older he was of course. The Panama hat did not hide the grey hair, and
though indefinably hinting of shrunkenness, the broad shoulders were
still broad and erect. As for the young woman with him, Frederick
Travers experienced an immediate shock of distaste. He felt it vitally,
yet vaguely. It was a challenge and a mock, yet he could not name nor
place the source of it. It might have been the dress, of tailored linen
and foreign cut, the shirtwaist, with its daring stripe, the black
wilfulness of the hair, or the flaunt of poppies on the large straw hat
or it might have been the flash and colour of her--the black eyes and
brows, the flame of rose in the cheeks, the white of the even teeth that
showed too readily. "A spoiled child," was his thought, but he had no
time to analyse, for his brother's hand was in his and he was making his
niece's acquaintance.

There it was again. She flashed and talked like her colour, and she
talked with her hands as well. He could not avoid noting the smallness
of them. They were absurdly small, and his eyes went to her feet to make
the same discovery. Quite oblivious of the curious crowd on the station
platform, she had intercepted his attempt to lead to the motor car and
had ranged the brothers side by side. Tom had been laughingly
acquiescent, but his younger brother was ill at ease, too conscious of
the many eyes of his townspeople. He knew only the old Puritan way.
Family displays were for the privacy of the family, not for the public.
He was glad she had not attempted to kiss him. It was remarkable she had
not. Already he apprehended anything of her.

She embraced them and penetrated them with sun-warm eyes that seemed to
see through them, and over them, and all about them.

"You're really brothers," she cried, her hands flashing with her eyes.
"Anybody can see it. And yet there is a difference--I don't know. I
can't explain."

In truth, with a tact that exceeded Frederick Travers' farthest
disciplined forbearance, she did not dare explain. Her wide artist-eyes
had seen and sensed the whole trenchant and essential difference. Alike
they looked, of the unmistakable same stock, their features reminiscent
of a common origin; and there resemblance ceased. Tom was three inches
taller, and well-greyed was the long, Viking moustache. His was the same
eagle-like nose as his brother's, save that it was more eagle-like,
while the blue eyes were pronouncedly so. The lines of the face were
deeper, the cheek-bones higher, the hollows larger, the weather-beat
darker. It was a volcanic face. There had been fire there, and the fire
still lingered. Around the corners of the eyes were more
laughter-wrinkles and in the eyes themselves a promise of deadlier
seriousness than the younger brother possessed. Frederick was bourgeois
in his carriage, but in Tom's was a certain careless ease and
distinction. It was the same pioneer blood of Isaac Travers in both men,
but it had been retorted in widely different crucibles. Frederick
represented the straight and expected line of descent. His brother
expressed a vast and intangible something that was unknown in the
Travers stock. And it was all this that the black-eyed girl saw and knew
on the instant. All that had been inexplicable in the two men and their
relationship cleared up in the moment she saw them side by side.

"Wake me up," Tom was saying. "I can't believe I arrived on a train. And
the population? There were only four thousand thirty years ago."

"Sixty thousand now," was the other's answer. "And increasing by leaps
and bounds. Want to spin around for a look at the city? There's plenty
of time."

As they sped along the broad, well-paved streets, Tom persisted in his
Rip Van Winkle pose. The waterfront perplexed him. Where he had once
anchored his sloop in a dozen feet of water, he found solid land and
railroad yards, with wharves and shipping still farther out.

"Hold on! Stop!" he cried, a few blocks on, looking up at a solid
business block. "Where is this, Fred?"

"Fourth and Travers--don't you remember?"

Tom stood up and gazed around, trying to discern the anciently familiar
configuration of the land under its clutter of buildings.

"I ... I think...." he began hesitantly. "No; by George, I'm sure of it.
We used to hunt cottontails over that ground, and shoot blackbirds in
the brush. And there, where the bank building is, was a pond." He turned
to Polly. "I built my first raft there, and got my first taste of the
sea."

"Heaven knows how many gallons of it," Frederick laughed, nodding to the
chauffeur. "They rolled you on a barrel, I remember."

"Oh! More!" Polly cried, clapping her hands.

"There's the park," Frederick pointed out a little later, indicating a
mass of virgin redwoods on the first dip of the bigger hills.

"Father shot three grizzlies there one afternoon," was Tom's remark.

"I presented forty acres of it to the city," Frederick went on. "Father
bought the quarter section for a dollar an acre from Leroy."

Tom nodded, and the sparkle and flash in his eyes, like that of his
daughter, were unlike anything that ever appeared in his brother's eyes.

"Yes," he affirmed, "Leroy, the negro squawman. I remember the time he
carried you and me on his back to Alliance, the night the Indians burned
the ranch. Father stayed behind and fought."

"But he couldn't save the grist mill. It was a serious setback to him."

"Just the same he nailed four Indians."

In Polly's eyes now appeared the flash and sparkle.

"An Indian-fighter!" she cried. "Tell me about him."

"Tell her about Travers Ferry," Tom said.

"That's a ferry on the Klamath River on the way to Orleans Bar and
Siskiyou. There was great packing into the diggings in those days, and,
among other things, father had made a location there. There was rich
bench farming land, too. He built a suspension bridge--wove the cables
on the spot with sailors and materials freighted in from the coast. It
cost him twenty thousand dollars. The first day it was open, eight
hundred mules crossed at a dollar a head, to say nothing of the toll for
foot and horse. That night the river rose. The bridge was one hundred
and forty feet above low water mark. Yet the freshet rose higher than
that, and swept the bridge away. He'd have made a fortune there
otherwise."

"That wasn't it at all," Tom blurted out impatiently. "It was at Travers
Ferry that father and old Jacob Vance were caught by a war party of Mad
River Indians. Old Jacob was killed right outside the door of the log
cabin. Father dragged the body inside and stood the Indians off for a
week. Father was some shot. He buried Jacob under the cabin floor."

"I still run the ferry," Frederick went on, "though there isn't so much
travel as in the old days. I freight by wagon-road to the Reservation,
and then mule-back on up the Klamath and clear in to the forks of Little
Salmon. I have twelve stores on that chain now, a stage-line to the
Reservation, and a hotel there. Quite a tourist trade is beginning to
pick up."

And the girl, with curious brooding eyes, looked from brother to brother
as they so differently voiced themselves and life.

"Ay, he was some man, father was," Tom murmured.

There was a drowsy note in his speech that drew a quick glance of
anxiety from her. The machine had turned into the cemetery, and now
halted before a substantial vault on the crest of the hill.

"I thought you'd like to see it," Frederick was saying. "I built that
mausoleum myself, most of it with my own hands. Mother wanted it. The
estate was dreadfully encumbered. The best bid I could get out of the
contractors was eleven thousand. I did it myself for a little over
eight."

"Must have worked nights," Tom murmured admiringly and more sleepily
than before.

"I did, Tom, I did. Many a night by lantern-light. I was so busy. I was
reconstructing the water works then--the artesian wells had failed--and
mother's eyes were troubling her. You remember--cataract--I wrote you.
She was too weak to travel, and I brought the specialists up from San
Francisco. Oh, my hands were full. I was just winding up the disastrous
affairs of the steamer line father had established to San Francisco, and
I was keeping up the interest on mortgages to the tune of one hundred
and eighty thousand dollars."

A soft stertorous breathing interrupted him. Tom, chin on chest, was
asleep. Polly, with a significant look, caught her uncle's eye. Then
her father, after an uneasy restless movement, lifted drowsy lids.

"Deuced warm day," he said with a bright apologetic laugh. "I've been
actually asleep. Aren't we near home?"

Frederick nodded to the chauffeur, and the car rolled on.

III

The house that Frederick Travers had built when his prosperity came, was
large and costly, sober and comfortable, and with no more pretence than
was naturally attendant on the finest country home in the county. Its
atmosphere was just the sort that he and his daughter would create. But
in the days that followed his brother's home-coming, all this was
changed. Gone was the subdued and ordered repose. Frederick was neither
comfortable nor happy. There was an unwonted flurry of life and
violation of sanctions and traditions. Meals were irregular and
protracted, and there were midnight chafing-dish suppers and bursts of
laughter at the most inappropriate hours.

Frederick was abstemious. A glass of wine at dinner was his wildest
excess. Three cigars a day he permitted himself, and these he smoked
either on the broad veranda or in the smoking room. What else was a
smoking room for? Cigarettes he detested. Yet his brother was ever
rolling thin, brown-paper cigarettes and smoking them wherever he might
happen to be. A litter of tobacco crumbs was always to be found in the
big easy chair he frequented and among the cushions of the window-seats.
Then there were the cocktails. Brought up under the stern tutelage of
Isaac and Eliza Travers, Frederick looked upon liquor in the house as an
abomination. Ancient cities had been smitten by God's wrath for just
such practices. Before lunch and dinner, Tom, aided and abetted by
Polly, mixed an endless variety of drinks, she being particularly adept
with strange swivel-stick concoctions learned at the ends of the earth.
To Frederick, at such times, it seemed that his butler's pantry and
dining room had been turned into bar-rooms. When he suggested this,
under a facetious show, Tom proclaimed that when he made his pile he
would build a liquor cabinet in every living room of his house.

And there were more young men at the house than formerly, and they
helped in disposing of the cocktails. Frederick would have liked to
account in that manner for their presence, but he knew better. His
brother and his brother's daughter did what he and Mary had failed to
do. They were the magnets. Youth and joy and laughter drew to them. The
house was lively with young life. Ever, day and night, the motor cars
honked up and down the gravelled drives. There were picnics and
expeditions in the summer weather, moonlight sails on the bay, starts
before dawn or home-comings at midnight, and often, of nights, the many
bedrooms were filled as they had never been before. Tom must cover all
his boyhood ramblings, catch trout again on Bull Creek, shoot quail over
Walcott's Prairie, get a deer on Round Mountain. That deer was a cause
of pain and shame to Frederick. What if it was closed season? Tom had
triumphantly brought home the buck and gleefully called it
sidehill-salmon when it was served and eaten at Frederick's own table.

They had clambakes at the head of the bay and musselbakes down by the
roaring surf; and Tom told shamelessly of the _Halcyon_, and of the run
of contraband, and asked Frederick before them all how he had managed to
smuggle the horse back to the fishermen without discovery. All the young
men were in the conspiracy with Polly to pamper Tom to his heart's
desire. And Frederick heard the true inwardness of the killing of the
deer; of its purchase from the overstocked Golden Gate Park; of its
crated carriage by train, horse-team and mule-back to the fastnesses of
Round Mountain; of Tom falling asleep beside the deer-run the first time
it was driven by; of the pursuit by the young men, the jaded saddle
horses, the scrambles and the falls, and the roping of it at Burnt Ranch
Clearing; and, finally, of the triumphant culmination, when it was
driven past a second time and Tom had dropped it at fifty yards. To
Frederick there was a vague hurt in it all. When had such consideration
been shown him?

There were days when Tom could not go out, postponements of outdoor
frolics, when, still the centre, he sat and drowsed in the big chair,
waking, at times, in that unexpected queer, bright way of his, to roll
a cigarette and call for his _ukulele_--a sort of miniature guitar of
Portuguese invention. Then, with strumming and tumtuming, the live
cigarette laid aside to the imminent peril of polished wood, his full
baritone would roll out in South Sea _hulas_ and sprightly French and
Spanish songs.

One, in particular, had pleased Frederick at first. The favourite song
of a Tahitian king, Tom explained--the last of the Pomares, who had
himself composed it and was wont to lie on his mats by the hour singing
it. It consisted of the repetition of a few syllables. "_E meu ru ru a
vau_," it ran, and that was all of it, sung in a stately, endless,
ever-varying chant, accompanied by solemn chords from the _ukelele_.
Polly took great joy in teaching it to her uncle, but when, himself
questing for some of this genial flood of life that bathed about his
brother, Frederick essayed the song, he noted suppressed glee on the
part of his listeners, which increased, through giggles and snickers, to
a great outburst of laughter. To his disgust and dismay, he learned
that the simple phrase he had repeated and repeated was nothing else
than "I am so drunk." He had been made a fool of. Over and over,
solemnly and gloriously, he, Frederick Travers, had announced how drunk
he was. After that, he slipped quietly out of the room whenever it was
sung. Nor could Polly's later explanation that the last word was
"happy," and not "drunk," reconcile him; for she had been compelled to
admit that the old king was a toper, and that he was always in his cups
when he struck up the chant.

Frederick was constantly oppressed by the feeling of being out of it
all. He was a social being, and he liked fun, even if it were of a more
wholesome and dignified brand than that to which his brother was
addicted. He could not understand why in the past the young people had
voted his house a bore and come no more, save on state and formal
occasions, until now, when they flocked to it and to his brother, but
not to him. Nor could he like the way the young women petted his
brother, and called him Tom, while it was intolerable to see them twist
and pull his buccaneer moustache in mock punishment when his sometimes
too-jolly banter sank home to them.

Such conduct was a profanation to the memory of Isaac and Eliza Travers.
There was too much an air of revelry in the house. The long table was
never shortened, while there was extra help in the kitchen. Breakfast
extended from four until eleven, and the midnight suppers, entailing
raids on the pantry and complaints from the servants, were a vexation to
Frederick. The house had become a restaurant, a hotel, he sneered
bitterly to himself; and there were times when he was sorely tempted to
put his foot down and reassert the old ways. But somehow the ancient
sorcery of his masterful brother was too strong upon him; and at times
he gazed upon him with a sense almost of awe, groping to fathom the
alchemy of charm, baffled by the strange lights and fires in his
brother's eyes, and by the wisdom of far places and of wild nights and
days written in his face. What was it? What lordly vision had the other
glimpsed?--he, the irresponsible and careless one? Frederick remembered
a line of an old song--"Along the shining ways he came." Why did his
brother remind him of that line? Had he, who in boyhood had known no
law, who in manhood had exalted himself above law, in truth found the
shining ways?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12